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Quoting The IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report (discussed here):

Achieving deep cuts [in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions] will require more intensive use of low-GHG technologies such as renewable energy, nuclear energy, and CCS.

So, someone who is completely anti-nuclear is in conflict with the IPCC, which is supposed to be the standard for technical consensus, right? It's only those crazy global warming denialists who think they know better than the IPCC.

In this piece by Joe Romm (linked to here by timothy) I think the first step is to note that he's critiquing something over at the Guardian UK site written by James Hansen, Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley, Nuclear power paves the only viable path forward on climate change (it's distantly possible that you're better off reading something by James Hansen rather than by some guy who actually quotes Mark Jacobson approvingly).

Please note the sub-title on that Hansen piece: "Alongside renewables, Nuclear will make the difference". Joe Romm insists it's likely nuclear power will be just a "bit player", but conceeds we should keep working on it, e.g. he likes research into small, modular reactors. Hansen and company don't dispute that renewables have a role to play, they just insist we can't solve the problem without nuclear. Arguably, the great fight here is over whether we need renewables plus nukes, or nukes plus renewables.

Hansen and company say:

For example, a build rate of 61 new reactors per year could entirely replace current fossil fuel electricity generation by 2050. Accounting for increased global electricity demand driven by population growth and development in poorer countries, which would add another 54 reactors per year, this makes a total requirement of 115 reactors per year to 2050 to entirely decarbonise the global electricity system in this illustrative scenario. We know that this is technically achievable because France and Sweden were able to ramp up nuclear power to high levels in just 15-20 years."

Joe Romm argues:

According to the online database of the International Atomic Energy Agency, France has 58 operational reactors, which took the country more than two decades to connect to the grid! That would be a rate of under three per year.

Actually, 58 reactors over two decades is in fact nearly 3 per year, and that's built by a single country.

Why, that would mean that to build 115 reactors per year we might need the efforts of nearly 40 countries! Oh my god where are we going to find that many?

Seriously: you need to grasp the sheer scale of the problem of decarbonizing the world economy. If you look at what we need to do to ramp up any clean energy source, it's absolutely huge. Take a look at some of the numbers Saul Griffith crunched back in 2009:

Two terawatts of photovoltaic would require installing 100 square meters of 15-percent-efficient solar cells every second, second after second, for the next 25 years. (Thatâ(TM)s about 1,200 square miles of solar cells a year, times 25 equals 30,000 square miles of photovoltaic cells.) [ ... and so on ... ]

Another version of that talk is here. Anything we do is going to involve incredible magnitudes of rapid construction, and we really need to get started on it.

By the way, Hansen and company did an extended presentation at COP21.

Glad to see so much interest on Slashdot for our sunflower. I'd like to address a few misunderstandings and share with you how YOU can test one of our systems in your home town. 1. The standard commercial system will be available in 2017 for both heat and electricity, the water desalination will come later. 2. This presentation explains the science behind the sunflower and how it can also provide cooling: http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/... By means of a thermally driven sorption chiller, cool air can also be produced. A sorption chiller is a device that converts heat into cooling via a thermal cycle applied to a liquid or solid sorption material. Adsorption chillers, with solid silica gel adsorbers and with water as a working fluid, can replace compression chillers, which place a burden on electrical grids in hot climates and contain working fluids that are harmful to the ozone layer. Although absorption (liquid sorption) systems are already available for combination with the HCPVT system, they provide less cooling output compared to low-temperature driving heat for the adsorption (solid sorption) systems under development at IBM. The systems can also be customized with a transparent back for urban installations. 3. This presentation highlights the regions and the commercial applications: http://www.zurich.ibm.com/pdf/... 4. Here is a YouTube video showing the prototype in Biasca, Switzerland http://youtu.be/JVB9_3IKIAE 5. The news was announced at a TED conference in San Francisco on Tuesday. You can watch the presentation here: http://fora.tv/2014/09/23/Solv...

