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The average car in the US travels approximately 20,000 miles/year.

The 20k/year warranty isn't due to the average, it's to catch like 90% of people. The average is more like 12k - light duty trucks(pickups) average closer to 15k.

1800 miles per charge is 7 swaps, or about every other month.

If you keep even a 25 mile liIon battery in it though it'd become an annual swap for most people.

Or perhaps you could express the amount of radiation leaked by a nuclear plant by comparing it to the normal operation of a coal power plant.

On average, a nuclear plant leaks about 10 milli-coal-plants worth of radioactive material. Which is why you see the coal industry being hit with billions of dollars in cleanup costs every time they dump radioactive uranium and thorium in the form of coal ash.

Oh, wait. You don't, really. Because coal power plants aren't regulated the same way nuclear plants are they can just blow it into the air and forget about it. And if that coal ash just happens to contain enough radioactive Uranium 238 to power every nuclear power plant in the country with a few hundred tons left over, then so be it. At least they're not nuclear so that's okay, right?

According to page 43 of this study, men drive about 50% more miles per year than women.

The GP's link shows that men account for 2.5x as many traffic fatalities.

So men are clearly still worse according to these statistics. But why trust these numbers? Insurance companies make their money by having teams of extremely smart, highly trained statisticians pore over more data than you'll see in a lifetime, and they charge women less. I don't see how anyone could rationally argue that women are worse drivers while knowing that fact.

Women have more more accidents overall and much more likely to have an injury accident than men per mile driven (source). Males, particularly young males are much more likely to take risks than females. Young males are 2.1 more likely to be in a fatal accident but the rates start converging and by age 60 there isn't a difference in the fatal accident rate. But for non-fatal accidents females consistently are more likely to be involved. I couldn't find any data on insurance rates by gender, do you have a source for that?

According to page 43 of this study, men drive about 50% more miles per year than women.

The GP's link shows that men account for 2.5x as many traffic fatalities.

So men are clearly still worse according to these statistics. But why trust these numbers? Insurance companies make their money by having teams of extremely smart, highly trained statisticians pore over more data than you'll see in a lifetime, and they charge women less. I don't see how anyone could rationally argue that women are worse drivers while knowing that fact.

Fukushima is a serious nuclear disaster. It's a very situation that we should all be concerned about. But this should not lead to any pause in our appetite for nuclear energy.

What people often fail to appreciate is that even coal fired powerstations release quite large amounts of radioactive material in to atmosphere. Coal fired powerstations burn about a million times as much material as a nuclear powerstation per joule of energy produced. Some of that material is radioactive. That stuff isn't been sealed in a container in burrried in a mountain, it's being blown up chimney stacks along with the rest of the rather unpleasant stuff.

Don't believe me? Reflect on this passage taken from this (PDF) document:

The EPA found slightly higher average coal concentrations than used by McBride et al. of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively. Gabbard (A. Gabbard, “Coal combustion: nuclear resource or danger?,” ORNL Review 26, http://www.ornl.gov/ORNLReview... 34/text/colmain.html.) finds that American releases from each typical 1 GWe coal plant in 1982 were 4.7 tonnes of uranium and 11.6 tonnes of thorium, for a total national release of 727 tonnes of uranium and 1788 tonnes of thorium. The total release of radioactivity from coal-fired fossil fuel was 97.3 TBq (9.73 x 1013 Bq) that year. This compares to the total release of 0.63 TBq (6.3 x 1011 Bq) from the notorious TMI accident, 155 times smaller.

So far, there has not been a single confirmed death due to Fukushima accident. In comparison, there were 20 deaths in the US just mining for coal in 2013. This is not to mention all the deaths being caused by cancers and other health problems being caused by breathing polluted air.

If we're ever going to get on top of this climate change challenge, nuclear must be leading the charge. Nuclear is a safe, non-polluting technology. Modern designs are fail-safe in every sense of the word. The newer designs can even cope with a loss of external power (like Fukushima experienced) yet still stay safe.

This is the 21st century. The technology is mature, sensible and safe. Really, we should be looking to retire every coal fired plant as a matter of urgency, if only to reduce the amount of radioactive contamination of the atmosphere!!

Computing has always been tiered: a small elite which pioneers what ultimately tickles down to the masses. When the first abacus was made, not everyone was able to use it. But when the masses learned to use it, the Mesopotamian elite already had adopted written language for accounting (sorry, only the German Wiki page contains said info). The first computers were all elitist devices. The masses were using tables to approximate sin/cos/log etc.

Today we call this elite supercomputers. Techniques developed for these eventually get adopted for mainstream hardware. The GPUs we have today are essentially modeled after the vector CPUs used in the supercomputers of the 1980s.

