> I'm going to put myself in the "not enough interest to try to figure this out" category, for now.
Whoa, folks. It's only an example! Let's not carried away by the magnitude of the problem domain to refuse to focus on the two limited questions I've asked. Let me repeat them, hopefully clarifying them… ++ are the input figures reliable, i.e. has the data been corrupted when moving it from web to SAMPLE9? ++ is TABULA calculating it right? These are purely questions of data integrity and code reliability. I thought everyone on this list was keenly interested in such issues. The first question arises from the deceptively simple task of looking up a quantity on the web and transferring it into a calculating engine. Simple, but errors can arise. Issues arise about where such-and-such a physical constant or observation comes from. How the end-user can verify its source. Would it have helped if I'd phrased it in terms of looking up the current $/£ exchange rate? TABULA is distributed with tables of physical and chemical constants. Are they up-to-date? Have they been copied across correctly? Built-in tables are an inherently unsatisfactory solution. I'm now considering an interactive specialised browser, with which the user can locate any of these quantities on a given webpage, draw a box round them, and leave TABULA to fetch the numbers and units at the point of use. Hey presto: keying errors eliminated, up-to-date figures, near-perfect assurance of the integrity of the data being fetched. Warning if the webpage has been corrupted or pulled. These, and only these, are the questions I'm interested in here. I just fail to see how I could possibly have made it clearer. On Fri, 7 Jun 2019 at 18:43, Raul Miller <[email protected]> wrote: > On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 12:18 PM Ian Clark <[email protected]> wrote: > > Would anyone fancy checking my calculations? > > I don't, but if I did, I'd try to find an alternate way of getting the > same information and see if the numbers land in the same order of > magnitude. > > (For example, when talking about global temperature change over the > last century, I like double checking those kinds of numbers with rise > in sea level. Weather stations tend to be near airports, which tend to > have lots of asphalt, but sea level doesn't have that issue and the > thermal expansion coefficient of water is something I can easily find, > as are NOAA numbers on sea level...) > > So, if I were be double checking numbers related to CO2, I'd try to > find some similar thing. For actual levels, I don't have any good > ideas - maybe something optical? > > For cost of pulling it back out? The big mechanism there has always > been trees and similar vegetation. So maybe I'd check forestry service > records, or lumber statistics. I'd probably have to put some thought > into it though - maybe a few weeks before I had any really good ideas > on what to look for. Hopefully someone else has been doing this > thinking, but most people aren't really interested in doing that kind > of thinking. > > (Related: It takes about 60 years to grow a typical crop of trees for > lumber -- maybe 10 times that for something like Sitka Spruce -- and > during that time they relatively large amount of CO2 out of the > atmosphere. So if enough land is earmarked for vegetation, we should > be seeing a lot of CO2 being pulled out of the atmosphere. Well, that > and don't let them burn up in forest fires, for example.) > > Anyways, good luck, but I'm going to put myself in the "not enough > interest to try to figure this out" category, for now. Maybe if I > think up a good approach I'll change my mind. > > Thanks, > > -- > Raul > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For information about J forums see http://www.jsoftware.com/forums.htm