The UK press release is more informative.

https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/40912.wss
http://www-03.ibm.com/press/uk/en/pressrelease/44972.wss

There's also a video of a TED@IBM talk (which I haven't watched)
http://fora.tv/2014/09/23/Solving_the_Energy_Crisis_One_Sunflower_at_a_Time

I haven't read this book, but I'd be shocked if it were better or more interesting than Daemon and Freedom by Daniel Suarez - which vividly represented the same sort of organizational idea, but set inside a truly impressive narrative. Check out his talk at Long Now to get a taste.

When in doubt, at least for me, I'll go with Neil deGrasse Tyson who says we shouldn't be counting as planets, but like to like.

Of-course, China has much freer market than almost anybody else on the planet, all the businesses that are there, all the people, who moved their investment capital there, all the companies that produce there, you think they are there because China is communist? China is a communist like I am a ballerina.

Also, China to USA is what Germany is to Greece, except Greece cannot print money and USA can, but the rest of the relationship is the same, USA needs China much more than China needs USA. Here is one of debates on this, the people in the audience don't understand it and don't want to hear about it (no surprise, so many are Chinese expatriates)

Daniel Suarez writes about this in his excellent novels Daemon and Freedom. Here's a video by him along those lines http://fora.tv/2008/08/08/Daniel_Suarez_Daemon_Bot-Mediated_Reality

I get the impression that 99.9% of the in-game 'wealth' created (for eventual real-world transactions) is generated by bots. From 3 years ago: http://fora.tv/2008/08/08/Daniel_Suarez_Daemon_Bot-Mediated_Reality#chapter_08

And that the Linux people try to convince themselves that they aren't cheapskates, because they paid more than the Windows people as though that "proves" something.

When you get down to it, they are all pathetic amounts of money. $12 means, ignoring CC costs and other overhead, that you pay only $4/game. That is an almost insultingly low amount for quality software.

I think part of the reason the Windows numbers are so low, is that the non-cheapskate people already bought this stuff. I will not be buying this bundle, because I already own the games form it that I care to. However I didn't pay $4 for them. Trine I paid $15 for on sale, and it was worth the money.

I say that not to brag, I didn't pay it to prove a point, I paid it because that was the price they were asking at the time and I decided it was a reasonable price.

If the Linux people want to impress, they should at the very least match the Steam price for this. Currently Steam sells the Frozenbyte pack (which Frozenbyte sets the price for) for $30 and it does not include a Splot preorder. Realistically if they are trying to show the platform's viability/willingness to pay it should be more as a demonstration, and also because a cut is going to charity.

All these bundles ever show to me is:

1) There are a lot of cheapskates out there and if you let them set their own price, it'll be very low.

2) People aren't as altruistic as they think, they just compare themselves to others and try to do better then pat themselves on the back (as explained here: http://fora.tv/2009/11/10/SuperFreakonomics_Challenging_the_Way_We_Think).

Now I should say I've no problem if you wish to buy a game pack cheaply. Nothing wrong with that. However don't go and sprain your arm reaching over and patting yourself on the back so hard because you didn't buy it quite as cheaply as someone else.

The simple fact of the matter is many Windows users (and probably Mac users too) paid much more for a single one of these games because they decided it was worth it. That is really supporting the devs, not a token "Well we paid more than the other cheapskates!" thing.

There was a good talk on religious demographics at fora, and how fundamentalist families have much higher fertility rates within most all cultures.

http://fora.tv/2010/09/05/Eric_Kaufmann_Shall_the_Religious_Inherit_the_Earth

I don't understand the hostile reaction to the idea that propensity to religion has a genetic component. I wonder what the gene is for that.

I listened to Spence on Growth the other night. He's the guy who came up with Signalling (economics) and won a Nobel prize for it, and then went off to do whacks of other high level stuff.

The premise of signalling theory is that the competence you gain from your education can be entirely ignored and the educational system would still have an economic function.

As for ethics, he's quite right his ethics are no worse than many of our leaders of the future. I have no doubt he does acceptable quality work. You can see that from the article. Students are pretty harried, so a lot of what even the good students produce is no great shakes. And he's a professional, with years of experience and crib sheets to draw upon.

My favorite part was that he "never edits" and gets thanked for the authentic mistakes. Just like slashdot, fire and forget.