You're right though, that there is a feedback between both: the mainstream with its incredible volume drives manufacturing. As we approach the 7nm wall, manufacturing is becoming increasingly expensive. Only mass markets can finance the required R&D. Supercomputing is increasingly taking advantage of mainstream tech. E.g. ORNL's Titan is based on NVIDIA Tesla K20x GPUs, which technically aren't your average gamer GPUs, but the chips are essentially spin-offs of these.

Cellulose is the only way to go. One of the most promising sources is switch grass, which can be grown on much more marginal land, and pretty much re-plants itself (due to deep roots).

I've heard similar things about hemp, with the added benefit of hemp being useful for more than 1 thing.

Well, I applaud them for trying to end it, but it was never wise to turn over the best food growing land to fuel production.
It was known from the beginning that it took more energy than it produced.

Cellulose is the only way to go. One of the most promising sources is switch grass, which can be grown on much more marginal land, and pretty much re-plants itself (due to deep roots).

Had an equal amount of money been put into cellulosic ethanol we wouldn't be stuck with a corn industry that is driving up food prices, and depleting prime agricultural soils. Nor would be have a bunch of corn processing facilities that will require significant work to convert to anything else.

This has been an expensive failed experiment, about what you would expect when you rush something into production rather than letting the science and the industry develop. The problem was they didn't set it up to allow competition between sources. They went full funding and full legislative mandate for a single solution before they even did much research.

One recent solution, posted not much above you: http://hardware.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4531753&cid=45634657

Another one, that's actually been around for quite a while, vitrification (i.e. glassification): http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022311513010313

And yet another one, that Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed some years ago: http://web.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-2/text/radside1.html

There's no dearth of solutions. The issue is one of political will and public relations.

The short answer is no. The long answer is no ... and a very long list of reasons why.

Start with reading Goldbergs classic paper "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Computer Arithmetic" Sun's floating point group made some improvements to the paper and paid for rights to redistribute. Oracle continues to do so. http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html

If that isn't depressing enough, and you use trig functions, read http://www.scribd.com/doc/64949170/Ng-Argument-Reduction-for-Huge-Arguments-Good-to-the-Last-Bit you can get the source from netlib for "fdlibm" which is under a BSD flavor license.

If the purely software issues haven't made you realize that you haven't got much of a prayer, please note that different revs of the same intel chips sometimes provide slightly different results (sometimes intentionally, sometimes as a result of tweaking the order of execution in the out of order execution engine). Older x87 arithmetic was 80-bit, newer x64 arithmetic is pure 64-bit, providing no end of fun. Using the SSE instructions provides more variation.

If the pretty much (in principle) "simple" and potentially deterministic software issues aren't enough consider the reality of hw. Chessin has a very good, yet amusing, explanation of the key problems http://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1839574

Lest you think they only apply to a particular generation of boutique processor, most HPC ensembles are now built out of standard server motherboards and chips.

http://www.csm.ornl.gov/srt/conferences/ResilienceSummit/2010/pdf/michalak.pdf The issue of undetected soft errors is big and growing, as can be seen from the activity in the literature. SC13 "ACR: Automatic Checkpoint/Restart for Soft and Hard Error Protection" (which has lots of good citations of earlier work, including field data such as 27 soft errors per week leading to fatal node failures (that is, wrong enough results that while the hw didn't detect any problem, the issue caused the node to crash) on just one ensemble (ASC Q). its going mainstream in that HPCwire caught wind and in 31 Oct 2013 had a nice tabloidesqe writeup entitled "Addressing the Threat of Silent Data Corruption"

Neutron's don't only disrupt memory elements, but can hit logic as well. See the upcoming issue (already available via IEEE xplorer for member/subscribers) JOURNAL OF SOLID-STATE CIRCUITS, VOL. 49, NO. 1, JANUARY 2014 The 10th Generation 16-Core SPARC64 Processor for Mission Critical UNIX Server" which details the lengths some (but not many) go to ensure that there are no undetected errors (wide range of techniques, ranging from where wires are placed on the chip, ECC, parity, residue arithmetic, automatic retry, etc.). No doubt there are some good (similar) papers in the IBM Technical Journal.

No doubt a good literature search would turn up dozens of other papers, and circuit design textbooks cover some of the territory.

In principle, interval arithmetic could provide a solution (you might not get the same interval, but if the intervals nest, you have consistent results and if they are disjoint you have a bug ... and if they nest, the narrower one is "sharper" which is better). In practice, most algorithms haven't been reworked for good interval implementation, languages don't provide very good support, nor does most hardware. All fixable in principle, but unlikely to be the solution you seek for todays off the shelf virtual systems available cheaply.

Sure. While I'm asking the people of Fukashima, you go ask the four thousand US coal miners each year with blacklung, or if its easier, the six thousand that die each year in China from coal mine accidents. While you're doing that, don't forget to check out the uranium and thorium that gets upchucked into the atmosphere where it can't be contained in a discrete area. http://web.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

I've been asking and asking for citations to any other similar result.

