Maybe ADSL can do better than 64 kbit, but MY phone company won't even provide that.
Numbers quoted are that I have to live within 18,000 feet wire distance from the exchange. (I live 40,000 feet crow flight)
So I'm stuck with satellite. It's nominally 500Kbits down, 128kbits up. Actual is about 80% of that. I just used jigdo to download the debian DVD. That took several days. (I figure on about a GB/day when things are good.)
I thought that the whole principle of cell broadcasting was that as the demand grew, the cells shrank. So if the demand grows by a factor of 10, we put in a huge raft of low power cell stations.
It MAY mean that in cities with large buildings we will need to come up with more frequencies to have enough so that cells that are adjaacent vertically can be different from all of their horizontal neighbors.
In theory a flat cell plane can be done with 3 frequencies so that no two adjacent cells use the same frequency. (In this discussion a given frequency is broken into multiple channels.)
If cells can be packed vertically too, then at first look it would take 9 to do the same. However, I suspect that in conditions like this, you want to have more than one different cell between reuse of the same freq. For the flat plane I think this can be done with 7. The 3D version is beyond me right now, but takes at least 21.
Add to that: There may be merit in have a mix of large cells and small cells. Large cells are used by people on the move, small cells for people who have settled into a building. Large cells would be flat so could be handled with another 3 freqs.
In winter, the roof is covered with snow although if the shingles are slick enough it will act like my steel roof and there will be periodic 'shwoooshh.. WHUMP' when the snow gets to 2-3 inches.
But winter is also when the sun is low on the horizon, days are short.
Seems to me that it would make more sense to put up southerly solar siding in snow country.
It also occurs to me: All solar cells I've seen have a fairly low albedo. Seems to me that it should be possible to make a combined unit that grabs the 10% it can to shove electrons around, and uses the rest to heat water.
Like most tools with combined functions, it won't do either one as well as a dedicated tool, a unit that had only 8% electrical efficiency and 40% thermal efficiency may be a better win than two units at 10 adn 60%.
If the goal is to make your power meter run backward then roof mount makes sense -- but in our climate the peak demand on the system is in winter.
In some ways I hope that utility companies are forced to buy surplus power from anyone who makes it, but we also need some sanity as to when it is produced.
As a small tree farmer marketing locally has always been a problem.
In 2008 I advertised for 5 weeks in the three closest weeklies. I received 1 phone call. $300 per lead.
In 2009 I kept a bunch of ads running on two Kijiji sites. I paid the $13/week to keep one ad as a top ad.
Net result 4-6 calls per week generating $20,000 in sales for the season.
The general model of dead tree advertising is also dead. The ad has to be targeted. There is no point in advertising trees on the sports page. Google adwords makes sense.
With the internet advertising and news will be separate. If you want a car, you go to a car site. If you want a washing machine, you go to an appliance site.
There *may* be a demand for advertising for marketing -- building brand awareness, building image. There may also be a demand for advertising for impulse buying.
But I think the conventional role of full page spread ads in the newspaper is going fast.
Newspapers have never been the timeliest info delivery system since the invention of radio.
THAT said, the electronic media have a dismal reputation for depth.
Were I the owner of a newspaper, I would try for substance over flash. Take the stuff that was news last week, last month, last year. Do a followup. Figure out it's impact. Analyze the causes.
Many of these articles would have a useful lifespan far longer than the day or two that present "news" does. That amortizes the journalists' salaries over more time.
To make money:
* You sell ads that appear beside your articles. * An article appears only as an abstract for non-subscribers initially. A tag line on it says when it will become free access. * Subscriptions fees allow the following:
1. An ad free version. 2. Permanent links. (You can search for an article at any time, but the permanent link allows you to cite the article in a report or paper.) 3. Immediate access to articles as soon as they are published. "Hey did you read that article in the Tattler on nanofiber fabrication? Oh, that's right, you're not a subscriber. Look for it two weeks. Worth your time. Meanwhile here's a tip: Don't buy Almalgamated Nano." 4. Customizable mashups -- In the daily list of headlines, you tag them as "Important, Interesting, Significant, Yawnable" etc. When their system learns your preferences, the important stuff is at the top.
At the international level there may be only a dozen articles a day. But they may run several thousand words.
As an example: Some years ago Yugoslavia was in the news with all kinds of beastial things being done by the Slavs. The news was fairly one sided. I caught an episode of Ideas on CBC that went into the history of the region. I realized that it wasn't quite as simple as I thought.
The TV covers news of Katrina. The newspaper should cover what changes have been made to prevent the next one.
The TV covers the latest shuttle launch for the last refurbishment mission to the hubble. The newspaper gives the history of the Hubble, why it was designed to be human serviceable, where it fits into the big picture, how much that cost us, and what changes in astronomy have come about because of it.
The average American drives 10,000 miles per year.
Let's assume that the average electric car will get the equivalent of 50 miles per gallon.
That's 400 gallons of gas per year.
Gasoline is roughly 120 MJ/gallon A MJ is about 33 kW hr. So that's 2640 KwHr.
With charging inefficiencies call it 3000 KwHr/year.
That would close to double the electrical demand. Gonna be some warm wires somewhere.
The one advantage: Most of the extra load is at night. In the climates where electric is appreciated, air conditioning is also a big load.
