Slashdot Mirror

http://www.engr.psu.edu/ce/enve/mfc-Logan_files/mfc-Logan.htm it's pretty legit. They can use wastewater as fuel that will ultimately be enough to power the water purification process itself. This could save 5% of all energy consumed in the U.S., which is pretty substantial in the broad scheme of things

To clarify, arxiv is a document repository (you submit your papers there). If you want a scientific papers search engine, use citeseer.

Note that citeseer also indexes arxiv documents :)

But, it doesn't matter - it's all open source, you can look at the lines of code and verify for yourself that they're safe, right?

Wrong. I know this is common wisdom in the open source community, but it really isn't that simple when compilers are involved.

The reason is that the hackers COULD potentially have modified the binary of the compiler used to bootstrap the whole RedHat distribution. You can modify the compiler such that it takes harmless code and compiles backdoors into it. In particular you could modify it so that it always propagates the change when it compiles a version of itself. Since every system bootstraps from an already compiled version of the compiler, a well hidden backdoor could propagate forever, unless people actually analyze the machine code.

Read Ken Thompson's 1984(!) Turing Award lecture for the full nitty gritty details. This should be required reading for everybody in security (and all open source advocates, for that matter):

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.91.5728&rep=rep1&type=pdf
(PDF)

"When MacIntyre asked for the code and the raw data, Mann said no. Repeatedly."

This is rubbish, although McIntyre did seem to have trouble tracking the data down for himself, I am glad to see that you didn't.

"It's not science if it's not reproducible, and it's not reproducible if it's not thoroughly documented and completely published."

The journals "Science" and "Nature" are by far the two most respect scientific journals on the planet and any scientist from any field would give thier left testicle to have just one publication in either. They are certainly not going to risk their reputation by publishing anything that cannot be peer-reviewed because of a lack of data or methodology. Again I point to the recent "hockey stick" paper by Mann et. al. in "Science", although I do agree it's a bummer these journals have a dollar cost associated with them.

Add in the subsequent violation of the refereeing rules in a journal actually named Climage Change in order to get supporting papers published, and the smell of a politically motivated con job becomes very strong.

It's worth noting that in Mann's CV he is listed as a reviewer for the journals Science, Nature and Climage Change (plus a fistfull of other respected journals). The reason for this impressive list is simple; Mann is recognised the world over as being at the top of his field.

Now please don't take this to mean that I am using a logical fallacy (ie: arguing from a position of authority) because Mann's work has been independently confirmed many times over. What I am saying is that the politics is such that someone at the top of this particular field might as well have a large bull's eye painted on his forehead when it comes to attacks from political hacks (such as the "based on two trees thing").

"I am an engineer reasonably capable of reading words of more than two syllables. But I don't even have to be capable of understanding any of the science to be suspicious of Mann."

My own father is also a (retired) mechanical engineer who was for many years the Chief Engineer of a large company that made and modified assembly line machines for auto-companies. We had many debates over climate change, his misunderstandings were mainly due to the fact that engineering does not involve a lot in the way of statistical analysis. If it was difficult to convince my own father then I don't really expect my posts to change anyone's mind here on slashdot.

Coincidently RC has a recent article by a guest writer from the American Institute of Physics on this theme.

By all means be suspisiuos, after all that is what a skeptic does. What a skeptic doesn't do however is dismiss scientific arguments on the basis of political conspiracy theories. I put it to you again that your are (unwittingly) letting someone else's politics intefere with your science and that much of what is said on McIntyre's behalf in the blogosphere is not supported by McIntyre himself (ditto with Mann).

Satire is covered by free speech.

No, parody is covered by fair use, and that's not the same thing.

