It's not surprising at all. Read any paper on integrated pest management.
In almost all cases poisons work by blocking some metabolic pathway. However most critters have multliple paths that achieve the same result. So a given poison selects for species that have somewhat higher levels of the alternate pathway.
This has an energy/efficiency cost. The critter doesn't grow as fast, doesn't lay as many eggs. So if you stop administering the agent, the population reverts to the old pathway fairly quickly.
Administering sub-lethal doses on a continuous basis is the best way to quickly evolve an immune response.
In the case, cited earlier, of almonds (actually the whole cherry family) and cyanide: Current thoughts are that this is an anti-browsing feature. But deer will eat cherry leaves -- just in low quantity. But repeated doses will allow deer to build up a tolerance.
Integrated pest management practice is to use a dose heavy enough to get close to a 100% kill. Then, when the critter starts requiring heavier doses, switch to a different agent that affects a different metabolic pathway.
BT corn is exactly the wrong way to do it. Much better to create the BT agent outside of the corn plant, and apply a heavy dose all at once.
I normally have two-three mugs of near expresso strength coffee a day. Some years ago I went on a two week canoe trip. The guy running the food wasn't a coffee drinker and didn't bring any along. While I missed my sugar fix I had no symptoms of caffeine withdrawal.
At various other times I've been denied coffee for one reason or another. No problem.
I dislike instant coffee enough that when the choice is instant or none, I'll take none.
Like many statements about addiction, take this one with a grain of salt. It's over generalized.
AFAIK cm level accuracy requires differential GPS. Between 1 and 3 meters of the GPS error is due to atmospheric issues. By siting one receiver at a known point, and broadcasting the current 'location' your field instrument can correct it's idea of where you are.
In essence differential GPS is a local version of WAAS. The closer the receivers are, the better the accuracy.
Another trick is done by tracking the phase of the carriers. Requires much better electronics, and if you lose carrier sync you have to return to a known good location to re-establish it. This system is a real pain in forested areas.
The advantage of video in a non-classroom situation:
1. You can pause it. 2. The speaker can ask a question of the viewer and the viewer can check/try/lookup/think about it.
Some people are visual learners. Some are audio learners. In University I could get a 'B' in anything by sitting near the front of the class and paying rapt attention to the lecturer.
Because books are expensive on a per page basis, they often elide over bits of the development. And on the other hand, having all the development of an idea every time can cause you to lose track of the direction overall.
Video on computer with GOOD performances and GOOD editing could do something like this:
Screen is 3/4 vid, and 1/4 navigation. At any given point the main thread goes pretty fast, but in the navigation pane there is a 'review topic A' 'Expand previous step', 'Skip to next chunk'
Or the navigation bar has in essence an outline of the talk down to about the 1 minute level.
Or look at Ted Talks -- With them you have a transcript of the talk itself. Click any word in the transcript, and get to that point on the vid.
Good video is tough to do. And like software it should be done iteratively.
1. Create a talk. 2. Edit it for delivery. 3. Redo the bits you need to. 4. Present it with the lecturer standing beside. 5. Stop and take questions whenever a hand comes up. 6. Rewrite the script from the basis of the questions. 7. Reshoot the talk. 8. GOTO 2
Execute this loop 4 times or so. This would mean that a given teacher should teach a course 4 semesters in a row this way, with a vid geek doing the shooting and editing. A good teacher would spend most of a day shooting the next day's work, and reshooting the bits from that day's talk that were needed. So while it's being developed, it takes roughly 8 times as much time. (E.g. two people for a semester to do one course instead of one teacher teaching 3-4 courses)
They're stuffing houses 7/acre hear, and that includes the street access.
An average 6 years per car seems a bit quick. I figure that a car is pretty reliable for the first quarter million kilometers. (160,000 miles)
I consider 4 bedrooms larger than average. Square feet would be a better measure however.
As another data point: I consider myself lower middle class or perhaps upper lower class now. My wife and I have a combined pre-tax income of about $40,000 per year.
We have a 2500 square foot house on 80 acres of land that we paid 180K for 12 years ago. It's paid for. (We used to be upper middle class with combined income of about 120K) We have a 2006 Silverado bought used and a 2010 Subaru Outback, bought new. They get about 5000 and 30000 km usage annually.
Minimum wage here is $8 per hour. Industrial wages start at $15 per hour. First year apprentices get $18/hour. Journeymen get $30 per hour. If you have the strength to work in resources you can get 60-80K a year working on the rigs or in the mines.
Years ago I was a sysadmin working for 35K for the University of Alberta. I got an offer from NeXT to work in redwood city. My mom lived near San Jose, so I asked her to send me a copy of the San Jose Mercury. (Pre world wide web)
Here, I was able to live in a small lake cottage 40 minutes commute to work. The mountains were 3 hours away. My house payments were $500 per month. There I couldn't rent a one room apartment for a thousand a month. Comparing other prices it would have cost twice as much to have a comparible life style, and still end up with a longer commute. I told them that I wasn't interested unless they were offering at least 120,000/year, and explained my thinking. I didn't hear back.
I disagree. Many of the teachers in the current system are reasonably smart, and talented. However:
A: Streaming. Put the behaviour problems in the classroom with the normal kids. Put the genuinely stupid, the spinal bifida kids, the Fetal Alchohol kids in the classroom. Don't give the teachers any help dealing with them.
B: The parent is always right. Teachers can't keep kids after school if they act out. My sister in law got raked over the coals for keeping a grade 4 girl in over lunch break for 10 minutes to talk to her about her behaviour.
***
Addressing the original topic of this post.
Smart boards have their place. So do computers. Educational software generally sucks golf balls through a garden hose. But internet access beats the hell out of a school library with 6 30 year old sets of encyclopedias.