(In Canada an awful lot of the engine's waste heat is used to heat an badly insulated box with lots of windows in a fast moving cold wind. )
I suspect that large neighbourhoods exceed that 10,000 mi/yr figure -- bedroom communities, long commutes. Which means the load won't be evenly distributed.
If eeStor's capacitor technology works then you can have a smart charger that keeps the household battery full, and easily charge the car at whatever rates the wiring will allow.
While I think that a factor of 2 is hard, it's not impossible.
Conventional laminar flow airfoils get a Coefficient of Drag under 0.1 -- and they are designed to produce lift too.
* Most cars have to abrupt a back end for good streamlining, and the front end is too bumpy. * Most cars have lots of junk protruding underneath. * Most cars do little about wheel well drag. * All north american cars are wider than they need to be.
Consider: A Cessna 150 gets 15 mpg flying at 120 mph. Given that (to first approximation) drag goes up with the cube of velocity, this type of streamlining should get 120 mpg at highway speed.
Methanol is a LOT easier than hydrogen to store, pipe, and transfer. Methanol can use most of the present gasoline infra-structure. I suspect that most existing IC engines could use it with suitable modification, although there may be corrosion issues.
Like hydrogen it needs to be made.
Currently usually made from natural gas but it can be made from coal. It also can be extracted from the gas stream that produces biochar.
For Sale: NextStation slabs.
on
A Geek Funeral
·
· Score: 1
For those of you who want tasteful black for your geek funeral urn, I have several NextStation slabs that I got some years ago from the CIA. (No disk, sorry.)
Even if the laws are on the books, I can see difficulties enforcing them.
I would expect this crowd to come up with technonerd solutions to this problem. I can see some possible tech solutions.
1. A video camera on a 5 minute loop that runs whenever the engine is on. It has a view of both the driver and the dashboard. In the event of an accident, the police routinely dump the vid. This is part of the evidence used to determine fault.
2. Program the cell tower system to take longer to hand off to the next tower. If normal routine was to have a 10-15 second drop out when moving from tower to tower cell phone use from a rapidly moving vehicle would be *really* annoying. You might still get people doing really short calls, but long yaks would be rare. Does nothing for texting.
3. Since most phones have GPS, it should be easy for the cell companies to monitor the speed of the phone. If transit drivers and cabbies have cell phones, in principle you can figure out who is likely to be a passenger. (Your location is the same as a 'designated driver')
4. If your phone is in a moving vehicle and you are not a passenger, then your phone goes to voice mail with a custom message, "Your recipient is driving right now. He will be notified of this message when he stops." As soon as the GPS indicates that you have not moved for a time of 2-3 light changes, it gives a distinctive ring. In principle the phone can predownload the messages. (Not sure why they don't do this.)
5. There is a message you can send to the cell company that says, "I'm a passenger in a moving vehicle, and can give full attention to my cell phone" This state continues until speed indicates clearly that the person is no longer in a vehicle or when the user sends a "I'm no longer in a vehicle" message. Using this mode under false pretenses results in you having to surrender either your cell phone or your drivers license.
It's not a 20 minute lunch. As an elementary school, lunch hours are long enough for kids to walk home for lunch, and walk back after if they wish.
Mom came by to pick up the kid for some none-school function. There was not a time conflict for the mom, Mom was solely incensed that the teacher had impinged on her daughter's freedom.
You are correct if you limit it to the way the vast majority of standardized tests are written. If, however they are written like the GRE tests they are more valid.
The Graduate Record Exam tests are set to cover the entirety of the subject matter no matter whose program it is. So, for example the GRE in physics has bunches of questions on Astrophysics, Solid state, quantum, mechanics, E&M, acoustics, etc.
NO undergraduate takes everything and does well at it. The expectation is that you will answer something like 30 - 40% of the questions. (There is a small penalty for just guessing) Because it tries to cover everything in depth, there is little to do to teach toward the test.
Compare that to the alberta high school physics test which for the last 20 years has had NO question involving angular momentum. No questions about cosmology. No questions about scale effects. No questions about... It ONLY tests material that is on the standard syllabus. Yes, this makes it easy to teach to the test. And boring as hell.
Were I setting the exam for high school physics: I would want to put in: * Chunks about physics in the news: The collider at CERN, the last refurbishment of Hubble, the fuss about sprites and such in the ionosphere. * Cover ALL topics that are touched on in first year university physics courses, although in many cases simple examples. * Cover lots of stuff on the interaction of physics and other sciences. (E.g. Calculate the momentum of the North American Plate) * Lots of Back of the Envelope stuff.
In general a standarized test does well if it is scoped FAR beyond the expectation of a specific class.
I remember a contest, the "Putnum Award" I think it was for math. Anyone who wanted to take it showed up an hour early for class that day. In a school of 600 about 100 kids took it.
The test has 150 possible points broken down as questions of varying difficulty and varying point values. The average one year was 12 points. Getting 20 points put you in the top 10. I never won. My best score was 27. Dave Browne beat me by about 10 points every year.
THAT is the way to write standardized tests. (Ok, if everyone has to take them, maybe make them a little bit easier.)
My mom told stories of her youth in the early 1900's. Attendance went way down in May as kids helped plant. And many kids didn't start school in fall until mid-October.
From her tales, summer was no walk in the park. Her father grew hops: Each vine had to be visited a couple times during the sumemr to keep it climbing the twine. While the aisles were cultivated, the space between each pair of plants was done with a hoe. Ditches had to be opened for irrigation.