The key assumption from Spence is that it costs less (by some metric) for a good student to earn the credential than the bad student. It's pretty clear at $2000 for a term paper, the bad student is taking it on the chin.

It's a basic problem in economics to determine who has the goods and who doesn't, without spending more on the discrimination than the discrimination is worth. University is the assembly line solution to this problem.

Shadow conformance is as inevitable as prostitution when society commoditizes human capital to the extent that global trade implies.

More of the problem explained here: Ken Robinson: Changing Education Paradigms

(Had dim recall of the particulars of that link. Search google on "the world is thinking" to recover FORA.tv, hadn't the first clue about the guy's name so I searched FORA for the keyword "sir", and it came up first hit. That's funny. I could have found him the long way through TED.

WARNING: FORA practices bait and switch: you think you're watching the whole video, but clips are cut off abruptly as unpaid previews. The clip by the good Malcolm Gladwell on taxation would have been interesting to watch to conclusion. It's like his brain is loaned out from the Men in Black brain archive, and gets recalled from time to time, and to kill time without it, he writes another book.)

See the guy who did it talk about how it happened.

He rebuilt the Hayden Planetarium's exhibit to account for the new stuff being discovered. They wanted to present generally what's out there, so they grouped like with like: the inner planets, the gas giants and the Kuiper belt. Pluto plainly is not a gas giant at all and looks a lot like what's in the Kuiper belt, so wtd?

Apparently, when you're looking at how much crap really is in orbit around our sun , there isn't much question what to do, but it seems like a much bigger deal to people who haven't yet looked. .

I can do a couple of weeks of 80 hours each no problem. After that I'll need a couple of days off. But I just can't do this if I am not looking after my physical well-being. That means eating well and gym workouts every second day. As other people have said you also need be interested in the project and be in 'the zone' a lot of the time. That requires minimal distractions. As an aside, others have mentioned you can't write QUALITY code working long hours. Well, not exactly true. Provided you realise when you're rushing a solution and are willing to put it aside until the next morning, you will find your unconscious mind can come up with some elegant solutions while you sleep. Not kidding, try it. And this just in, science agrees.. http://fora.tv/2009/08/11/Matt_Walker_Secrets_of_the_Sleeping_Brain

http://fora.tv/2008/12/12/MythBusters_Co-Host_Adam_Savage_on_Obsession

Adam Savage of Mythbusters gives a talk on the value of obsession, detailing one of his own.

No fair, you RTFA'd! You've got a lot to learn about Slashdot etiquette. Here's a link to a very thought provoking video in which Brand addresses this and some related topics:

http://fora.tv/2009/10/09/Stewart_Brand_Rethinking_Green

Our two views are not mutually exclusive. By defintion a corporation is to serve the interests of the shareholders. This has its pluses and minues. The only real check against corporate power, greed, and malice is the "people" and the only entity that can enforce ethics is the Government. If you don't have people and government to check corporate power.

Elliot Spitzer discusses this in context to the Banking Industry on Fora.TV
http://fora.tv/2009/11/12/Eliot_Spitzer-Governments_and_Markets-From_Rand_to_Feinberg

The problem with anecdotal evidence, is that people arguing the exact opposite point can pull out a dozen examples too. In this article John Derbyshire pulls out a dozen examples of why Obama is trying to kill science in the United States. It's not convincing to anyone who knows about National Lab Day, Educate to Innovate STEM initiative, Computer Science Week, data.gov, and the Policy Forum on Public Access to Federally Funded Research... but this is all anecdotal too, a better resource would be an overview of all the projects being funded by the stimulus package or trends in government funding of scientific research.

However, I do completely agree that Tyson is being unfair to the American government. In fact, this is the same guy who previously argued Republicans were doing a great job of funding American science. The real issue here, and the one we are dealing with most in computer science, is American Culture's antipathy and outright contempt for science and academia. Kids aren't going into Computer Science, Physics, Chemistry, etc, because they are afraid of being associated with "geeks." The kids all want to be gangsters, models, and sports stars... not realizing how unrealistic those dreams are and that only a miniscule percentage of people succeed in those arenas.

We need a culture change, we need to be proud geeks and make others envy us. It'll help us out in the long run.