It's still based on compression (and out of Penn State, licensed to Ben and Jerry's, of course), but it's a much *faster* compression, at the frequency of the sound waves used, and it takes advantage of air's intrinsic nonlinearity at high acoustic amplitudes, rather than the much slower effects inherent in traditional refrigeration techniques.

http://www.acs.psu.edu/thermoacoustics/refrigeration/benandjerrys.htm

Try googling the words "page brin pagerank" - the first result I got was the CiteSeer entry for the PageRank article from '98. It describes the basic algorithm - and I can say from experience, that PageRank can be implemented using this and other available articles (no, I don't care to look up more - go build a search engine and find them yourself (or bootstrap with google)).

What is protected by Googles trade secrets is what they do besides PageRank (e.g. detection of link farms). And how to run a search engine that services the whole internet with nice response times.

Nitrogen fertilizer and calcium-rich deposits of limestone have little to do with one another, other than that the fertilizer goes on top of the ground and the limestone is under it.

According to the link you provided, the dead zone is caused by nitrogen fertilizers growing algal blooms to massive sizes which then collapse and decay. They produce a lot of oxygen at first, bringing in extra animal life. Then the blooms die and give off CO2 as they rot, leaving too little oxygen (hypoxia).

Most nitrogen compounds used as fertilizers also lower the pH of soil over the long term. Limestone (calcium carbonate, not simple lime) is then applied to raise the pH back towards neutral.

I'm not a chemist or an environmentalist, so I won't pretend to know what nitrogen fertilizers do for the pH in the long term around oceanic algal blooms. I do know, though, that if the problem is too much CO2 being taken in by plants which then die and release the CO2 and you then take a bunch of the initial CO2 out of that water, the blooms won't grow so large in the first place.

That is the Indian Hill C Coding Standard. It is almost mandatory to learn for certain areas of computer programming such as device driver development and applications programming. Mainly because it is the first documented coding standard that came out and was used by universities and corporations.

I've known some companies to make it a priority that all programmers used this standard when their greatest threat to survival was keeping up technologically with their competitors.

This article (pdf) has a good explanation of what I think they are aiming for. It even explains why it will be error free.

There will be effects, you can't do only one thing. "These devices would be deployed in groups of 20 or even more providing cheap electricity without harming our environment." Not quite. I remember reading an article on a study that was performed in the 1980s and reported in Scientific American. The purpose of the study was to discover the effects of putting tidal power units at the entrance of the Bay of Fundy, in Nova Scotia. This bay has enormous tides, over 40 feet difference between low and high tide levels, making it a candidate for a tidal plant power. The overall environment was definitely affected, one of the big effects was that there was a "reflection" of the tide at the Bay of Fundy that affected tides in Boston, over 400 km away. Specifically tides in Boston were stronger and somewhat later in the day. The total amount of energy on the coastline was the same, of course, but distributed somewhat differently. Also see http://www.ems.psu.edu/~elsworth/courses/cause2003/finalprojects/canutepaper.pdf Add in a rising sea level and things could get interesting in Beantown.

1. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/
2. If you have an ACM membership:
http://portal.acm.org/portal.cfm
3. If your university gives you access to engineering village:
http://www.engineeringvillage2.org/controller/servlet/Controller
IEEE transactions on software engineering
4. http://csdl2.computer.org/persagen/DLPublication.jsp?pubtype=t&acronym=ts
5. Google:
http://www.google.com/
Beyond this, its upto you to do your own research.

or CiteSeer. Man, that site is useful. Nothing like a bit of "reference surfing" from paper to paper to get a feel of an unfamiliar topic.

How would we go about replacing X-windows? It seems to be one of those API's that if you tried to replace it with something "simpler and more modern", by the time the developers added the features that everyone else wanted, we would be back to what we had already. The wikipedia entry for the X-Window System"> explains why the designers made the decisions that they made.

Just by looking at all the research papers and articles that have been published relating to X-windows: X-windows, there seems to be plenty that needs to be changed/added/optimized/enhanced.

I wonder how relevant is the paper: "Why X Is Not Our Ideal Window System" today, considering it was written just over 18 years ago.

I was going to complain to your parent post but you did it for me. I will just a little.