During the harvest season endless cords of wood had to be cut and chucked into the kiln.
Some of our Indian bands have enough people who are returning to their roots that the classrooms are largely empty from the time the lakes thaw to the time they freeze again, as the people move from town to the land. Some kids will disappear for another month or so mid winter if their family runs a trapline.
A local native school says they don't know what their enrollment will be until after Pow Wow season -- Early October.
A college system that offers eitehr 2 year certification, or acts as the first two years undergrad for the university.
An institute of technology system that teaches traditional trades -- usually as intense 12 week blocks separated by 6 months of practical work experience. This system also offers programs such as "Dental hygenist" "Paralegal assistant"
A raft of special purpose trade schools -- hair cutting, office work, and so on.
The entrance requirements vary witht he program. E.g. NAIT's carpentry program requires only a grade 9 education. Licensed Surveyor requires grade 12.
The system works well enough that people finish an undergrad degree at university -- then go to trade school to get a job to pay back their loans.
Addressing the original topic:
It's the use of that time, not the time itself. Way too many courses are watered down. Math text books that expect you to know how to solve quadratic equations after doing 3 problems. Lit courses that use Marvel Comic books (Comic books aren't a bad way to work with older kids who are reading far below their grade level however.) Science labs that prohibit the use of any dangerous chemical or the use of open flame.
Most kids regard school as a waste of time -- because it is. They aren't challenged. There is no demand for excellence.
This is a failure of leadership in our education system.
My sister-in-law is an elementary teacher.
Recently she kept a student who was mis-behaving after class at lunch time for 5 minutes to talk with her about her behaviour. Turned out that Mom was picking her up that day. Mom storms in gets the kid, storms out. Later makes a complaint to the principal that the school had no right to keep her child from lunch.
Libby had to phone the parent and apologise. The principal would not back her up.
"No child left behind" translates into "No child gets ahead" While not fashionable not all kids are created equal.
As a teacher most of my career, I taught the middle third of the class. The top third would get it anyway. The bottom third would get some of it with handholding. The middle third could learn from well prepared lessons and practice. But if you accept mediocrity as the standard, then the level of that middle third keeps dropping.
And on the other hand, if you put a few average kids in a class full of Brights, the average kids rise to the expectations.
However this can't be scaled up to a universal solution.
My best stab at an unfair solution: Teach the top quarter separately. Teach the next 60% separately. Teach the bottom 15% separately. Give them teachers in the ratios 1:2:1
Recognize that hard work can compensate for lack of ability. So at any level, offer the best the chance to move up. Suggest that the worst would be better served a level down.
Additional archival solutions that approach Deep Time:
1. Fired porcelain. Can get wet. Less shock resistant than paper. Bulky.
2. Mineral pigment paint on canvas. Production time for animations is excessive.
3. Carved stone. Even more difficult to move than #1. Weathering issues if left outside too long.
#1 and #3 have the advantage that they cannot be used by barbarian hordes as butt wipe or fire starter.
One of the issues for Deep Time archiving is unwitting steganography. The future viewer needs to recognize that there is data there. As data storage gets more compact, it's harder to recognize that there is anything there. Given a pile of CD's which ones are coasters. which are data?
The coding needs to done in a way that is human recognizeable. E.g.Text expressed as morse code is not as recognizeable as text in words. A stream of bits that is a jpeg is not as recognizable as a bit map. And neither is as recognizable as a print. For archiving our data storage needs human codecs If not ink on paper then something that looks like ink on paper. If you want machine codecs, then you have to figure out how to make a machine that survives deep time. The closest common item we have right now is a solid state wrist watch -- which is still pretty shallow.
Ultimate data storage needs to be fractal in nature, with the steps between levels small enough that at each level there are hints that there is another level.
For example: Suppose you had a rectangle of phase change material whose reflectivity was different with the two phase changes:
The top level masks off the title of the work. So those area are not used for data. Net effect big block letters. The next level down has data blocks eliminated so that you see an abstract of the work -- the dust cover summary. The next level down has the index to the work.
If done as text, typical ink covers 5-10% of the page. So at each level you lose 10% of the data capacity. A seven level hierarchical data storage still has about 50% of the full capacity.
If you are going to use the current pivot mechanism, I think 5 or 6 is all you can manage without them hitting each other.
However there may be problems with one head reading what another head wrote. I know this was a problem with floppy drives due to differences in head alignment.
Would this be a problem now?
For that matter, can a present head be used so that you can read platter 3 while writing to platter 1? It would mean more wires running to the head fork.
I see this as a huge complication with small benefit. After all, for reading, mirroring is effectively the same thing as having a dual head.
In general, throwing multiple spindles combined with a smart controller is probably less expensive than solving the control issues with multiple heads.
I agree. Right now we are moving to two different interfaces -- touch for handheld devices, and mouse/keyboard for desktop devices. As previous posters have pointed out, this can be irritating when moving from one to another.
As to the number of posters who comment that having your arm in front of you for hours on end is unworkable:
With the possible exception of artists and possibly gamers, most computer users use a mouse intermittently. It's a case of click once to position a cursor, then type for several minutes. Click once. Type for a while. Click once, read for a while.
The two technologies complement each other.
Other places I can see this having an advantage:
1. Inventory applications. I would love to have a touch screen connected by blue tooth to my camera for doing inventory at my tree farm.
2. Harsh environments. In addition to the industrial process control, I can see a big advantage to a solid slab for field biologists, anyone on a boat.