Well, just looking at the page I pointed out to you you can see the graphs for Barrow, Samoa and the South Pole.

Actual numbers can be found at http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/co2/sio-keel-flask/sio-keel-flasksam.html

Dozens of people have replied to those posts, but not one has cited a single measurement, anywhere in the world, even in the middle of LA, with readings anywhere NEAR that high. I just checked the reading in downtown Houston, TX, one of the country's dirtiest cities. It's 0.2 ppm. These guys are claiming overall atmospheric C02 of 400 ppm.

WTF? Where the hell do you get 0.2 ppm CO2? Source?

Just quickly looking around the web I can find papers like Elevated atmospheric CO2 concentration and temperature across an urban-rural transect

Which includes the gem:

In Phoenix, USA CO2 concentration was monitored for nearly a year and values ranged from a daily minimum of 390 ppm rising to a daily maximum of 491 ppm, although a maximum value of 619 ppm was attained (Idso et al., 2002).

619 ppm in 2002 in Phoenix good enough for you?

Looks like your Houston figure is dodgy. Confusing CO with CO2 maybe?

Fermilab does a lot of research in exascale applications.

http://sc12.supercomputing.org/schedule/event_detail.php?evid=post171

http://computing.ornl.gov/workshops/scidac2010/presentations/j_amundson.pdf

No, he is saying he doesn't know how accurate the measurements are. That doesn't mean they aren't accurate.

The researchers doing the work definitely know how accurate their measurements are.

The readings taken from ice cores are correlated with average global temperatures taken from satellites, ground stations, etc. Fluctuations in the average are reflected in fluctuations in the core samples. Seasonal variations are readily identified. Once that correlation is established, it is used for "hindcasting" where individual core readings are compared with known measured temperatures to prove the validity of the estimating technique.

Greenhouse gas samples trapped in the ice are similarly correlated with overall planetary gas levels. Methane levels measured in ice cores map very accurately to methane levels measured around the globe for the last 35 years. The uncertainty of the methane measurements has been determined to be accurate to within 10 parts per billion. Timeframe accuracy varies based on the age of the sample, but is accurate to within two years for dates since 1805 A.D. And current ice sheet data only goes back less than a million years, although there is an attempt underway to find 1.5 million year old ice.

The ice cores are not the only sources of historical climate data. Geological data reveals ice damage to rocks, the formation of glacial moraines, etc. Dendroclimatology measures the temperature by examining plant growth. Tree rings are often cited because many people are familiar with the concepts, but there are other ways to use plants to measure climate. The geologic record shows the prevalence of the types of plants growing at certain distances from the equator - the historical equivalent of USDA Plant Hardiness Zones. The edge of a range of a certain type of fast-spreading plant will indicate the minimum temperatures at which that plant would survive the winter. The age of the plants can be determined through radiocarbon dating. For samples that are less than 26,000 years old, calibrated radiocarbon dating gives an accuracy of no worse than 163 years. For older samples or fossils, sediment layers are used to identify the age of origin of the sample. These are calibrated by comparing the strata layer with other known events, such as volcanic eruptions, sea level changes, etc.

All these sources of data are correlated to give a bigger picture. Like anything else, it's messier the farther back you go. Certain studies will show wide variations, others will show narrow variations. And even though they don't always agree to within the exact degree, they all show similar consistent broad trends in temperature, gasses, and the effects.

Here are a couple of papers studying the accuracy of gas measurements in ice cores: http://faculty.washington.edu/steig/papers/recent/Steig_Annals_2005.pdf
and http://cdiac.ornl.gov/trends/atm_meth/lawdome_meth.html

they are all in broad agreement that the temperature rises in the last century have been exceptional

They most certainly are not - if you don't happen to cherry pick ~1850 (the coldest part of the whole Holocene) as a starting point.

Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise)

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

Has it ever changed so rapidly?

Oh yes.

Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise).

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

Don't mistake low proxy resolution (example, ice cores) for lack of actual rapid changes.

PS: Looked into the monitoring networks a bit deeper. A good data source with some excellent visualizations of this sort of thing can be found at the US DOE, the link comes from the excellent compendium of climate data archives at realclimate.

As a personal anecdote I first became interested in climate science in the early eighties, in that time it has gone from 340 to 400. OTOH, millions (if not billions) of people like myself have come to accept that it is a genuine problem. Same thing happened with "pea-soup" fog and acid rain, the economy won't die but unless the coal industry really can produce "clean coal" it will rapidly become obsolete, they read the writing on the wall 25yrs ago but what does that mean to an industry that held back "clean air" legislation for almost a century, stalling that cost 10's if not 100's of thousands of premature deaths across Europe?

Sounds exactly like the data between 1960 and 1978! And nothing has changed since then! The temperature has stayed exactly the same! Oh, wait.