Seeing as the topics of genre and Neal Stephenson has been raised I will link this lecture by mister Stephenson. Neal Stephenson: Science Fiction as a Literary Genre; were he talks about SF and the idea of genres in general.

I'm the same way... I've never had a cable subscription since I left my parents' house a couple decades ago. By virtue of higher mathematics and assuming $50/month, that's $12k.

If you like TED, you might like FORA http://fora.tv/.

I also find video.google.com is a great way to find content across a variety of video sources. And of course, there is the local library.

While useful, isn't this just a larger drone with it's parts connected by signals rather than wires? Sure, it's got ablative resilience (one of three drones can go boom and you still have the rest of the formation), and more payload (more drones to cary stuff), but there doesn't seem to be any capacity for communication beyond holding formation and relaying orders from the human controller.

To answer this question adequately would take a much longer lesson in systems theory than I have time for. You touch on some of the aspects of why multiple systems are better than a single system. Swarms don't just "hold formation" they self-organize in the most efficient manner to accomplish complex functions with whatever resources are available. But there is plenty of literature about why cooperating systems are always greater than the sum of its parts. May I suggest a good introductory video lecture by Scott Page on the Logic of Diversity as a taste of what is possible: http://fora.tv/2007/03/14/Power_of_Diversity

Franky yes, an average idiot like me. And unless you've got a PhD in bio, an average idiot like you too.

If you're not worried, you're not paying attention... if you're interested in this stuff, I'd suggest you watch this: http://fora.tv/2008/11/17/Drew_Endy_and_Jim_Thomas_Debate_Synthetic_Biology

It really is an excellent discussion of all of the salient issues pertaining to synthetic biology. It's not going to make your hair curl or keep you amazingly excited like the mostly terrible edutainment stuff we have today, but it will discuss the facts in detail with two distinct points of view.

(I guess my post could be seen as trollish if you didn't click on the link to the profile I linked to - he's a GNAA idiot that forgot to hit the anonymous button when posting his stupid nonsense, and also a 27-year old IT geek)

Al Qaeda and other extremist groups believe in the "cosmic" battle of good and evil. Iran is nationalist instead of cosmically religious, just as Lebanon, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt are. Nationalists can be bargained with, because they want something that actually exists. They want a sovereign state where they can do as they wish. Reza Aslan gave a great talk on this.

http://fora.tv/2009/05/15/Reza_Aslan_How_to_Win_a_Cosmic_War

Every argument against allowing Iran to have a nuclear weapon can equally be applied to the United States, where very recently the President literally believed in the rapture, where a very huge portion of the population believes in hastening the return of Christ. Iran did express interest in a nuclear free middle east, but the US refused to even negotiate on the basis that Israel would have to give up it's nuclear arsenal.

The United States is digging itself into a grave with the one sided nature of it's foreign policy. As soon as we finish bankrupting ourselves with our empire, I don't doubt the calls from everyone to disarm the evangelicals with the thousands of nuclear warheads will seem fair to us. But it will happen.

• hyperion power
• babcock and wilcox
• NuScale power
• sandia labs
• tsinghua university

not to mention south africa's PBMR, and the travelling wave reactor (intellectual ventures). It's simple - make a mass-producable, small, efficient reactor, use it to boil water at both the pressure and temperature of your average coal-fired power plant, and *turn off the burning of coal altogether*. And do it in scale.

That way, there isn't a horrendous capital cost (pocket nuke reactors are small and you are only replacing the boiler), the fuel is cheaper, and as a side benefit current coal plants increase their capacity factor from ~75% to above 90%.

This is really the only way to combat global warming in a way that profits everybody; it allows developing countries to leverage their experience in building coal-fired power plants to build carbon-neutral sources, and given the factory approach is comprehensively scalable, as scalable as producing fighters or bombers in WWII.

We have to do this. We have to stop dicking around with solutions that only work 15% of the way, have appallingly low capacity factors (for 53 days in a row, the windmills in denmark produced basically nada in the way of electricity, texas has an average of 8.7% capacity (ref: here ).

