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"[In comments Eric S. Raymond] Says: Um, what global warming? There hasn’t been any since 1998. Recently global average temperature has actually been dropping r

"[In comments Eric S. Raymond] Says: Um, what global warming? There hasn’t been any since 1998. Recently global average temperature has actually been dropping rather dramatically, enough to wipe out the last century of warming trend." Good lord, did I really consider this guy a luminary in my teens? I am ashamed.

SwellJoe 18y ago
The thing about being a contrarian is that you end up wrong sometimes...possibly a lot of the time. I think we still need them, though, to keep us questioning common wisdom. And ESR, for all his flaws, is still an interesting character and a useful member of society.
- wheels 18y ago
  My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS. Combined with him standing up a packed audience at my college without even bothering to call and cancel, and general nutjobery (see his rants about guns or mysticism) I'm somewhat less than a fan. We need wackos like Stallman. He's a little south of sanity, but damn, he's slung a lot of code and really changed the landscape of technology with his idealism.
  - graywh 18y ago
    Now I'm confused. Are you talking about RMS or ESR?
    - abstractbill 18y ago
      He's saying (and I tend to agree) that RMS is the useful kind of nutjob/wacko, while ESR is not.
  - omouse 18y ago
    Stallman is wacko for being an idealist and sticking to his principles?
    - wheels 18y ago
      Pretty much. Most influential wackos tend to be single minded about some ideological point. Sometimes that gets them a peace prize, other times it involves invading neighboring countries. ;-) I've talked to him. It's amusing. And inspiring. And a little frustrating. At least as of a couple years ago he'd still interrupt you every single time you said "Linux" to stick a "GNU" in there.
  - mroman 18y ago
    ESR has contributed plenty of code: http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html Why do you refer to Stallman as a wacko? Why do you accuse him of being insane? I would love to read the opinion of someone trained in human mental health care insofar as Stallman's mental health is concerned.
    - corentin 18y ago
      He's not clinically insane; it's just that he "doesn't have people skills"...
    - wheels 18y ago
      > http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html That's a long list, but most of them are toys, scripts or quick hacks. Even the ones that almost look significant at first glance -- i.e. bogofilter or sed -- not so much. His version of bogofilter was 900 lines of code and his version of sed 1700. I'd guess that the total amount of code that he's written that gets packaged for a standard Linux distribution is maybe 5k LOC. That's being generous, honestly. And that's what I find disingenuous when he's busy talking about his prolific OSS background. The comments about Stallman's sanity weren't meant to be taken literally. I assumed that was obvious.
      - mroman 18y ago
        Ok, you don't think that's much code/of very high quality/of much usefulness . . . very well, I now respectfully ask you to tell us how much/of what quality/how useful code YOU have contributed.
  - iuguy 18y ago
    > My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS. OSS ESR has been involved in or founded: Fetchmail, GPSd, CML2, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Jargon File, Terminfo/Termcap, VC Mode/GUB in Emacs (ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS), Contribs to Gnuplot, Gnome, Python, Groff and Nethack, GNU Toolkit SED, Hexdump, gif2png, Bogofilter, Countless Howtos at the LDP With the exception of the above, you're right he's not contributed much to OSS. I'm not saying ESR's not a polarising person (I've met both ESR and RMS, both can be black and white people) but he has contributed a lot to OSS.
    - wheels 18y ago
      As noted below, his versions (or contributions) to most of those software projects were all pretty trivial. And listing "projects" like hexdump is kind of cute -- it's 211 lines of code. The one claim that stood out there -- the one that gave a really testable statement that would have surprised me if true was, "ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS". I thought, hey, there'd be a surprise, so I decided to run cvstat on the emacs lisp subdir: - RMS contributed the 2nd most code to Emacs' Lisp with 217542 lines of changes. - ESR contributed the 39th most code to Emacs' Lisp with 6367 lines of changes. The reason that I don't like the guy so much is because he claims to speak for a movement, that by his own prognostication is a meritocracy, and I don't feel like he has the credibility for that. Combined with the fact that I think a lot of what he says is bozo-riffic, I'd prefer him step back from his self-appointed spokesman position.
    - blogsworth 18y ago
      i.e. nothing substantial in the past half-decade
- tptacek 18y ago
  http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1a5pk/eric_s_raymond_on_paul_graham_yo_dont_you_be/c1a6ua http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1a5pk/eric_s_ra... But I'm sure he is useful to society. We're all unique snowflakes.
  - Hexstream 18y ago
    My respect for him just had the beating of its life.
- Alex3917 18y ago
  There is a difference between a contrarian and someone who is wrong on basic facts: "And no, electric cars aren’t the answer either; the power to run them has to come from somewhere. The best case is that people will charge them off the grid at night. This will require power plants to be burning just as much additional fuel as if the cars themselves were doing it, perhaps more given transmission losses." --ESR "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculates that there is enough excess nighttime generating capacity nationwide to charge 84 percent of the 198 million cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road today. Ideally, the energy charging those cars would come from carbon-free sources, which would reduce almost to zero the greenhouse gas emissions per mile. But a joint study by Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that even if a plug-in vehicle got all its electricity from coal-fired plants (the U.S. electricity grid is about 50 percent coal), it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car. Over the next thirty years, the study concluded, widespread adoption of V2G could eliminate 450 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of retiring a third of the current fleet." From Earth: The Sequel (p. 226)
  - mindslight 18y ago
    > there is enough excess nighttime generating capacity nationwide to charge 84 percent ... This only means no new power plants. The current ones would have to step up production at night. > it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car 2/3 isn't significantly different than 1 as far as I'm concerned. Especially when were talking about what goes into making the batteries. Without clean grid electricity, electric cars are merely a feel-good way of outsourcing the problem.
    - swombat 18y ago
      As Al Gore put it in his movie, all those things add up... 1/3 here, 25% there, 15% over there, another 1/3 of what's left from here, etc... 1/3 is quite a lot in that respect.
      - mindslight 18y ago
- yost 18y ago
  > a useful member of society Sure. You can gauge a hacker's grip on reality based on what specific year they stopped taking him seriously. One does not get granularity that fine very often. Few people spend a day a week composing more and more whacky odes to junk science and more and more possessed rants against the cultural tapestries of entire continents. Even fewer people manage to slowly but consistently rack it up over the better part of a decade. Every field should get itself some Raymond or other, really. Now excuse me while I go sip some latte, nibble some brie, and appease to some Islamofascists with my fellow Idiotarians.
tocomment 18y ago
He says there are other problems with CO2 in the article. If not global warming, what else could be bad about it?
- DabAsteroid 18y ago
  He might be referring to reduced nitrogen (e.g. protein) content in plants: http://www.sspi.gatech.edu http://www.sspi.gatech.edu A book, "Silent Power", summarizing the work of the SSPW to date will be published here. Chapter One "Climate Change - Nutritional Impacts" explains how the food we eat is slowly changing due to rising CO2 http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/chapter1.pdf http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/chapter1.pdf From that .pdf: In one important study, Dr. Clenton Owensby and colleagues, studied ruminants grazing in a FACE range with a doubled CO2 level on Kansas’ grassy rangelands. Their studies into the impact of increasing carbon dioxide on those rangelands revealed a surprising effect. The grass these animals foraged from the FACE range had less nitrogen and correspondingly less protein. The protein content and digestibility, even by the four highly efficient stomachs of ruminants, was reduced at increased CO2 level.
DaniFong 18y ago
Wow. That's quite a statement. How does that match up versus this graph, Eric? http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20040.htm http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20040.htm

