Since grad school , I've often felt that one difference between me and other students in some teky classes is that I believed the quantitative concepts being explained actually , inescapably applied to our reality . For many , it seemed just an academic exercise .

Groking these truths , hard won by humanity thru the lives of many messiahs , having them inform your evaluation of everyday experience is more than that . It's why I say my religion is Math & Physics older than I am .

Physics starts with algorithms on the most basic of forms like Gaussian surfaces , spheres and planes , etc .  Planets , conveniently , are spheres . 

Spheres are parameterized by direction and radius . Points are spheres with no radius . Balls are filled spheres .

From the outside , a planet is an opaque varicolored ball , its atmosphere like a thick coat of paint . Planetary diameters are measured in thousands of kilometers ; their atmospheres in tens .

During the 19th century , humans really mastered the approach and power of quantitative science . Their accomplishments understanding the relationship between temperature and energy density and the modes of energy transport , particularly radiant transport impelled the quantum age .

I've elaborated the most basic computations of this classical physics for the case of uniform and nonuniform gray ( flat spectrum ) , and now uniform colored ( non-flat spectrum ) radiantly heated opaque balls .

Venus is often held up as the boogie man of a CO2 caused runaway greenhouse effect . Unlike the other inner planets , It has a surface temperature way in excess of that calculated for a gray ball in its orbit  . Here's a graph I made when first driven to divert my time into the war against climate nonscience . It plots the gray ball temperature for each of the four inner planets' orbits , and their mean temperature as best I could estimate at the time . The most popular number for earth's temperature now days seems to be 287 ( all degrees in Kelvin ) down from a ubiquitous 288 . In any case , about 9 or 10 degrees warmer than the 278.7 of a gray ball in our orbit . The temperature of a gray ball or point is determined simply by adding up all the energy impinging on the point . Stefan ( 1879 ) and Boltzmann ( 1884 ) independently deduced that temperature is proportional to the 4th root of energy density -- as seen in the equation below .

  M I L

Most Brilliant talk I've seen in a long time :

[ 20130225 ]

Great series of lectures by
of Science, Engineering and Technology, Kansas

2002 Econ Nobel laureate at Cato 30th monetary conference

Recently a blog post on The Science of Doom : Venusian Mysteries led me to apply the first and most basic equation in How to Calculate the Temperature of a Radiantly Heated Colored Ball ( CB ) to Venus . There , I defer to Martin Hertzberg's  proof that the equilibrium temperature of a radiantly heated colored ball is  |)| Tgray * ( a % e ) ^ % 4 |(| .  In particular , the temperature of a colored ball in our orbit is the temperature of a gray ball times the fourth root of the ratio of its absorptivity with respect to the sun divided by its emissivity with respect to the rest of space .  By the 1850s it was understood that the portion of radiant energy of a particular frequency a material will absorb and convert it to thermal energy is the same going the other way from thermal to radiant . That is , |)|  a = e  |(| for any particular frequency .  In the visible spectrum , we see the color an object reflects rather than turns into heat .
To turn that equation around , |)| ( a % e ) = ( Tball % Tgray ) ^ 4 |(| .  For instance , the ratio between earth's approximate 288.8 and a gray ball is about 1.03 . So , neglecting the heat we are generating ourselves , particularly around cities , and geothermal , to balance the energy density averaged over our surface against that of a point next to us at  our distance from the sun , we must be 1.14 times as absorptive with respect to the sun's spectrum than we are emissive at temperatures of the energy density of points in our orbit .  NASA gives our absorptivity ( 1 - albedo ) with respect to the sun as about 0.7 . Thus , our emissivity in the long wave lengths must be around 0.61 . Quite believable . I would hope it is confirmable by measurements made from probes we've sent out looking back at us .

In my previous newsletter , I looked forward to answering "what are the max and min possible mean temperature  of a ball in our orbit" by implementing the computation for colored balls . I shouldn't have been surprised that the mathematics offers no limitation other than the temperature of the sun itself . However , that would require a material which totally reflected thermal radiation , and such materials don't exist . Even aluminum foil has an emissivity of 0.04 according  to a link cited by Glenn Tamblyn in response to CB . And , of course it also has a very low  absorptivity in the visible , solar , spectrum . CO2 is said to "trap" heat because it  is a good absorber , and therefore good emitter of infra-red .

So how about the case of Venus ?  NASA  gives the values in the table below for Venus and Earth albedos , solar irradiances and and surface temperatures .

 Venus

Earth

Albedo [ wrt Sun ]

0.90

0.306

Absorptivity [ wrt Sun ]
[ calculated from albedo above ]

0.10

0.694

Solar irradiance (W/m2) 

2613.9 

1367.6

gray-body temperature (K)
[ calculated from irradiance above ]

327.6 

278.7

Surface temperature (K)

737.

288.8

"Black-body" temperature (K)

184.2

254.3

Using values from NASA’s Venus Fact Page , Venus is |)| 737 % 327.65 |>| 2.25 |(| times hotter than that of an opaque gray bal in its lorbit . That means the energy density at its surface is |)| 2.25 ^ 4 |>| 25.63 |(| times higher than outside . Given that it’s absorptivity wrt the sun is 0.1 , its emissivity in the long wavelength band must be |)| 0.1 % 25.63 |>| 0.004 |(| .

Venus mus be  10 times as reflective in the long wavelengths as aluminum foil . If such a material exists , it sure isn't CO2 .