The stakes are too high. I encourage everyone to watch:

http://fora.tv/2009/08/18/A_REALLY_Inconvenient_Truth_Dan_Miller

which shows the true state of our affairs with regards to the climate (the person introducing Mr. Miller says, in short, "He's going to tell us all how we are really fucked".

Looking at the evidence, I agree with him.

Ed

This is more about controlling the message to the populace than protecting the troops. In order to keep public support, you have to present a nice rosy picture that has nothing to do with the realities on the ground. This is just another measure the Pentagon is taking to make sure they can lie about their progress and not get called on it.

If the American public read the diaries of combat troops, the war would end in a heartbeat. Having a general pointing at a map and rattling off statistics is an entirely different experience than reading about how a kid who's barely out of high school doesn't want to die, and is nearly cracking under the pressure of killing people in a country he couldn't point to on a map a year earlier.

The war on terrorism is a complete joke. It's like a war on blitzkrieg offensives or the war on shock and awe. You can't defeat a tactic. We will continue to lose it because there is no attainable mission. There is no end game. Only endless war.

Once you start legitimizing the insane ramblings of jihadists by referring to good and evil, you lose. They have millions of people they can convince to fight to the death, especially when you're a foreigner treading on someone else's soil. The cost of deploying a peasant to a part of his own country with a box of ammo and a Kalishnikov might as well be zero.

For a good talk on the subject, check this out. It's good, but any rhetoric watched thereafter will make your blood boil.

Or we could raise and eat fewer cows.

I agree. Of course I like various forms of meat and steak; but I try to balance my diet with other substances; like vegetables, fruit, salads and other relatively health articles. While I do not feel comfortable telling people what they should or shouldn't eat; the amount of meat being consumed; or even more importantly the amount of meat (and other food articles) that are simply wasted by the system; is staggering.

While I can not see a simple solution to improving the way we produce and consume food; I believe many changes will come over the next decades and beyond. One of them being the almost ridiculous reliance on cheap oil. Cheap oil means cheap corn, means cheap cow stuffing, meaning cheap meat. When oil prices increase, and they will increase (especially with China and India seeing a massive growth in oil consumption), food prices will soar. Or at least some food products will see a great price increase for a period of time; until the what, how and where we eat adapts to the new state of affairs, or we find new and better ways to produce food at the current scale. But at the moment every link in the chain is reliant upon the price of oil; sowing, harvesting and transportation to name but a few.

While creating "better cows" with less methane production is definitely a good thing; if it works as advertised; it isn't the only thing. If you want to learn a bit more about the food production, as regards to the USA, I found Michael Pollan's Deep Agriculture interesting.

"The masses have spoken: saving a few bucks is worth it. If you don't like it--vote with your dollars and encourage your friends and family to do the same"

The problem is the average human being has the cognitive power of a lemon, most people are creatures of habit and could care less. People don't change unless they can feel the effects of what they are doing.

You can see this when they do choice experiments on how people choose: People who use credit cards spend more then those who don't because it doesn't activate the part of the brain associated with pain. It also explains why americans are up to their eyeballs in debt.

You should all check this video out:

Inside my mind

http://fora.tv/2009/02/19/Jonah_Lehrer_Inside_My_Mind

"Whether you agree with the outcome or not, foreign labor has helped to reduce the price of many of the goods and services that westerners rely on every day"

But this comes at the cost of jobs, the idea that the free market will pick up the slack is a lot idealogical bullshit. The early United states used protectionism to build it's economy when britains manufaturing was better then theirs, they protected domestic industries so they would not be subject to foreign interests, while the free trading south bought foreign cheap goods and used slaves, guess who won that one? The protectionists.

The free traders need to bone up on their history.

The "Fault" in Yucca is a joke. Nearly every place in the USA has a fault near it in some way. The "Fault" at Yucca is just another anti-industrial age strawman cooked up by a bunch of environmentalists. I ran Yucca mountain through the same earthquake simulations used by insurance companies all over the world, and the premiums were pretty damned low.

You might enjoy a listen to Nassim Taleb. His Black Swan concept seems to have a direct bearing on your argument.