The Muana Loa observatory measures only at night, when air is descending from far up high. That air has come from across the Pacific Ocean, far from any specific CO2 sources.
At night, the volcanic gasses are trapped in a thin layer near the ground by a temperature inversion. The observatory measures the air at several towers at different altitudes and also closer to the volcano so as to get a comparative reading.

You can read more in this report.

The climate changes naturally but not like now

"The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (Interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial. Detailed analysis of terrestrial and marine records of climate change will, however, be necessary before we can say confidently on what timescale these events occurred; they almost certainly did not take longer than a few centuries."

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

You might mistakenly refer to limits of proxy resolution as proof of non-rapid natural climate change.

"The time span of the past few million years has been punctuated by many rapid climate transitions, most of them on time scales of centuries to decades or even less. The most detailed information is available for the Younger Dryas-to-Holocene stepwise change around 11,500 years ago, which seems to have occurred over a few decades. The speed of this change is probably representative of similar but less well-studied climate transitions during the last few hundred thousand years. These include sudden cold events (Heinrich events/stadials), warm events (Interstadials) and the beginning and ending of long warm phases, such as the Eemian interglacial. Detailed analysis of terrestrial and marine records of climate change will, however, be necessary before we can say confidently on what timescale these events occurred; they almost certainly did not take longer than a few centuries."

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

If I had to travel more than 10km, chances are I'd be coming in from out of town, and I wouldn't spend as much time stopped at red lights. I can average about 26kph on my bike when I'm out riding in the country.

Next up - statistics, man. The average trip is 16 miles. That does not mean that 50% of the people travel more than 16 miles, and 50% travel less than 16 miles. An educated guess would be that commute distances follow something more akin to a Poisson distribution (sorry, I forget what the continuous form of that distribution is), with the median commute distinctly shorter than the man, due to the long tail formed by people with 100 mile commutes.

Thirdly- citation needed. Here's a report from the US Dept of Transportation:

http://nhts.ornl.gov/2009/pub/stt.pdf

Here, it states that the average commute for someone who drives alone, in 2009, was 12.09 miles (page 54), and for all people, it was 11.79 miles. Based on the historical trends, I find it hard to believe that it's jumped by 30% in just four years.

Finally - I'm not telling everyone in the US to bike to work. Some guy asked for a good way to stay in shape, and I responded that the only thing that I do is bike to work. I don't really get any exercise outside of that. I think it's a great way to keep in shape. Unless you are also Dishwasha, or you know their commuting arrangements intimately, don't discount my suggestion to them. Anecdotes aren't data, and data isn't anecdotes. Maybe it's a good suggestion, maybe it's not. Only they can tell that.

Still the article points out corn ethanol produces 1.2 unit for every 1 unit put, so the original claim is wrong.

True, the wiki article suggest that you get slightly more energy out than you put in. We'd get a lot more out with cellulose based production such as switch grass.

But, the production side is only half of the picture. The other side is any inefficiencies when actually using the ethanol as a fuel. Chemical analysis of the PRODUCTION side does not always translate into real world use.

You also have the USE side. According to the US Department of Energy E85 (85% ethanol - so-called FlexFuel) gives 25 to 30% less mileage. My car's manual (2012 Chrysler product) just flat out states 30% less miles per gallon, and it further states don't ever use it unless your car has a FlexFuel badge. (which my car does not).

E10 (10% ethanol), makes only a 3 to 4% drop in mileage (according to DOE). There are some stations in my area that have E15 (15% ethanol), reduces milage by 7.7% according to the DOE referenced study. My owners manual specifically warns against that as well. Essentially, the report indicated the reduction in miles per gallon continued as a linear trend with increasing ethanol content.

Further there appears to be little pollution benefit from using ethanol, contrary to the claims of some people.

Regulated tailpipe emissions remained largely unaffected by the ethanol content of the fuel.
As ethanol content increased,
  oxides of nitrogen (NOX) and non-methane organic gases (NMOG) showed no significant
change;
  non-methane hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide (CO) emissions declined on average for
all ethanol blend levels tested. Neither pollutant changed appreciably from E10 to E20;
  ethanol emissions increased;
  acetaldehyde emissions increased;
  formaldehyde emissions increased slightly; and
  benzene and 1,3-butadiene were expected to decrease due to dilution, but measurements
were conducted on only a subset of the vehicles and have not been thoroughly analyzed
to date.

The average commute distance by private vehicle as of 2009 in the United States is a little over 12 miles (12.09, PDF, page 48, table 27). So I would say that a lot of people DO have less than 20 miles commutes.

It's not a volatile compound, it's a stable salt. http://www.ornl.gov/sci/scale/pubs/SOL-05-1048_1.pdf You don't have to read more than "1 Introduction" to get the jist. The same goes when you dissolve thorium in there.

there's a big difference between changes that happen over the course of many lifetimes or many lifetimes in the future, and change that happens in the lifetime of people currently inhabiting the planet.