In computer science, "USENIX Annual Technical Conference" has much higher impact factor than, say, "FOCS". The only thing I take it to mean is that it takes 5, 6 times the time to read a paper in "FOCS" than one in "USENIX Annual Technical Conference". (c.f. http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/impact.html)

Now compare that to publications in mathematics. It appears that the citation index depends at least as much to the importance of the discovery as

1. the immediate usefulness of the subject matter, and

2. the difficulty of the subject (=> less researchers, less accessible)

3. the completeness of the study (if a work is very complete it is very difficult to improve upon)

Those images were created using a stereo camera and photogrammetry.

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/267813.html

Why do jerks like you insist on presenting things they imagine to be true as fact?

If you want to see high quality 3D reconstructions from aerial photographs, go here:

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/267813.html

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=5073723324007466679

The study really had nothing to do with video games at all. It used DDR to get people to exercise to a point of pysiological arousal to see how it, in correlation with emotional state, would affect various aspects of cognition. The abstract can be found here.

Here's some light reading for you..
TCP Extensions for Space Communications
TCP/IP Router for Space Applications

Will the big three instant messaging providers use it?

Less overhead means things like this will be easier.

The problem is if none of the popular services utilize the protocol, it will make no money.

(See: IRC & Jabber)

At which point some clever individual finds a new variety that circumvents such attacks.

Thinking a moment about it, I could envision (for instance) a peer-to-peer system that uses rateless codes along with a protocol on top of UDP, and an anonymous DHT. It wouldn't be BitTorrent anymore, but it could work like this: The one who wants files sends his IP through the anonymous DHT. Those with files transmit a nonce to that IP, and the requesting person replies (so as to prove he's giving the right IP). Then the senders transmit packets as given by a rateless erasure code encoding of the original file, and mark the packets with a fake source IP address. This works because erasure codes don't need any regular ACK-type feedback. Now add something like EigenTrust (or a robust variant of it) on top of the DHT to get rid of fake file uploads, and proof the erasure code against the case where some "senders" just pretend to have the file and send noise instead (there's a paper of how to do this, but I can't remember its title at the moment), and you're all set.

In the worst case, ISPs would implement egress filtering. That, itself, isn't a bad thing (as it prevents reflection denial-of-service attacks), and so in either case we win. And that was just a first stab; clever people could probably find some way of masquerading it as HTTPS, use secret sharing to say "but I wasn't really sharing the file, just a part of it", or whatever.

DNA is a program. It is a program that has features (and bugs) that vary in different regions. These features cluster together, and those larger clusters we call "race".

Is there a gene for intelligence? I don't know. But it's beyond ludicrous to suggest that a gene for intelligence has anything to do with the genes for skin color. Any attempt to justify your brand of racism through genetics has fallen flat on its face.

New studies show there is more genetic diversity between humans in Africa:

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1288178
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2005/03/050310103042.htm
http://www.science.psu.edu/alert/Tishkoff1-1999.htm

It might be easier to find a genius among very different subjects, than finding one in a group where everybody is similar.

Hawking is a genius

...but some more info here as well as a (ugh) [a href="http://wang.ist.psu.edu/imagination/imagination.ppt">powerpoint and a user study with some samples.

...but some more info here as well as a (ugh) [a href="http://wang.ist.psu.edu/imagination/imagination.ppt">powerpoint and a user study with some samples.

Alternative URL: http://wang.ist.psu.edu/docs/projects/imagination.html

eLion still looks like its from 1994! :P

Although, if they went and screwed with anything there and lost some transcripts or student schedules, Old Main would burn.

More like 100 billion DM. I don't really remember the exchange rates but I think it's about 50 billion EUR.

Something EXTREME? Like hanging certain of the lobbyist, corrupt case judges, and placing bounties on the wretched of the CEO's who've taking uncouth advantage of the broken patent system.

What we need is to change the system (by hook or crook to get things jumpstarted) by nullifying dubious patents, plunging the purported value into chaos.