This is an example of my taking these essential equations to heart . They are proven every time someone uses an IR thermometer . I've had skeptic physics professors comment that the application of StefanBoltzmann and Kirchhoff had not been too successful .  They are not optional . Until the surface and atmospheric temperatures are tied quantitatively to the energy from the sun , you are building castles on muck .  I defy any "climate scientist" to produce a ball which will come to an internal temperature 2.25 times its graybody temperature . Oh , what am I thinking ; they don't do experiments .

Bottom line ,

The climate catastrophists resist all they can the notion that Venus has significant geothermal heating like so many other planetary bodies including Earth , and that heat is held in by the planet's very insulative atmosphere .  It's hotter on the inside ; the flow of heat must be outward . I happened upon John Tyndall's 1861 lecture summarizing years of his experimental work . I'll end with his summary question which totally applies to CO2 :

Black-body temperature (K)    Equivalent black body temperature is the surface 
                              temperature the body would have if it were in  
                              radiative equilibrium and had no atmosphere, 
                              but the same albedo, in Kelvin.

 Freeman Dyson in the talk linked above discusses the notion of pre-cellular pre-Darwinian evolution where genetic material was passed around like tweets . He points out that the evolution of knowledge has now returned to that asexual promiscuous replication .

My number of Titter followers more than doubled when I Tweeted

@silentbicycle Tho needs time I don't have , 4th.CoSy cosy.com/CoSy/MinnowBro… has some useful generalized APLish algos in FORTH .

— BobArmstrong (@BobArmstrong) October 9, 2012

I ridiculously optimistically tweeted in response :

@silentbicycle Don't go 2 crazy , Generic overloading needs to be redone . I'll make a cleaner copy this weekend . h/t @raudelmil RT for ><

— BobArmstrong (@BobArmstrong) October 9, 2012

One reason why , when a path to my PhD in the psychology department at Northwestern U closed , I refocused on APL was that I felt that for people , anyway : me , to express the concepts necessary to abstract and grok the brain's information flows , would require a population fluent in an APL level executable notation . The defining feature of APLs is that the Array or lists of lists , generalized from matrix algebra , is the fundamental object . The notations are generally as or more succinct than traditional mathematical notation . I have lived my adult life in notecomputing environments I've created , first around 1984 in original "flat" APL , then , around 2000 , in Arthur Whitney's K . Upon moving to Teller County , CO in 2005 , I put in the extended intense months necessary for me to  create  a  reference counting  dynamic object  vocabulary and the essential recursive algorithms for operating on lists of lists and the essential naked lists of chars , integers , and floats in Ron Aaron's Reva Forth which was itself undergoing rapid honing by a number of brilliant programmers scattered around the globe .

Arthur Whitney's work has been the template and caliper for much of mine . However , I came to decide that his 3 list dictionary or namespace structure ( symbols ; values ; attributes ) had the difficulty of referencing attributes from values or vice versa .  Motivated by MinnowBrook 2011 , I added a cell to the headers of all CoSy dynamic objects to allow a link to an object's attributes or metadata . This would itself generally be a dictionary .

While I use 4th.CoSy every day as my log , my Shopping/ToDo list and my Reference ( passwords , account #s , etc ) list , I've not been able to steal the devoted weeks of time necessary to convert the overall dictionary structure . All the family accounting is done in K.CoSy and will be for quite some time .
I was hoping to get the transformation done and a new "release" for this NewsLetter . But that was terribly optimistic . Simply getting back into the code is daunting . I have done some useful work tho , both conceptually and in detail .  I've started keeping a programming log separate from my personal log to better organize the chaotic jumble of experiments and mini-scripts which fill the first 1100 lines of my log window .

A defining characteristic of CoSy environments since their earliest days around 1980 has been the mixing of lines intended to be executed by the computer with ones just intended for human consumption . In current 4th.CoSy tapping F6 will execute a line in Forth displaying any output generated ; tapping F7 will execute the line expecting a CoSy object or nothing to be  generated , and  displays it as CoSy output . For instance , the last line executed in the screen shot , highlighted in blue transposes the result of the previous lines which catinates a list of indices for the 3191 lines in the text window to the lines of text to produce a crude list so I can scroll down and see my daily log for 2012 began at line 1127 .  That was executed with F7 .  Some lines above , you'll see nil DMP .  DMP is a pure Forth word which outputs the first 8 cells of a definition . That line was executed with F6 , then F5 was used to insert it in the text .

Note that the great Slava Pestov's early project , jEdit , fills most of the screen with , it happens , 7 windows open on various of the Reva Forth code files making up 4th.CoSy . It would be great to eventually have such an interface to CoSy , but I really want to interface it to HTML . 4th.CoSy won't really be CoSy until normal definitions are saved within the dynamic root dictionary , R .

It's obvious there is a tremendous amount , ie , several dedicated me-months ,  left to do . That's why I posted the current status as a collection of useful APLish  algorithms in  Forth .  Reva by itself is an open modern Forth with significant libraries for a number common tasks . If some youngsters get interested , there's a lot to be learned and contributed . I only worry that I won't be able to keep up , that is , some paths will become dominate which I think are IbM , not optimal .

I plan to tweet relevant announcements  with the tag #4th.CoSy .  I am adding Disqus threads to new windows I create or revisit as I have here . I think Yahoo could have done a much better job of upgrading their mail groups into contemporary social networks , but they haven't . I have also started a Google+ Community which may have its uses .  If anybody knows of better options , let me know .

Cicero : To live long , it is necessary to live slowly
 a Forbes Thought Of The Day

Here at 2500 meters , I like long sleeve Tees , but you can have almost whatever garment you like