Or maybe it's because ordinary people recognize that chaotic systems are not predictable. The ice caps are melting does not imply that my house is going to be flooded next week,

The system may not be entirely predictable, but that doesn't mean we can't track our effects on the environment and predict what the impact of warming will be. It really doesn't matter wether or not you're a believer in AGW, if we can show that we can do something to fix the problem, then we are obligated to do so.

The fact is that warming is already affecting the world's poor in terms of food and water shortages. If it gets much worse, then global polictical instability will become an expensive problem even for joe consumer in the US.

There are more sensible ways of producing the desired results than injecting pollution in the atmosphere, the problem is that they rely on personal responsibility, and government action. Unfortunately the US has proven to be very capable of either thus far.

Here's an industry expert that talks about the effects of global warming and the kinds of things that will have to be done to combat them: http://fora.tv/2009/01/16/Saul_Griffith_Climate_Change_Recalculated#chapter_01.

http://fora.tv/2009/02/04/Neil_deGrasse_Tyson_The_Pluto_Files#chapter_04 Planets are more defined than that. At least as of when the Pluto decision was voted on.

Obviously what I experience as sweet can be very different from what you experience as sweet.

I'm not sure that's right. I'm might prefer things that are sour to sugary-sweet candy, but I think sugar will taste sweet to both of us because sweetness is biological (at least to some extent). If someone is for some reason unable to taste sweetness, that doesn't change what sweetness is. But I get what you're saying: Laziness is somewhat relative, but perhaps not entirely. The idea isn't really borne out in the rest of your post, though.

Some tasks just need to be done because... end of story. If you can't, then the label is lazy.

This doesn't make sense to me. You're saying that some things need to be done for no reason, and it's "laziness" if you don't do them. Now I don't understand why anyone should be doing things for no reason. I don't think I know anyone who does things for no reason, with no rationale, and with no expectation of personal benefit from those actions. If there were anyone doing such things, than I would probably label that "stupidity".

I think what you're actually thinking of is that there are some things that ought to be done even though the benefit might not be immediately apparent to everyone. In those cases, I think the people who understand the importance of those things are willing to put in work to make sure they get done. Other people may be motivated to do those things for other reasons without fully understanding the importance. But no one is doing it for no reason.

If you are not prepared to simply say at a certain point "we did all we wanted to do, now it is up to you and if you don't, you fail" you end up with the no-child-left-behind policy.

Now this is a different argument about a different topic. You're just arguing that, given limited resources, we should be willing to sacrifice the welfare of some children in order to increase the success of other children. Even if true, that's a whole other discussion before we can get to the question of which children to sacrifice and which to spend your resources on.

School nowadays is so non-challenging that kids with brains are left to rot because the most dis-intrested can't be left behind.

I'm not saying that we should make schools less challenging. I'm just saying it might be counter-productive to single children out and tell them they have inherent deeply-ingrained character flaws.

At a certain point our society just can't afford or can't be bothered to keep chasing after people who are lazy.

At a certain point, society can't afford not to. You keep writing children off, telling them they're no good, trying to force them into the idea that they're useless, and then you're surprised when they don't grow up to be productive members of society?

Yes, I think society would be well served to chase down everyone and try to find good uses for them. Why shouldn't we? Here's a pretty interesting video that's somewhat related. But even so, that's not what I was talking about. I haven't said anywhere before that we need to put more effort and resources into chasing people down, but if we're going to spend all of our effort and resources trying to educated people, we may as well educate them properly. There's no point in putting extra effort into chasing people away.

But let me put it this way: I've known lots of different types of people, some of whom have been labelled as lazy. I have never known anyone who met most of the following criteria and were still unwilling to work:

• understood the importance of a task
• believed that he/she would benefit from completing the task
• knew which task needed to be complete and how to do it
• felt confident in his/her own ability to complete that task

I

I will say this is the first time EVER where I thought a H2 energy culture was even remotely possible.

Can't imagine why. You can split water easily using a source of electricity (e.g. nuclear), ship the hydrogen to where ever, and burn it using local oxygen from the air (fuel cell, internal combustion engine, whatever), and the emissions are limited to water vapor. Essentially, it's a neat way of storing energy -- the hard part is shipping the hydrogen (Do you do it at high pressure? At cryogenic temperature?)

As for ethanol, I still don't understand why we don't use hemp instead of corn.