Also, change the system by saying SIMULTANEOUS/PLURAL, MULTI-PARTY INVENTION IS PERMITTED. Let the product success in the market be determined by actual consumer purchases, not purported road maps of envisioned market cap and market penetration.

The US patent system is WHOLLY corrupted by big interests and wholly undeserving of an existence or right to issue rights to a patent based on tweaked mods. As mentioned before, most awarded patents are just work-around to defeat (by need or by greed) an existing patent.

So, i believe that it should be OK for someone to invent something and then if not wealthy enough to take it to market, still be allowed patent protection. This forces others to become inventive, ingenious, or the like. If their product truly IS deserving of a patent, the market will validate it. Superior products should survive on their WORTHINESS in the EYES of PURCHASERS, not by sheer dint of a patent number and certificate.

Just look at the Blackboard vs Desire2Learn case. A decent CRM, Google or Slashdot engine, an easy-to-use front end of a relational or object database, and some data protocols and good old-fashioned teacher-inspired/utilized grading systems and multi-industry scheduling and process management (BOMS - such as Agile come to mind....as do things like MINTO, etc...)

http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/570552.html

http://www.deskeng.com/articles/aaadje.htm

Treat scheduled classes as products with a life cycle, value, as having parts (students, faculty, staff, etc...) and propagate it among users local and remote, and you INSTANTLY can kick off the patent table all sorts of products. Even without pursuing one's own patent, the mere assemblage and tweaking of products could be the perfect end-run around products UNWORTHY of a patent. Just charge for installation, service, maintenance, and upgrading.

Hmm, you mean just like my DNA is 99% identical to that of every chimp ;)

Also remember that many of your cells carry DNA of all those viruses you got exposed to without even noticing. And while we talk about infections, the immune system comes in mind, with all those crazy DNA recombinations taking place during its development. Not to mention spontaneous mutations which are not that insignificant tumorigenesis.

Nobody actually ever believed that twins are 100% identical. They just want to make up their story. Nothing new to see here ...

I wondered the same thing. I've talked to several experts and have been told that, indeed, a quantum computer can break elliptic curve encryption efficiently. This paper, for example, seems to cover adapting Shor's algorithm to breaking elliptic codes.

You're right, but that's not what this is. They say that 10-15% efficiency may be possible in a real application of this, rather than the proof of concept they created (with no mention of it's efficiency.)

"This is a proof-of-concept system that is very inefficient. But ultimately, catalytic systems with 10 to 15 percent solar conversion efficiency might be achievable," said Thomas E. Mallouk, the DuPont Professor of Materials Chemistry and Physics. "If this could be realized, water photolysis would provide a clean source of hydrogen fuel from water and sunlight."

Quote from http://live.psu.edu/story/28853

Additionally, here's a more informative article posted by Penn State. http://live.psu.edu/story/28853

• Memory leaks
  • 333078 - XPCOM Cycle Collector. (Cycle collection has similar goals to tracing garbage collection but integrates better with reference counting. Turning on cycle collection fixed entire classes of leaks, both in Firefox and in extensions.)
  • 330128 - Calling cancel() on a timer doesn't drop reference to callback.
  • Many more: 331 bugs fixed on trunk with the "mlk" keyword.
• Code size and memory use
  • 296818 - Don't hold onto decoded image data for so long.
  • 143046 - Reduce memory use for animated GIFs by storing frames other than the first at the original 8 bits.
  • Take a string constructor out of line. (From 345517.) (1% code size win.)
  • 332174 - Drop SOAP support. (2% code size win.)
  • 313309 - Provide table-driven QI mechanism.
  • 407459 - [Windows] Switch from default MSVC malloc to jemalloc for better memory allocation speed and lower fragmentation.
  • Many more: 100 bugs fixed on trunk with the "footprint" keyword.