SwellJoe 18y ago

The thing about being a contrarian is that you end up wrong sometimes...possibly a lot of the time. I think we still need them, though, to keep us questioning common wisdom. And ESR, for all his flaws, is still an interesting character and a useful member of society.

wheels 18y ago
My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS. Combined with him standing up a packed audience at my college without even bothering to call and cancel, and general nutjobery (see his rants about guns or mysticism) I'm somewhat less than a fan. We need wackos like Stallman. He's a little south of sanity, but damn, he's slung a lot of code and really changed the landscape of technology with his idealism.
- graywh 18y ago
  Now I'm confused. Are you talking about RMS or ESR?
  - abstractbill 18y ago
    He's saying (and I tend to agree) that RMS is the useful kind of nutjob/wacko, while ESR is not.
- omouse 18y ago
  Stallman is wacko for being an idealist and sticking to his principles?
  - wheels 18y ago
    Pretty much. Most influential wackos tend to be single minded about some ideological point. Sometimes that gets them a peace prize, other times it involves invading neighboring countries. ;-) I've talked to him. It's amusing. And inspiring. And a little frustrating. At least as of a couple years ago he'd still interrupt you every single time you said "Linux" to stick a "GNU" in there.
- mroman 18y ago
  ESR has contributed plenty of code: http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html Why do you refer to Stallman as a wacko? Why do you accuse him of being insane? I would love to read the opinion of someone trained in human mental health care insofar as Stallman's mental health is concerned.
  - corentin 18y ago
    He's not clinically insane; it's just that he "doesn't have people skills"...
  - wheels 18y ago
    > http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/software.html That's a long list, but most of them are toys, scripts or quick hacks. Even the ones that almost look significant at first glance -- i.e. bogofilter or sed -- not so much. His version of bogofilter was 900 lines of code and his version of sed 1700. I'd guess that the total amount of code that he's written that gets packaged for a standard Linux distribution is maybe 5k LOC. That's being generous, honestly. And that's what I find disingenuous when he's busy talking about his prolific OSS background. The comments about Stallman's sanity weren't meant to be taken literally. I assumed that was obvious.
    - mroman 18y ago
      Ok, you don't think that's much code/of very high quality/of much usefulness . . . very well, I now respectfully ask you to tell us how much/of what quality/how useful code YOU have contributed.
- iuguy 18y ago
  > My opinion of him isn't too high. He likes to brandy himself about as some sort of hacker hero, but in truth, he's not really contributed much to OSS. OSS ESR has been involved in or founded: Fetchmail, GPSd, CML2, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Jargon File, Terminfo/Termcap, VC Mode/GUB in Emacs (ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS), Contribs to Gnuplot, Gnome, Python, Groff and Nethack, GNU Toolkit SED, Hexdump, gif2png, Bogofilter, Countless Howtos at the LDP With the exception of the above, you're right he's not contributed much to OSS. I'm not saying ESR's not a polarising person (I've met both ESR and RMS, both can be black and white people) but he has contributed a lot to OSS.
  - wheels 18y ago
    As noted below, his versions (or contributions) to most of those software projects were all pretty trivial. And listing "projects" like hexdump is kind of cute -- it's 211 lines of code. The one claim that stood out there -- the one that gave a really testable statement that would have surprised me if true was, "ESR is the second biggest lisp contributor to Emacs after RMS". I thought, hey, there'd be a surprise, so I decided to run cvstat on the emacs lisp subdir: - RMS contributed the 2nd most code to Emacs' Lisp with 217542 lines of changes. - ESR contributed the 39th most code to Emacs' Lisp with 6367 lines of changes. The reason that I don't like the guy so much is because he claims to speak for a movement, that by his own prognostication is a meritocracy, and I don't feel like he has the credibility for that. Combined with the fact that I think a lot of what he says is bozo-riffic, I'd prefer him step back from his self-appointed spokesman position.