At the rate we're going, marijuana will be legalized before they get around to hemp, but the bio-fuel dream is always going to be a non-starter: there just isn't enough energy available to the biosphere to think that we can hijack enough of it to run a significant chunk of our industry. Seriously, the estimates I've seen are something like 6 terrawatts in the biosphere, and more than twice that is used by industry: Drew Endby and Jim Thomas, Long Now talk (mp3)

If you got an hour I highly recommend watching this presentation by Steve Chu, http://fora.tv/2007/09/13/Steve_Chu_A_New_Energy_Program who is Obama's new Energy Secretary. He gives a good concise presentation on the state of energy systems today and how practical they are.

And hey, here's more. I'm just 8 minutes into this talk and I'm already on his side.

Steve Chu: A New Energy Program

One of my faves is fora.tv which has lots of really good lectures and readings. A lot of it is from CSPAN, but I like CSPAN, so I'm not one to complain.

This kind of refinement in the online video space is a great great thing, and as online advertising increases in value (At the expense of broadcast advertising dollars) these kinds of websites will have greater and greater viability and from there, increased depth of programming.

Some websites have tried to do this in an entertainment sphere, and for the most part, aren't realy doing too well - audience expectations are high and the material presented is often iffy in quality. OF course, that changing, slowly - better stuff is arriving, but there needs to be filtering systems. Things like the site in TFA and fora.tv are just such filters.

This is a very exciting time for online video!

Now, if we can only keep the bandwidth up before it all chokes itself to death...

RS

Finally someone who understands that this is not simply a "supply and demand" equation like the 60 second "news" stories tell us. Oil and gasoline are publicly traded commodities, and their prices are subject to those who buy and sell them long before retail. I was not able to find an online transcript, but during this discussion on C-SPAN, http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=965, Forbes and Pickens agreed that the speculative trading in oil and gasoline was responsible for the current increase in increase in the price of crude oil and gasoline, not supply and demand. In short, if it were not for traders running up the price, like stock at an IPO of a new "hot" tech company, oil would be around $40-$50 per barrel.

Whether the discussion is about the price of gas and telecommuters or global warming, there are always posts about how we should use mass transit, walk, or bicycle, instead of a using a personal motor vehicle. Now, I absolutely believe that we humans do affect the climate with our machines. The fact that the temperature variation was 2 degrees Fahrenheit greater in the days after Sept. 11 2001, when all civilian and commercial air traffic was grounded, http://www.physorg.com/news8899.html, I think absolutely proves that we do affect the climate.

The price of gasoline, and the voiced changes planned to prevent global warming both impact the same function in our lives, transportation. Whether we move food stuffs, goods, or people, we pay at the pump and with the climate. Would you like to take a bus on vacation, with your schedule dictated by consensus of the other groups on the bus? Have you gone grocery shopping on a bus or train, and if so, with children? Public mass transit places serious limitations on your ability to move from place to place.

I have no idea of the math/efficiency, but how cleanly would we generate electricity, enough to power all of our transportation needs? Would all electric vehicles, even just in the urban areas, be enough of an improvement to offset their inconvenience? Remember, we're thinking globally, not just in the immediate area. Whether coal, oil shale, natural gas, or hydroelectric is used to generate the electricity, it all impacts the environment. The transmission of electricity to the charging stations for each vehicle also has an impact (installation, maintenance, inspection, transmission).

The solution is a source of energy for our machines that is more efficient than electricity. Once again, it will be an egotistical nerd who will come up with the answer.

There is a pretty amazing video on FORA.tv with Will Wright from MAXIS talking about programming generative systems and showing a demo of his new game Spore. The whole clip is backed up by Brian Eno playing generativly created music. http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=451

There is a pretty amazing video on FORA.tv with Will Wright from MAXIS talking about programming generative systems and showing a demo of his new game Spore. The whole clip is backed up by Brian Eno playing generativly created music. http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=451

I enjoy the Stanford CS Colloquium.

The article doesn't actually link to the subject sites, so here you are: fora.tv and ResearchChannel.

privacy, liberty: the history
http://fora.tv/fora/showthread.php?t=889