This is actually a very important step towards what you want. About two-thirds of the TLDs have authoritative servers which are reachable over IPv6. There's a complete list at my blog - http://www.personal.psu.edu/dvm105/blogs/ipv6/2008/01/ipv6-dns.html

So you can query the root and .com DNS servers using IPv6. If you want Google to be reachable over IPv6, go talk to Google. Everything higher in the tree is IPv6-enabled now. And Google has an IPv6 allocation from ARIN - they got a /32 2005 - http://ws.arin.net/whois/?queryinput=!%20NET6-2001-4860-1

I agree that there isn't much content on the IPv6 internet now. So if you want it, yell at the content providers.

or us to exist using evolutionary theory had to be done in the right order,

not really, experiments with pseudomonas bacteria had shown that these bacteria like others, can and do evolve enzymes to metabolize newly introduced chemicals, most importantly each bacterium evolved new enzymes in different ways. none were alike, none were done in "the right order" in a sense. we later sequenced the gene(s) encoding for these enzymes and showed what set of mutations lead to the formation of these genes. all of them simple steps that occur from time to time in bacterial genomes from deletions to recombination to point mutations and duplications.

that were built upon each other with dependent parts of the microscopic human body all working towards the end goal of a single living cell which don't exactly live well outside the body today.

that's very incoherent but it seems like you're trying to imply that the human body couldn't have evolved from ancestors that lived in a very different environment. bacteria [similar to archea] => eucaryotes => multicellular => evolution of hoc genes, increase in O2 in atmosphere supporting collagen synthesis increasing body size and complexity of available reactions=> vertebrates [stronger body form, some could burrow] => first land animals => [plants with roots evolve] => first mammals => [KT boundary marks mass extinction] => "primitive monkeys" => primate species split off leading to pan and homo genera=> Australopithecus => Homo erectus => two separate species in Homo, one the neanderthals, one humans => neanderthals die out ~30kya recently sequenced neanderthal DNA differs significantly from modern human DNA putting it in its own species separate from ours [fossils suggested this as well] http://www.astro.psu.edu/users/niel/scales/geohist1.ascii it's rather abbreviated although a lot more details can be found in science journals, nature in particular is a good source as is sciencedirect which actually has sections devoted specifically to human evolution, PLOS is a much better source as it is an open access journal [libraries and universities usually have nuch greater access to nature/sciencedirect]

I've yet to see a prediction by scientists of when, where, and what the next species will be, care of evolution.

the timing of species evolution depends on several factors that you would at the least need to take into account. 1) rate of mutation 2) generation time 3) environmental conditions such as predation, toxins, food availability, population size, and/or whether the populations are separated or not. in one specific case two species of wasp like insects were found to have been reproductively isolated because of symbiotic bacteria which occured like this: species A had a certain bacteria that kills the gametes of species B and vice versa, attempts at interbreeding would result in the gametes being destroyed before fertilization. when these bacteria were artificially killed, the two could again interbreed. in another instance, a single gene is responsible for shell shape of certain mollusks which prevents the two groups from interbreeding. chromosomes line up and share/exchange/recombine genetic material in what is called chromosomal crossover. if chromosomes can not pair it can result in sterility. chromosome suplication can cause speciation as was likely the case with human chromosome 2. humans have 46 chromosomes, primates have 48, two primate chromosomes fused to form chromosome 2 [so sayeth the human genome project] in any case, any prediction would need to be done knowing the conditions in which it is to occur. much like I wouldn't ask you to figure out precisely where and when an arrow fired from some random bow would hit the ground without knowing the relative gravity, shape/mass of the arrow, density of air it is flying through, air cur

Another company seems to have developed speech recognition engines for embedded devices in languages other than english. Speech recognition has a potentially huge user base(in tens or hundreds of millions atleast) if they can crack the problem for native indian and chinese languages.