3. Collaboration. Being able to touch something over someone's shoulder in a team or teaching situation has lots of merit.
4. Markup/editing. As a former teacher I would love to have a software/hardware combination that was as easy to use as a red pencil for correcting stuff.
5. Math. ALL math right now is a real pain to enter from a keyboard. The closest to a reasonable keyboard interface I've found was in FrameMaker's equation editor. LaTeX can come close for speed, but what you type is very distant from what you get. Having a touch screen with handwriting recognition for math would be a huge win.
Sure these are specialized applications. But it is the OS's chore to present this to the developers. Otherwise everyone has to re-invent the wheel, and every GUI is different..
1. We need to bias the nature of corporate america to put a much larger emphasis on long term plans, and less on the next quarterly return.
1a. Pay executives on the basis of a livable wage NOW, and 20 years dividends off a block of stock. E.g. For this year you get $100,000 + dividends on a block of 10,000 shares for the next 20 years. Next year you get 100,000 + your first dividend cheque + dividends on another block of stock. When you retire in 20 years, you get dividends off a 200,000 shares. The next year, dividends off of 190,000 shares.
1b. Anyone who owns more than N% of a company's stock can only get rid of X% of it per year. This means that the major players in the stock market (insurance companies, pension funds) will have to consider their position carefully as they can't change it quickly.
2. Changes to the tax law.
2a. It must become a lot simpler. Right now too many of the sharpest brains work to game the tax system.
2b. Lots of changes to encourage long term research and risk taking. E.g. being able to carry over losses in a division indefinately to write off against eventual earnings.
3. Changes to liability law.
3a. Known and obvious hazards should be exempt. E.g. If you slip and fall on my icy step, when the ice is there for you to see, you acted imprudently.
3b. There should be a mechanism for declaring hazards, and the probabilities. E.g. A ski hill should be able to post a sign detailing the types of hazards on the hill, stating the number of fatalities, major and minor injuries per 100,000 skier days, and be done with it.
3c. Injuries while attempting a crime should have no liability. E.g. The burglar who breaks his leg jumping your fence and landing on a pile of loose bricks should not be able to sue you.
Much of the campus does IT at the departmental level. The central IT department is mostly concerned over networks, firewalls, site licensed software, and assorted campus services. (DNS, Mail, backups.) Last time I looked they were a sunsite, and had mirrors of several linux distributions.
The Chem department has two labs that during teh day are windows labs, and at night turn into a beowulf cluster doing computational quantum chemistry. It's called werewolf.
Lot of linux labs over in engineering.
Math department had linux, windows, SGI, HPUX, Solaris, Next on desktops. We used openbsd for firewall. Freebsd for servers.
Space phyics had AIX, Nexts, Stardent Titan (SysV) and the world's only myrias MP3.
We've been within 50 years (or less) of peak oil for years. And we keep discovering more oil/gas.
(I replaced my furnace with a high efficiency one -- Gas was $12/GJ and seemed unlikely to come down. Now they are talking $1/GJ. Sigh.)
Uranium is harder to find than oil. During WWII Canada had a U mine at Uranium City on Lake Athabasca. They were making it work with 0.25% U in the ore. After the war, it produced U for the Candu reactors. In the 70's they closed U City. The Key Lake mine was working with ore that ran 30% U. But it took 30 years to find that deposit.
Since then several other large deposits have been found.
Even if the 50 year figure is true, there is energy in thorium too.
EEStor's device reportedly stores 50 kWhr in a 300 lb block. The electrolyte is barium titanate -- neither barium nor titanium are rare or expensive. They currently claim price level around 3K in bulk.
Now whether eestor's stuff is real or vapour ware is admittedly up in the air. If not eestor, then someone else will develop this .
50 kWhr makes it reasonable to put one in every house. That's a couple day's back up power for the house -- more if you are frugal. It makes alternative power feasible.
A trailer with such a unit replaces or augments generators at the lake cottage.
With smart electrical meters it makes it possible to use them as load leveling devices so that power plants can run at more uniform rates.
Hey, I'm a tree hugger. (tree farmer, actually) I'd love to have one of those windmills on my back 40. Not enough wind.
Or small scale hydro? Would mean I'd have a lake -- storage for irrigation water, ducks, wetlands. Oh. I don't have a year round stream.
Solar? Cool. But at our latitude we have a month where the sun only gets 13 degrees above the horizon, and that diluted sunlight is only present for a few hours.
Stone, and pots. Pots can last thousands and thousands of years.
(The prevailing remnant of our society 10,000 years from now will be billions of ceramic toilet bowls.)
How hard is it to take the reactor waste turn it into insoluble salts, sulphides or oxides, and mix it with glass, cast it into bricks, and make pyramids out of it in the desert?
Aviation and the global atmosphere: a special report of IPCC Working Groups...
By Joyce E. Penner
Comments that NOx released in the troposphere (where the bulk of weather occurs) is a few weeks. Releases in the lower stratosphere has residence times on the order of months to years. If NOx is significant as an ozone depleter, the source would be primarily jets and natural sources that inject gas into the stratosphere (some wildfires, volcanoes)
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe ADSL can do better than 64 kbit, but MY phone company won't even provide that.
Numbers quoted are that I have to live within 18,000 feet wire distance from the exchange. (I live 40,000 feet crow flight)
So I'm stuck with satellite. It's nominally 500Kbits down, 128kbits up. Actual is about 80% of that. I just used jigdo to download the debian DVD. That took several days. (I figure on about a GB/day when things are good.)