Climate has changed much more rapidly than currently, throughout history.

Until a few decades ago it was generally thought that all large-scale global and regional climate changes occurred gradually over a timescale of many centuries or millennia, scarcely perceptible during a human lifetime. The tendency of climate to change relatively suddenly has been one of the most suprising outcomes of the study of earth history, specifically the last 150,000 years (e.g., Taylor et al., 1993). Some and possibly most large climate changes (involving, for example, a regional change in mean annual temperature of several degrees celsius) occurred at most on a timescale of a few centuries, sometimes decades, and perhaps even just a few years. The decadal-timescale transitions would presumably have been quite noticeable to humans living at such times, and may have created difficulties or opportunities (e.g., the possibility of crossing exposed land bridges, before sea level could rise).

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

You shouldn't throw around words like "denialist" when you obviously only repeat popular propaganda.

I'd like to see a source for that. More radiation than a properly functioning nuclear plant, maybe.

[ To copy a post from myself from 2005. ] I find this interesting. It's a little old (1982), but the summary is:

For the year 1982, assuming coal contains uranium and thorium concentrations of 1.3 ppm and 3.2 ppm, respectively, each typical plant released 5.2 tons of uranium (containing 74 pounds of uranium-235) and 12.8 tons of thorium that year. Total U.S. releases in 1982 (from 154 typical plants) amounted to 801 tons of uranium (containing 11,371 pounds of uranium-235) and 1971 tons of thorium. These figures account for only 74% of releases from combustion of coal from all sources. Releases in 1982 from worldwide combustion of 2800 million tons of coal totaled 3640 tons of uranium (containing 51,700 pounds of uranium-235) and 8960 tons of thorium.

And that's just for one year. The projected cumulative stats for year 2040 (100 years of coal burning):

U.S. release (from combustion of 111,716 million tons): Uranium: 145,230 tons (containing 1031 tons of uranium-235) Thorium: 357,491 tons Worldwide release (from combustion of 637,409 million tons): Uranium: 828,632 tons (containing 5883 tons of uranium-235) Thorium: 2,039,709 tons

Personally, I'd rather use nuclear power and know where all the radioactive material is than burn coal and have it dispersed into the atmosphere. Omen

From your fine link,

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

Various mechanisms, involving changes in ocean circulation, changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases or haze particles, and changes in snow and ice cover, have been invoked to explain these sudden regional and global transitions.

So, WTF are you talking about again? Just linking random stuff without even reading it?

Too bad the only thing that the only thing that we have in common with your link and GW (ie. today) is changes in atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Too bad.

If your example is in hope of saying that climate change cannot affect humans because it happened in the past (hell, even more quickly), when there were almost no humans, I think you are wrong.

At all other times in the planet's history when there have been periods of warming, it's taken orders of magnitude longer than the current period.

No.

http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/transit.html

How do we know? Ice cores.

No.

http://www.climate.unibe.ch/~stocker/papers/bereiter09grl.pdf

It ships with Compute Node Linux, which is a cut down (lower overhead) version of SLES. It supports several schedulers, but ORNL typically uses Altair PBS on the big systems (http://www.cray.com/Products/XK/Software.aspx). ORNL provides a large number of compilers and libraries that users can use in the form of 'modules' (http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/support/user-guides/titan-user-guide/). And in terms of scheduling/partitioning, the user just requests a specific number of nodes when they submit a job, and they get those nodes to themselves for the allotted time. It's pretty low-impact on the compute nodes, and less exciting than you might think. They don't put much emphasis on the software when reporting on these machines, because it's stripped down as much as possible to allow the user applications to run at peak performance.

Wrong plant. ORNL is a completely separate laboratory from Y-12, even though they're located in the same city.

Thanks for that link. Quoting the most relevant passage from it:

"Many experts agree that, on a national level, the United States is ready for a vast expansion in electric cars. According to a 2008 Energy Department study, the effect of a vast expansion in electric vehicles could be minimal. Electric vehicles are expected to account for around one quarter of the market by 2030. If those vehicles are all charged after 10 p.m., when electricity demand is low, the nation would require no additional power generation. "

Which is pretty much just what I just said.

Later--after repeating "In most residential areas, an EV can easily be accepted into the charging infrastructure"--the article goes on to point out that if you get too many EVs in one area, you will need "'some kind of a strategy for adapting to it,' according to Allan Schurr, vice president of strategy and development for energy and utilities at IBM."

Fine. Most residential areas have no problem, but, OK, some areas may need "some kind of strategy" to deal with a high number of vehicles all in one place. So we may have to deal with it. That's not "a giant fail" (your words) on the electrical grid.

Oh, and yes, electric vehicles require energy, and that energy has to come from somewhere. Yep, that's true. Nobody that I know of ever claimed that they didn't.

As I said, no amount of data can change the mind of people who are determined to not pay attention to data.