There is a lot of scope for the sister technology(speech synthesis) too ,if it can be implemented with reasonable success in native languages.Ideally ,this technology could act like a google translate for voice.It could break the language barrier at one stroke.unfortunately ,speech synthesis seems to be much more nascent.

actually tetris is np-hard

Relational databases were the perfect solution for the data processing environments of the 60's through the end of the century, but the computational landscape has changed significantly in three ways: scale, dirty data, and distribution.

To support ACID semantics, relational databases require convergence of control for transactional domains. While this can be distributed, the sacrifices necessary to make it happen typically reduce your relational performance beyond what is acceptable. To handle the scale of data that Amazon and Google process in real time every moment of every day, you need to work independently across dozens or hundreds of machines. Each one can't block its processing in a mother-may-I request to lock objects or commit a transaction. To be able to process every comment on any particular item in Amazon's database in time to spit out a web page in 300ms, you need to leave the transactions behind.

Especially for Google, the data does not lend itself well to indexing. They're sucking down their data from all corners of the Earth (Earth is processed in another system...) and trying to meaningful analysis on this grungy data. It's much easier to have local parsing and exception handling rather than trying to stuff everything into the same rigid schema. Most post-relational systems have soft notions of schema; it's more in the realm of metadata giving hints about how you might want to look at the data rather than a guarantee about what form the data will have, and the code adapts to dirty data as it comes through the pipe.

Related to the first point, connectivity is now so cheap that it's a requirement to make these systems distributed. You can't have all your data sitting in one data center; all it takes is one mouth-breather with a backhoe to turn off your company. So you replicate the data to multiple centers. Of course, you want to send updates to all those data centers, which brings us to the first point that distributed transactions are a barrier to scalability. But most fundamental to the whole discussion is the CAP theorem: you can have Consistency, Availability, or survive network Partitions. Pick two. Post-relational systems choose Availability and Partition survival over guaranteed consistency of their data. This allows them to scale tremendously and be very, very resilient to interruptions in the underlying communications systems.

For a very interesting read, I recommend reading Werner Vogels's excellent paper on the theory and practice of Amazon's Dynamo back-end.

If you work at a cubicle farm or live in a dormitory where there are a number of women working or living together for a long time, you may want to ask the women to compare the dates of there periods. The results may surprise you. More information here and here.

I think to be a decent engineer you should know at least one tool/language in each relavent category. It may or may not be the same one you end up using but at least you will know the basic concepts.

C++ fills the niche of where you still want tight control but some OOP capabilities would be usefull.

As an academic researcher funded by the NSF and DARPA, among other sources, I'd simply point out that registering a copy of a published paper isn't a particularly onerous burden. NSF requires multiple-page yearly reports; DARPA requires the same on a quarterly basis. The NSF reports already require listing the bibliographic information for every paper published as a result of the research. It's actually very much in a researcher's interest to track these things carefully anyway---it's one way to show that you're doing what you promised with the grant and that your work is having an impact. While I don't publish in PubMed-related areas, I and many others I know in computer science already take care to upload new papers to indexes like CiteSeer. It benefits everyone---including the authors---to have your work more readily available and easy to find via major databases like PubMed.

This change is a good thing.

(a) Violano-virtuoso: Video link Considering it was made almost 100 years ago, isn't bad! This one used discs to rub against the strings to produce the sound. The Toyota robot uses the back and forth motion of a bow which is definitely more complex.

(b) The violobot: Pic and Text link Video Link Sucks!

(c) An attempt at Penn State from 10 years ago in a research project Link. Made mostly noise. Probably abandoned.

From the PSU Press Release:

"This process produces 288 percent more energy in hydrogen than the electrical energy that is added to the process," says Logan.

That illustrates just how big the jump in efficiency is here. These bacteria are amazing little energy multipliers. It's quite astonishing!

In commercial food production, none of this is new. Here's a first course in food chemistry online. Read Sources of Flavor Volatiles in Food (PowerPoint).