I thought that the whole principle of cell broadcasting was that as the demand grew, the cells shrank. So if the demand grows by a factor of 10, we put in a huge raft of low power cell stations.
It MAY mean that in cities with large buildings we will need to come up with more frequencies to have enough so that cells that are adjaacent vertically can be different from all of their horizontal neighbors.
In theory a flat cell plane can be done with 3 frequencies so that no two adjacent cells use the same frequency. (In this discussion a given frequency is broken into multiple channels.)
If cells can be packed vertically too, then at first look it would take 9 to do the same. However, I suspect that in conditions like this, you want to have more than one different cell between reuse of the same freq. For the flat plane I think this can be done with 7. The 3D version is beyond me right now, but takes at least 21.
Add to that: There may be merit in have a mix of large cells and small cells. Large cells are used by people on the move, small cells for people who have settled into a building. Large cells would be flat so could be handled with another 3 freqs.
Rethink snow country:
In winter, the roof is covered with snow although if the shingles are slick enough it will act like my steel roof and there will be periodic 'shwoooshh .. WHUMP' when the snow gets to 2-3 inches.
But winter is also when the sun is low on the horizon, days are short.
Seems to me that it would make more sense to put up southerly solar siding in snow country.
It also occurs to me: All solar cells I've seen have a fairly low albedo. Seems to me that it should be possible to make a combined unit that grabs the 10% it can to shove electrons around, and uses the rest to heat water.
Like most tools with combined functions, it won't do either one as well as a dedicated tool, a unit that had only 8% electrical efficiency and 40% thermal efficiency may be a better win than two units at 10 adn 60%.
If the goal is to make your power meter run backward then roof mount makes sense -- but in our climate the peak demand on the system is in winter.
In some ways I hope that utility companies are forced to buy surplus power from anyone who makes it, but we also need some sanity as to when it is produced.
eeStor: I want my 50 kilowatt hour battery!
As a small tree farmer marketing locally has always been a problem.
In 2008 I advertised for 5 weeks in the three closest weeklies. I received 1 phone call. $300 per lead.
In 2009 I kept a bunch of ads running on two Kijiji sites. I paid the $13/week to keep one ad as a top ad.
Net result 4-6 calls per week generating $20,000 in sales for the season.
The general model of dead tree advertising is also dead. The ad has to be targeted. There is no point in advertising trees on the sports page. Google adwords makes sense.
With the internet advertising and news will be separate. If you want a car, you go to a car site. If you want a washing machine, you go to an appliance site.
There *may* be a demand for advertising for marketing -- building brand awareness, building image. There may also be a demand for advertising for impulse buying.
But I think the conventional role of full page spread ads in the newspaper is going fast.
Newspapers have never been the timeliest info delivery system since the invention of radio.
THAT said, the electronic media have a dismal reputation for depth.
Were I the owner of a newspaper, I would try for substance over flash. Take the stuff that was news last week, last month, last year. Do a followup. Figure out it's impact. Analyze the causes.
Many of these articles would have a useful lifespan far longer than the day or two that present "news" does. That amortizes the journalists' salaries over more time.
To make money:
* You sell ads that appear beside your articles.
* An article appears only as an abstract for non-subscribers initially. A tag line on it says when it will become free access.
* Subscriptions fees allow the following:
1. An ad free version.
2. Permanent links. (You can search for an article at any time, but the permanent link allows you to cite the article in a report or paper.)
3. Immediate access to articles as soon as they are published. "Hey did you read that article in the Tattler on nanofiber fabrication? Oh, that's right, you're not a subscriber. Look for it two weeks. Worth your time. Meanwhile here's a tip: Don't buy Almalgamated Nano."
4. Customizable mashups -- In the daily list of headlines, you tag them as "Important, Interesting, Significant, Yawnable" etc. When their system learns your preferences, the important stuff is at the top.
At the international level there may be only a dozen articles a day. But they may run several thousand words.
As an example: Some years ago Yugoslavia was in the news with all kinds of beastial things being done by the Slavs. The news was fairly one sided. I caught an episode of Ideas on CBC that went into the history of the region. I realized that it wasn't quite as simple as I thought.
The TV covers news of Katrina. The newspaper should cover what changes have been made to prevent the next one.
The TV covers the latest shuttle launch for the last refurbishment mission to the hubble. The newspaper gives the history of the Hubble, why it was designed to be human serviceable, where it fits into the big picture, how much that cost us, and what changes in astronomy have come about because of it.
The average American drives 10,000 miles per year.
Let's assume that the average electric car will get the equivalent of 50 miles per gallon.
That's 400 gallons of gas per year.
Gasoline is roughly 120 MJ/gallon A MJ is about 33 kW hr.
So that's 2640 KwHr.
With charging inefficiencies call it 3000 KwHr/year.
That would close to double the electrical demand. Gonna be some warm wires somewhere.
The one advantage: Most of the extra load is at night. In the climates where electric is appreciated, air conditioning is also a big load.
(In Canada an awful lot of the engine's waste heat is used to heat an badly insulated box with lots of windows in a fast moving cold wind. )
I suspect that large neighbourhoods exceed that 10,000 mi/yr figure -- bedroom communities, long commutes. Which means the load won't be evenly distributed.