  - blogsworth 18y ago
    i.e. nothing substantial in the past half-decade
tptacek 18y ago
http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1a5pk/eric_s_raymond_on_paul_graham_yo_dont_you_be/c1a6ua http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1a5pk/eric_s_ra... But I'm sure he is useful to society. We're all unique snowflakes.
- Hexstream 18y ago
  My respect for him just had the beating of its life.
Alex3917 18y ago
There is a difference between a contrarian and someone who is wrong on basic facts: "And no, electric cars aren’t the answer either; the power to run them has to come from somewhere. The best case is that people will charge them off the grid at night. This will require power plants to be burning just as much additional fuel as if the cars themselves were doing it, perhaps more given transmission losses." --ESR "Pacific Northwest National Laboratory calculates that there is enough excess nighttime generating capacity nationwide to charge 84 percent of the 198 million cars, pickups, and SUVs on the road today. Ideally, the energy charging those cars would come from carbon-free sources, which would reduce almost to zero the greenhouse gas emissions per mile. But a joint study by Electric Power Research Institute and the Natural Resources Defense Council found that even if a plug-in vehicle got all its electricity from coal-fired plants (the U.S. electricity grid is about 50 percent coal), it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car. Over the next thirty years, the study concluded, widespread adoption of V2G could eliminate 450 million tons of carbon dioxide annually, the equivalent of retiring a third of the current fleet." From Earth: The Sequel (p. 226)
- mindslight 18y ago
  > there is enough excess nighttime generating capacity nationwide to charge 84 percent ... This only means no new power plants. The current ones would have to step up production at night. > it would still emit only two-thirds of the greenhouse gases released by a conventional car 2/3 isn't significantly different than 1 as far as I'm concerned. Especially when were talking about what goes into making the batteries. Without clean grid electricity, electric cars are merely a feel-good way of outsourcing the problem.
  - swombat 18y ago
    As Al Gore put it in his movie, all those things add up... 1/3 here, 25% there, 15% over there, another 1/3 of what's left from here, etc... 1/3 is quite a lot in that respect.
    - mindslight 18y ago
yost 18y ago
> a useful member of society Sure. You can gauge a hacker's grip on reality based on what specific year they stopped taking him seriously. One does not get granularity that fine very often. Few people spend a day a week composing more and more whacky odes to junk science and more and more possessed rants against the cultural tapestries of entire continents. Even fewer people manage to slowly but consistently rack it up over the better part of a decade. Every field should get itself some Raymond or other, really. Now excuse me while I go sip some latte, nibble some brie, and appease to some Islamofascists with my fellow Idiotarians.

tocomment 18y ago

He says there are other problems with CO2 in the article. If not global warming, what else could be bad about it?

DabAsteroid 18y ago
He might be referring to reduced nitrogen (e.g. protein) content in plants: http://www.sspi.gatech.edu http://www.sspi.gatech.edu A book, "Silent Power", summarizing the work of the SSPW to date will be published here. Chapter One "Climate Change - Nutritional Impacts" explains how the food we eat is slowly changing due to rising CO2 http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/chapter1.pdf http://www.sspi.gatech.edu/chapter1.pdf From that .pdf: In one important study, Dr. Clenton Owensby and colleagues, studied ruminants grazing in a FACE range with a doubled CO2 level on Kansas’ grassy rangelands. Their studies into the impact of increasing carbon dioxide on those rangelands revealed a surprising effect. The grass these animals foraged from the FACE range had less nitrogen and correspondingly less protein. The protein content and digestibility, even by the four highly efficient stomachs of ruminants, was reduced at increased CO2 level.

DaniFong 18y ago

Wow. That's quite a statement. How does that match up versus this graph, Eric? http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20040.htm http://www.wattzon.org/plan/pages/GamePlan_v1.0%20040.htm