Climate scientists publish all the time. They don't "hide their data and methods," nor "share only with people that agree with them"-- the whole point of peer-reviewed research is to publish and get the data out there in the community. I really, really, suggest that you should read the IPCC WG-1 report; http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/contents.html ; it won't change your mind (since you've determined you aren't interested in changing your opinions), but at least it will allow you to argue with some actual knowledge, instead of simply parroting the third-hand opinions of people who simply assert that climate scientists are frauds.

...Let's go back to that computer model.

What do you mean by "that" computer model? At the moment I'm aware of nineteen major global circulation models, being run by groups in America, Canada, France, Australia, China, Russia, Japan, Germany, Korea, UK, Norway, and Sweden, but I'm sure that there are more. You talk as if there's one model, that's made one prediction. There are a series of many different global circulation models, run by many different institutions, dating back nearly fifty years. (The earliest real global climate model incorporating convective/radiative transfer with an assumption of constant relative humidity was Manabe and Wetherald, 1967; but I've referenced that so many times I'm tired of it.)

A bunch of amateur software developers

"Amateur." Well, that's a charge that's impossible to refute, since whoever does it, I'm sure you will just say "they're amateurs." One of the major models was the Los Alamos model, for example; their experience in running finite-element supercomputer models of fluid and thermal transfer comes from the fact that they model nuclear weapons explosions. But I'm sure you can say "oh, they're amateurs" if you want to. Yeah, nuclear bombs probably don't even work, it's all a hoax. The National Center for Supercomputer Applications? Amateurs. Yeah, sure.

Pretty much all of the supercomputer centers in the world have worked on climate models over the last fifty years. "Amateurs." Yeah, right. Whatever.

with no source control, no data integrity and no experience with formal software engineering procedures

You know, Los Alamos National Labs pretty much invented formal software engineering procedures on supercomputers. And, yes, they do apply it to climate models. (discussed, among many many many other places, here, for example http://www.csm.ornl.gov/~bbd/IJHPCASpecialIssue05/Drake.pdf or here http://www.nd.edu/~gmadey/sim06/Classnotes/Validation/pope.pdf or here http://www.informs-sim.org/wsc98papers/016.PDF )

And for that matter, the majority of the computer models, including the source code, are publicly available-- many of them are even on the web.

are claiming to model something that is incredibly complex using what is by definition an abstraction. Do you understand what an abstraction is? Doesn't sound like it.

Yes, a computer model involves making abstractions. All equations are abstractions, for that matter, but guess what? Physics still works.

Uranium is as common a tin and 40 times more common than silver. Coal contains more energy due to uranium impurities than it does due to the chemical energy contained in coal.

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

<sarc>Shit, if uranium is only as common as tin and produces 10 million times the energy on a mass per mass basis as coal, how will we ever be able to solve our energy crisis?</sarc>

Go ahead and check for yourself.

Some numbers: Fukushima 900 PBq & Chernobyl 5200 PBq.

Total radioactive releases from coal power plants from 1937 to 2040: 100 PBq (2,721,736,430 millicuries).

So, just Fukushima and Chernobyl have released 61 times the radioactivity released by burning coal for electricity for a century (predicted).

Let's compare this to all of the proven coal reserves in the world being burned: 860 billion tonnes (950 billion tons) at 0.00427 millicuries/ton and 3.7e10 Bq/curie equals 150 PBq.

Obviously, these values are codependent, but we can probably safely assume that at least 200 PBq would be released (meaning that we have burned all of the known coal in the world). Fukashima alone still beats that value by almost 5 times and Chernobyl by 26.

Ouch!

Ugh ....
Maryland - Goddard Space Flight Center
New Mexico - AF Research Lab - Space Vehicles, Sandia Labs, Los Alamos Labs
Colorado - Ball, Raytheon, etc
California - JPL, Livermore Labs and way too many others to list
Virginia - Navy Research Lab, Wallops Island
Texas - UT Dallas, Texas A&M, Johnson Space Center, many more
Arizona - Orbital Sciences Corp., GD, etc
Tennessee - Oakridge
Alabama - U.S. Space and Rocket Center
Utah -Space Dynamics Laboratory, L3
Florida - Kennedy, ATK and many more
Alaska - Kodiak Island

The space industry is spread out over the entire country. This list could go on and on. Saying it is only Florida and Texas that benefit is mildly absurd. I agree with the idea, but it isn't nearly as narrow as that.

I guess they did not get anyone that technical to write that article or the summary.

For I/O I guess they mean memory bandwidth. GPUs have a LOT of memory bandwidth from their cache memory, the problem is that they sit at the end of a PCIe bus from the CPU and the CPU has to handle most of the book keeping (and the actual IO, i.e. taking data from an external source).