If eeStor's capacitor technology works then you can have a smart charger that keeps the household battery full, and easily charge the car at whatever rates the wiring will allow.
Had this problem when I was sysadmin at a school. The color printer would go unused for months at a time, then a flurry of activity.
Made a cron job that send a simple color page that used all 4 jets and about a square inch of each color. Ran that once a week.
Honda cross section.
While I think that a factor of 2 is hard, it's not impossible.
Conventional laminar flow airfoils get a Coefficient of Drag under 0.1 -- and they are designed to produce lift too.
* Most cars have to abrupt a back end for good streamlining, and the front end is too bumpy.
* Most cars have lots of junk protruding underneath.
* Most cars do little about wheel well drag.
* All north american cars are wider than they need to be.
Consider: A Cessna 150 gets 15 mpg flying at 120 mph. Given that (to first approximation) drag goes up with the cube of velocity, this type of streamlining should get 120 mpg at highway speed.
Methanol is a LOT easier than hydrogen to store, pipe, and transfer. Methanol can use most of the present gasoline infra-structure. I suspect that most existing IC engines could use it with suitable modification, although there may be corrosion issues.
Like hydrogen it needs to be made.
Currently usually made from natural gas but it can be made from coal. It also can be extracted from the gas stream that produces biochar.
For those of you who want tasteful black for your geek funeral urn, I have several NextStation slabs that I got some years ago from the CIA. (No disk, sorry.)
Even if the laws are on the books, I can see difficulties enforcing them.
I would expect this crowd to come up with technonerd solutions to this problem. I can see some possible tech solutions.
1. A video camera on a 5 minute loop that runs whenever the engine is on. It has a view of both the driver and the dashboard. In the event of an accident, the police routinely dump the vid. This is part of the evidence used to determine fault.
2. Program the cell tower system to take longer to hand off to the next tower. If normal routine was to have a 10-15 second drop out when moving from tower to tower cell phone use from a rapidly moving vehicle would be *really* annoying. You might still get people doing really short calls, but long yaks would be rare. Does nothing for texting.
3. Since most phones have GPS, it should be easy for the cell companies to monitor the speed of the phone. If transit drivers and cabbies have cell phones, in principle you can figure out who is likely to be a passenger. (Your location is the same as a 'designated driver')
4. If your phone is in a moving vehicle and you are not a passenger, then your phone goes to voice mail with a custom message, "Your recipient is driving right now. He will be notified of this message when he stops." As soon as the GPS indicates that you have not moved for a time of 2-3 light changes, it gives a distinctive ring. In principle the phone can predownload the messages. (Not sure why they don't do this.)
5. There is a message you can send to the cell company that says, "I'm a passenger in a moving vehicle, and can give full attention to my cell phone" This state continues until speed indicates clearly that the person is no longer in a vehicle or when the user sends a "I'm no longer in a vehicle" message. Using this mode under false pretenses results in you having to surrender either your cell phone or your drivers license.
It's not a 20 minute lunch. As an elementary school, lunch hours are long enough for kids to walk home for lunch, and walk back after if they wish.
Mom came by to pick up the kid for some none-school function. There was not a time conflict for the mom, Mom was solely incensed that the teacher had impinged on her daughter's freedom.
I disagree with point 2 about standardized tests.
You are correct if you limit it to the way the vast majority of standardized tests are written. If, however they are written like the GRE tests they are more valid.
The Graduate Record Exam tests are set to cover the entirety of the subject matter no matter whose program it is. So, for example the GRE in physics has bunches of questions on Astrophysics, Solid state, quantum, mechanics, E&M, acoustics, etc.
NO undergraduate takes everything and does well at it. The expectation is that you will answer something like 30 - 40% of the questions. (There is a small penalty for just guessing) Because it tries to cover everything in depth, there is little to do to teach toward the test.
Compare that to the alberta high school physics test which for the last 20 years has had NO question involving angular momentum. No questions about cosmology. No questions about scale effects. No questions about ... It ONLY tests material that is on the standard syllabus. Yes, this makes it easy to teach to the test. And boring as hell.
Were I setting the exam for high school physics: I would want to put in:
* Chunks about physics in the news: The collider at CERN, the last refurbishment of Hubble, the fuss about sprites and such in the ionosphere.
* Cover ALL topics that are touched on in first year university physics courses, although in many cases simple examples.
* Cover lots of stuff on the interaction of physics and other sciences. (E.g. Calculate the momentum of the North American Plate)
* Lots of Back of the Envelope stuff.
In general a standarized test does well if it is scoped FAR beyond the expectation of a specific class.
I remember a contest, the "Putnum Award" I think it was for math. Anyone who wanted to take it showed up an hour early for class that day. In a school of 600 about 100 kids took it.
The test has 150 possible points broken down as questions of varying difficulty and varying point values. The average one year was 12 points. Getting 20 points put you in the top 10. I never won. My best score was 27. Dave Browne beat me by about 10 points every year.
THAT is the way to write standardized tests. (Ok, if everyone has to take them, maybe make them a little bit easier.)
My mom told stories of her youth in the early 1900's. Attendance went way down in May as kids helped plant. And many kids didn't start school in fall until mid-October.
From her tales, summer was no walk in the park. Her father grew hops: Each vine had to be visited a couple times during the sumemr to keep it climbing the twine. While the aisles were cultivated, the space between each pair of plants was done with a hoe. Ditches had to be opened for irrigation.