Some of the advanced technology used in food production plants is filtering down to the chef level. The commercial guys have to produce products that are storeable, transportable, and repeatable, so they have a tougher job. If you don't have to do that but have access to commercial technology, a whole range of interesting options open up. One of the newer ideas of interest is cryogenic grinding, where foods are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures before grinding. This reduces loss of volatile components (which carry most of the flavor) during grinding. Works well for nutmeg, and is being tried for other spices.

In commercial food production, none of this is new. Here's a first course in food chemistry online. Read Sources of Flavor Volatiles in Food (PowerPoint).

Some of the advanced technology used in food production plants is filtering down to the chef level. The commercial guys have to produce products that are storeable, transportable, and repeatable, so they have a tougher job. If you don't have to do that but have access to commercial technology, a whole range of interesting options open up. One of the newer ideas of interest is cryogenic grinding, where foods are cooled to liquid nitrogen temperatures before grinding. This reduces loss of volatile components (which carry most of the flavor) during grinding. Works well for nutmeg, and is being tried for other spices.

The way water is usually treated and dealt with by most urban societies is to not treat it like a mineral (aka gold or even steel), but to treat it as a flushing mechanism. In other words, the aquatic structures of most urban environments are designed to flush toxic wastes and other pollutants (primarily organic compounds of various varieties) into a place where it will eventually be dealt with.... that usually being the oceans of the world.

But that doesn't deal with it, all it does is pass it on to someone, or something, else to deal with. It may sound like something dirty that no one wants to put up with but prior to piping and the massive sewage created by it, people used to collect human waste and take it to farms to fertilize the crops. Unfortunately this allows pathogens to enter the food chain, but by composting it pathogens can be killed. I think this is one area where organics goes wrong. While organics encourages the use of manure from other animals such as chickens, cows, and pigs, it does not allow the use of humanure. Basically organics takes humans out of the loop and creates a deadend. Ask good gardeners and farmers what many plants like and they'll tell you nitrogen, guess what? Human urine has a lot of nitrogen. In some circles, such as with some Permaculturists, people recommend mixing urine with water, something like 1 to 10 parts, to water crops. Diluted like this there's little smell. Then with things like living machines sewage can be treated producing no odor while producing fertilizer. Living machines, patented, are being investigated by a number of universities and businesses. Oberlin College has created a living machine that is capable of treating all the waste water created by the Lewis Center at Oberlin. There's no reason a living machine can't be expanded. The end result being clean water and nutrient rich fertilizer. Ah, I see you bring up sewage later.

The technology also exists to have a magnitude order of improvement or better with the efficiency of water usage for agricultural purposes. Living in a desert area, I've seen some amazing low water consumption methods that can be applied to gardens and even commercial food production facilities.

Drip irrigation and soaker hoses are good, as is only watering in the morning. Watering then allows the soil to soak up some water where it can then reach plant roots before the sun and heat can evaporate the water. I use a soaker hose in my garden in the morning. This is what farmers in Israel have been doing, however they are now draining more and more water from the Jordan River. Water is the one thing Queen Rania has said Jordan will go to war over. However Jordan is also diverting water. Because so much of the river is being diverted the Dead Sea is drying up much as the Soviets caused the Aral Sea to die.

And otherwise the climate of Texas is pretty reasonable for human habitation, even though I would have to agree that western Texas in the summer is something you want to avoid unless you have some serious air conditioning available.

Ah but western Texas is great for wind farms. Just three wind farms in western Texas creates 116 megawatts of electricity.

I certainly can walk about 15 miles from my house where I'm typing this message, and enter not only what is designated as an official federal wilderness area, but also risk getting attacked by rattle snakes and cougars.

In Florida where I used to live I

Moreover, suitability is all about what you're presenting. Suppose the reviewer had asked a mathematician to do a comparison of these three presentation packages on the one hand with LaTeX/PDF on the other, for the purposes of giving a mathematical talk. I can tell you from experience that Powerpoint is a joke for this purpose. (I'm not a mathematician but I do include a lot of equations in my slides. LaTeX/PDF rocks.)