So what is important is the compute density i.e. how much computation you do for each piece of data. Getting stuff into the GPU is slow, getting stuff out is slow, but doing stuff on the data is very very fast (because you have so many compute units and so much memory bandwidth).

That is also the way they are programmed, with the main code running on the CPU, and then the kernals getting launched on the GPU with explicit or implict transfer of data from the CPU memory to the GPU memory and back again.

I do have high hopes for stuff like Fusion ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Fusion ) which gets rid of the PCIe bus, and make it a lot easier to get data to the GPU cores and back again.

And if you are going to mention GPU machines, why not mention titan ? ( http://www.olcf.ornl.gov/computing-resources/titan/ )

You are probably making a mistake somewhere, but since there are no sources for your numbers, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analsysis Center (CDIAC) says that the world's fuel burning and cement use emitted 9,139 Tg of Carbon into the atmosphere in 2010, that's a little over 33.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide.

According to PBS, world carbon dioxide sources break down this way (The EPA has similar numbers):

1. 25.9% - energy supply
2. 19.4% - industry
3. 17.4% - forestry
4. 13.5% - agriculture
5. 13.1% - transportation
6. 7.9% - residential and commerical buildings
7. 2.8% - waste and waste water

So your back of the envelope calculation for human emissions looks like it's based on incorrect assumptions (under estimating because you only considered transportation and only in 2 countries).

If we try to fix the obvious errors and multiply your estimate by 7.7, to get from 13% to 100, that puts us at around 22 billion tons of CO2, which is still lower than the actual measured number. If we also account for only considering two countries (Wikipedia puts the combined emissions of China and the United States at around 41% of world emissions) by multiplying by 2.5, that gives us 55 billion tons of carbon dioxide from your estimate, which is almost double the measured amount. I'm guessing that your estimate of gas used for transportation is actually a little on the high side.

As for the amount of CO2 released by Mt. St. Helens, here's an article about the Eyjafjoell eruption. The estimate places it's emissions at around 150,000 tonnes of CO2 per day. Your calculation would mean the St. Helens eruption produced about 681,818 times the daily emissions of Eyjafjoell. According to wikipedia article on the Mt. St. Helens eruption only about 0.045 cubic miles of new lava was released, which means about the upper limit of CO2 emissions from lava would be about 153 million tonnes, that's for the initial eruption, the subsequent flows produced about an additional 0.05 cubic miles of new lava. That puts the estimate at a little over 300 million tonnes for the upper limit of the emissions using your conversion rates.

Yeah every now and then Slashdot has these silly articles about PC power consumption, "kill a watt" etc.

The power consumption of modern PCs (post P4) has gone down to a level where most home users would usually be better off looking for savings in other areas. Driving more efficiently, not using as much cooling/heating (and making it more efficient - insulation, sealing etc).

As for gaming, sure a high powered gaming rig will use a few hundred watts (and usually less if you're not doing SLI). But that's far from the most energy hungry way of having fun. Your hobby could be drag racing, or hiking/rock climbing somewhere that requires a 1 hour drive, or even baking cakes. FWIW even cycling and other sports might be more energy hungry if you replace the calories burnt by eating more of stuff that requires a fair bit of energy to produce ( e.g. US corn fed beef).

From various sources:
1 pound of beef = 13-15 pounds of CO2 ( http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/environment/2009-04-21-carbon-diet_N.htm )
1 kWh = 2.3 pounds of CO2 ( http://cdiac.ornl.gov/pns/faq.html )
so 1 pound of beef = 5.6-6.5kWh

So if all that exercise makes you eat an additional half pound of beef (400kcal), that's about the equivalent of running a 300W gaming rig + monitor for 9 to 10 hours.

In contrast 1 pound of chicken = 1.1 pounds of CO2.

I've even seen many people here who say they still prefer to use incandescent lighting. It doesn't take that many bulbs to use as much as a gaming rig, even fewer for a facebook/browsing PC/notebook. A single fluorescent tube lamp uses about 40W already.

But the problem is not only the plants that cause pollution..... The majority of 'instant' death's related to coal-power is at the coal-plants...

A few references related to coal-power...
http://www.ucsusa.org/clean_energy/coalvswind/c01.html
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=coal-ash-is-more-radioactive-than-nuclear-waste
http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/1997/fs163-97/FS-163-97.html
http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

Nuclear power is not unsafe... It's just the idiotic laws that are being passed that are blocking the construction of new and safer plants...
Just look at the Chinese... http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/comment/ambroseevans_pritchard/8393984/Safe-nuclear-does-exist-and-China-is-leading-the-way-with-thorium.html

Problem with nuclear power is not it's safety but the craze the media has put all the voters in about anything 'atomic' and then the politicians that then don't try to explain what is happening but just goes straight with the idiot-voters that don't have a clue about what is actually a danger...