During the harvest season endless cords of wood had to be cut and chucked into the kiln.
Some of our Indian bands have enough people who are returning to their roots that the classrooms are largely empty from the time the lakes thaw to the time they freeze again, as the people move from town to the land. Some kids will disappear for another month or so mid winter if their family runs a trapline.
A local native school says they don't know what their enrollment will be until after Pow Wow season -- Early October.
And in Alberta it is.
We have:
A university system.
A college system that offers eitehr 2 year certification, or acts as the first two years undergrad for the university.
An institute of technology system that teaches traditional trades -- usually as intense 12 week blocks separated by 6 months of practical work experience. This system also offers programs such as "Dental hygenist" "Paralegal assistant"
A raft of special purpose trade schools -- hair cutting, office work, and so on.
The entrance requirements vary witht he program. E.g. NAIT's carpentry program requires only a grade 9 education. Licensed Surveyor requires grade 12.
The system works well enough that people finish an undergrad degree at university -- then go to trade school to get a job to pay back their loans.
Addressing the original topic:
It's the use of that time, not the time itself. Way too many courses are watered down. Math text books that expect you to know how to solve quadratic equations after doing 3 problems. Lit courses that use Marvel Comic books (Comic books aren't a bad way to work with older kids who are reading far below their grade level however.) Science labs that prohibit the use of any dangerous chemical or the use of open flame.
Most kids regard school as a waste of time -- because it is. They aren't challenged. There is no demand for excellence.
This is a failure of leadership in our education system.
My sister-in-law is an elementary teacher.
Recently she kept a student who was mis-behaving after class at lunch time for 5 minutes to talk with her about her behaviour. Turned out that Mom was picking her up that day. Mom storms in gets the kid, storms out. Later makes a complaint to the principal that the school had no right to keep her child from lunch.
Libby had to phone the parent and apologise. The principal would not back her up.
"No child left behind" translates into "No child gets ahead"
While not fashionable not all kids are created equal.
As a teacher most of my career, I taught the middle third of the class. The top third would get it anyway. The bottom third would get some of it with handholding. The middle third could learn from well prepared lessons and practice. But if you accept mediocrity as the standard, then the level of that middle third keeps dropping.
And on the other hand, if you put a few average kids in a class full of Brights, the average kids rise to the expectations.
However this can't be scaled up to a universal solution.
My best stab at an unfair solution: Teach the top quarter separately. Teach the next 60% separately. Teach the bottom 15% separately. Give them teachers in the ratios 1:2:1
Recognize that hard work can compensate for lack of ability. So at any level, offer the best the chance to move up. Suggest that the worst would be better served a level down.
Additional archival solutions that approach Deep Time:
1. Fired porcelain. Can get wet. Less shock resistant than paper. Bulky.
2. Mineral pigment paint on canvas. Production time for animations is excessive.
3. Carved stone. Even more difficult to move than #1. Weathering issues if left outside too long.
#1 and #3 have the advantage that they cannot be used by barbarian hordes as butt wipe or fire starter.
One of the issues for Deep Time archiving is unwitting steganography. The future viewer needs to recognize that there is data there. As data storage gets more compact, it's harder to recognize that there is anything there. Given a pile of CD's which ones are coasters. which are data?
The coding needs to done in a way that is human recognizeable. E.g.Text expressed as morse code is not as recognizeable as text in words. A stream of bits that is a jpeg is not as recognizable as a bit map. And neither is as recognizable as a print. For archiving our data storage needs human codecs If not ink on paper then something that looks like ink on paper. If you want machine codecs, then you have to figure out how to make a machine that survives deep time. The closest common item we have right now is a solid state wrist watch -- which is still pretty shallow.
Ultimate data storage needs to be fractal in nature, with the steps between levels small enough that at each level there are hints that there is another level.
For example: Suppose you had a rectangle of phase change material whose reflectivity was different with the two phase changes:
The top level masks off the title of the work. So those area are not used for data. Net effect big block letters. The next level down has data blocks eliminated so that you see an abstract of the work -- the dust cover summary. The next level down has the index to the work.
If done as text, typical ink covers 5-10% of the page. So at each level you lose 10% of the data capacity. A seven level hierarchical data storage still has about 50% of the full capacity.
If you are going to use the current pivot mechanism, I think 5 or 6 is all you can manage without them hitting each other.
However there may be problems with one head reading what another head wrote. I know this was a problem with floppy drives due to differences in head alignment.
Would this be a problem now?
For that matter, can a present head be used so that you can read platter 3 while writing to platter 1? It would mean more wires running to the head fork.
I see this as a huge complication with small benefit. After all, for reading, mirroring is effectively the same thing as having a dual head.
In general, throwing multiple spindles combined with a smart controller is probably less expensive than solving the control issues with multiple heads.
I agree. Right now we are moving to two different interfaces -- touch for handheld devices, and mouse/keyboard for desktop devices. As previous posters have pointed out, this can be irritating when moving from one to another.
As to the number of posters who comment that having your arm in front of you for hours on end is unworkable:
With the possible exception of artists and possibly gamers, most computer users use a mouse intermittently. It's a case of click once to position a cursor, then type for several minutes. Click once. Type for a while. Click once, read for a while.
The two technologies complement each other.
Other places I can see this having an advantage:
1. Inventory applications. I would love to have a touch screen connected by blue tooth to my camera for doing inventory at my tree farm.