Just look at why an MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) was named that instead of NMRI (nuclear magnetic resonance imaging).. People are stupid and afraid of anything 'nuclear'... Just hope no one tells them they have about seven billion billion billion atoms inside their person...

from about 75,000 years ago until about 14,500 years ago, the world was glaciered over.

Here's a brief rundown of the climactic change over the years:
75,000 - 60,000 y.a. - full glacial world, cold and dry (the 'Lower Pleniglacial' or Stage 4)
60,000 - 25,000 y.a. - 'middling phase' of highly unstable but generally cooler and drier-than-present conditions (Stage 3)
25,000 - 15,000 y.a. - full glacial world, cold and dry; Stage 2 (includes the 'Last Glacial Maximum')
(This period includes two 'coldest phases' - Heinrich Events - at around 23,000-21,000 y.a. and at 17,000-14,500 y.a.)
14,500 y.a. - rapid warming and moistening of climates in some areas. Rapid deglaciation begins.
13,500 y.a. - nearly all areas with climates at least as warm and moist as today's
12,800 y.a. (+/- 200 years)- rapid onset of cool, dry Younger Dryas in many areas
11,500 y.a. (+/- 200 years) - Younger Dryas ends suddenly, back to warmth and moist climates (Holocene, or Stage 1)
9,000 y.a. - 8,200 y.a. - climates warmer and often moister than today's
about 8,200 y.a. - sudden cool and dry phase in many areas
8,000-4,500 y.a. - climates somewhat warmer and moister than today's
Since 4,500 y.a. - climates fairly similar to the present
(except; about 2600 y.a. - relatively wet/cold event (of unknown duration) in many areas)

This info from: http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc130k.html

"Originally reprocessing was used solely to extract plutonium for producing nuclear weapons. With the commercialization of nuclear power, the reprocessed plutonium was recycled back into MOX nuclear fuel for thermal reactors." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_reprocessing

"Over the course of 20 years, Chien Wai, a University of Idaho chemistry professor, has developed a process that uses supercritical fluids to dissolve toxic metals. When coupled with a purifying process developed in partnership with Sydney Koegler, an engineer with nuclear industry leader AREVA and University of Idaho alumnus, enriched uranium can be recovered from the ashes of contaminated materials." http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/08/080821213606.htm

You might also want to look into Partitioning and Transmutation

The next reactors to be built widely will probably those that burn nuclear waste. That is, "partitioning and transmutation". It seems (although it doesn't say in that article) that you can burn nuclear waste in a way that produces excess energy. Since you need an accelerator to keep the reaction going, you have automatic shutdown in case of loss of mains power.

The earth is warming dramatically relative to the rates that took place in the past

While that's true of typical rates of change, the current warming is far from historically unique. There are many instances of rapid climate change with no anthropogenic causes.

the only credible explanation so far put forward to explain it is the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

Maybe. Certainly every other theory or explanation is marginalized. But I think calling them "not credible" is a little extreme. Lots of scientists' theories have been deemed "not credible" by the mainstream academic for years before they were proven correct.

an increase which happens to coincide almost precisely with the observed warming and the expected warming

Not as well as closely as you would like to suggest (certainly not "precisely"). If it were, climate changes would be easier to predict. None of that is to say that human activity in general has no affect on the climate. It certainly has a contribution. How significant it is, and whether resources should be dedicated to trying to reverse the warming vs. mitigating the harm to humans from the change is very much up for debate.

On the other end of I-40, in eastern Tennessee, you can visit another major Manhattan Project site. There is the American Museum of Science and Energy in town, and you can also tour the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, home of the Graphite Reactor and the Spallation Neutron Source, among other things. Also, within an hour's drive away is Great Smoky Mountains National Park and Gatlinburg, Tennessee, with all sorts of fun attractions (though mostly non-science-based).

Cray has had Supercomputers on the top ten list (and even in the number one spot) again for years now. Ever since they spun off from SGI they've had one of the more interesting architectures in HPC. I was interviewing at ORNL when they were installing Jaguar, and I got a pretty in depth description of the hows and the whys. It's no longer the most powerful computer in the world, but it's still a very impressive piece of machinery. Sigh. I really need to get back into HPC.

The data is here. You can see that 2009 and 2010 are extrapolations, not actual data.

See here for actual CO2 levels in the atmosphere, up 1 or 2 parts-per-million per year for the last 5 years, as actually measured.

And two clicks in, here, you can see that the 2009 and 2010 so-called 'data' are extrapolated projections, not actual measurements. This is what passes for science today!

From Wikipee: According to U.S. NCRP reports, population exposure from 1000-MWe power plants amounts to 490 person-rem/year for coal power plants and 4.8 person-rem/year for nuclear plants during normal operation, the latter being 136 person-rem/year for the complete nuclear fuel cycle.[16]

http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev26-34/text/colmain.html

I'm not sure how to ask the question. Do I ask how much radioactive material is emitted by both or how much radiation might be gotten from a plant based on distance from it. Or both.