2. Harsh environments. In addition to the industrial process control, I can see a big advantage to a solid slab for field biologists, anyone on a boat.
3. Collaboration. Being able to touch something over someone's shoulder in a team or teaching situation has lots of merit.
4. Markup/editing. As a former teacher I would love to have a software/hardware combination that was as easy to use as a red pencil for correcting stuff.
5. Math. ALL math right now is a real pain to enter from a keyboard. The closest to a reasonable keyboard interface I've found was in FrameMaker's equation editor. LaTeX can come close for speed, but what you type is very distant from what you get. Having a touch screen with handwriting recognition for math would be a huge win.
Sure these are specialized applications. But it is the OS's chore to present this to the developers. Otherwise everyone has to re-invent the wheel, and every GUI is different..
And to do this we need to make some changes:
1. We need to bias the nature of corporate america to put a much larger emphasis on long term plans, and less on the next quarterly return.
1a. Pay executives on the basis of a livable wage NOW, and 20 years dividends off a block of stock. E.g. For this year you get $100,000 + dividends on a block of 10,000 shares for the next 20 years. Next year you get 100,000 + your first dividend cheque + dividends on another block of stock. When you retire in 20 years, you get dividends off a 200,000 shares. The next year, dividends off of 190,000 shares.
1b. Anyone who owns more than N% of a company's stock can only get rid of X% of it per year. This means that the major players in the stock market (insurance companies, pension funds) will have to consider their position carefully as they can't change it quickly.
2. Changes to the tax law.
2a. It must become a lot simpler. Right now too many of the sharpest brains work to game the tax system.
2b. Lots of changes to encourage long term research and risk taking. E.g. being able to carry over losses in a division indefinately to write off against eventual earnings.
3. Changes to liability law.
3a. Known and obvious hazards should be exempt. E.g. If you slip and fall on my icy step, when the ice is there for you to see, you acted imprudently.
3b. There should be a mechanism for declaring hazards, and the probabilities. E.g. A ski hill should be able to post a sign detailing the types of hazards on the hill, stating the number of fatalities, major and minor injuries per 100,000 skier days, and be done with it.
3c. Injuries while attempting a crime should have no liability. E.g. The burglar who breaks his leg jumping your fence and landing on a pile of loose bricks should not be able to sue you.
Not just linux.
Much of the campus does IT at the departmental level. The central IT department is mostly concerned over networks, firewalls, site licensed software, and assorted campus services. (DNS, Mail, backups.) Last time I looked they were a sunsite, and had mirrors of several linux distributions.
The Chem department has two labs that during teh day are windows labs, and at night turn into a beowulf cluster doing computational quantum chemistry. It's called werewolf.
Lot of linux labs over in engineering.
Math department had linux, windows, SGI, HPUX, Solaris, Next on desktops. We used openbsd for firewall. Freebsd for servers.
Space phyics had AIX, Nexts, Stardent Titan (SysV) and the world's only myrias MP3.
I question the 50 year figure.
We've been within 50 years (or less) of peak oil for years. And we keep discovering more oil/gas.
(I replaced my furnace with a high efficiency one -- Gas was $12/GJ and seemed unlikely to come down. Now they are talking $1/GJ. Sigh.)
Uranium is harder to find than oil. During WWII Canada had a U mine at Uranium City on Lake Athabasca. They were making it work with 0.25% U in the ore. After the war, it produced U for the Candu reactors. In the 70's they closed U City. The Key Lake mine was working with ore that ran 30% U. But it took 30 years to find that deposit.
Since then several other large deposits have been found.
Even if the 50 year figure is true, there is energy in thorium too.
EEStor's device reportedly stores 50 kWhr in a 300 lb block. The electrolyte is barium titanate -- neither barium nor titanium are rare or expensive. They currently claim price level around 3K in bulk.
Now whether eestor's stuff is real or vapour ware is admittedly up in the air. If not eestor, then someone else will develop this .
50 kWhr makes it reasonable to put one in every house. That's a couple day's back up power for the house -- more if you are frugal. It makes alternative power feasible.
A trailer with such a unit replaces or augments generators at the lake cottage.
With smart electrical meters it makes it possible to use them as load leveling devices so that power plants can run at more uniform rates.
Hey, I'm a tree hugger. (tree farmer, actually) I'd love to have one of those windmills on my back 40. Not enough wind.
Or small scale hydro? Would mean I'd have a lake -- storage for irrigation water, ducks, wetlands. Oh. I don't have a year round stream.
Solar? Cool. But at our latitude we have a month where the sun only gets 13 degrees above the horizon, and that diluted sunlight is only present for a few hours.
Drat.
What do we recover from ancient cultures?
Stone, and pots. Pots can last thousands and thousands of years.
(The prevailing remnant of our society 10,000 years from now will be billions of ceramic toilet bowls.)
How hard is it to take the reactor waste turn it into insoluble salts, sulphides or oxides, and mix it with glass, cast it into bricks, and make pyramids out of it in the desert?
Or put it in a salt mine.
Or drop it in a subduction zone.
Aviation and the global atmosphere: a special report of IPCC Working Groups ...
By Joyce E. Penner
Comments that NOx released in the troposphere (where the bulk of weather occurs) is a few weeks. Releases in the lower stratosphere has residence times on the order of months to years. If NOx is significant as an ozone depleter, the source would be primarily jets and natural sources that inject gas into the stratosphere (some wildfires, volcanoes)