So far there is no good reader program I've run into that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate multiple books, and switch easily between them.
There is no good intuitive math entry software program I've run into that allows you to type math as fast as a pencil.
"We don't have enough people to do what needs to be done"
Right. I'm a farmer. I've got 5 months a year that I can't do much so this fall I went looking for work.
I have no credentials, save for a degree in physics. but I do have experience with most power tools, have built buildings, changed well pumps, done home renos (my own) I'm smart. I learn fast. I also have 20 years unix sysadmin experience.
My criteria for employment was twice minimum wage. Less than that isn't worth the commute.
Of the 40 or 50 positions I applied for, I got two replies. One wanted me to work for free as a house framer, with the potential for a pay cheque after a couple months. The other redirected to another online questionaire (filter)
Certainly for temporary work, there seem to be enough people, at least in winter in Alberta.
As a school teacher of some 30 years experience, I can say that:
1. Our curriculum does not put any emphasis on critical thinking. CT is a grab back of a whole bunch of techniques. The following come to mind:
a. Logical fallacies. b. Qualifications of the source. c. Reputation of the source. d. Numerically reasonable. e. Logical consequences. f. Understanding statistical arguments. g. Semantically loaded vocabulary.
2. Our curriculum doesn't teach cynicism: a. What is the spin? Who is doing the spinning? b. Who gains from this spin? Who loses? Who speaks for the losers? c. Follow the money.
Logical fallacies themselves take significant practice to spot consistently.
Qualifications of the source: Celebrity !== qualification. On the other hand, an MD decrying alternative medicine is not necessarily credible either.
Reputation of the source: Generally I put more credence in something published in Discover than I do in National Inquirer. We need to teach how to evaluate sources.
Numerically reasonable. This requires substantial skill in doing back of the envelope calculation. News story: Domestic cats kill 110 million song birds in America per year. Shock! Dismay!. Look at the numbers: 300 million people. Average household of, say 4. 75 million households. 1 in 3 have cats. 25 million cats. each cat responsible for 4.5 birds.
Now look at it differently. Continental US has about 3 million square miles. 110 million birds is 35 birds per square mile. Can't speak for the US but on my farm I estimate that the bird density is over 100 birds per acre. Which is 64,000 birds per square mile.
Now look at it differently. Most song birds lay 2-4 eggs per session. I'm betting that on the average they bring one to adulthood in a batch. So the bird population has the potential to replace itself every year.
Questions arise: What is the natural predation on birds? How significant is cat predation by comparison? Now you need to dig into the natural history of several representative species to get to the core.
Logical consequences:
If such and such happens, what happens as a result? If 5 million sub prime mortgage holders default what does that do to the economy? Some of these require special knowledge to predict, but should be understandable to most people who are taught to think. Of course many sneak up on us. In the transition from horse to car, decreased crap in the streets was pretty obvious. Suburbia was less so, and the change in teenage courtship patterns was a real surprise.
I won't go on. Suffice to say, this has to be integrated into every subject, as well as some courses aimed specifically at it.
One of our local 'all news' radio stations has the same people who report the news doing ads. This shocked me, as it meant that their voice was for sale, and hence the news is also for sale.
I've spoken of this to several people, and have yet to discover anyone who shares my view. Most people figure that an ad by a well known person is more reliable than an ad from
1. In many cases you *DO* have to deal with confidential information. How do you secure the BYOD.
2. A corporate device is surrendered on the employee quitting or being fired. How do you deal with this?
3. An employee expects to have a personal life. Can a phone have two numbers, with distinctive ring?
4. Almost any phone smarter than a rock can be used to carry files. And thumb drives are common. What is a reasonable policy for working on confidential material at home on the same PC that your kid uses to surf the net?
There are two anwers:
1. Confidential information is locked down. Systems are locked down.
2. People are trained in the risks and the ways to minimize them.
Teaching kids critical thinking isn't easy. (If any of you actually have a curriculum the purports to do this please send me a message sgbotsford@gmail.com)
Raising kids generally:
We pack them in cotton wool, and protect them from all possible hazards. Drive them 5 blocks to the local 7-11 for a slurpy.
Compare to a 1910 scoutmaster's manual I've got where it was assumed that a group of 12-15 year olds could plan and carry out a weekend hike on their own.
Gossip.
We have an avid taste for it. I wish that one network would actually carry a news show, as opposed to an entertainment show. The difference: If it doesn't affect most people's lives, it doesn't air. E.g. Most items regarding celebrities. Much of the show would be laws and stats. Laws: changes that our government is proposing that affect our lives. Stats. The numbers that are measured, and what they mean for our lives. Good graphics. Lucid explanations.
And the news would be followed by a show called "The Backgrounder" which ran perspective pieces on how we got into this mess.
One segment of the news could be "One year ago" with stories that did followup on what was deemed important last year, and what the long term fallout was.
Climate change:
People have troubles dealing with slow onset crises. If it's only a little worse than last year, grin and bear it. This is especially true with climate, as the signal is buried deeply in the noise of everyday weather. Few people understand what 3-5 degrees C means as applied to their daily lives.
(I know that even as someone with a background in science there are days that I chant to myself: "What do we want?" "Global warming" "When do we want it?" "Now!")
Not as huge a boon as you may think. If BT chemicals are present all the time in the plant, then there is serious pressure on the caterpillar to evolve resistance. The key to a lot of agents is to use them in a large enough dose that it stomps the population flat. Low doses kill off only the most sensitive ones.
This is a chronic problem with all herbicides/pesticides. During the heyday of DDT there was a fly in Texas that not only metabolized it, but developed a dependency on it.
I don't object to GM foods in terms of their safety, but rather due to their environmental impact and the politics of their use.
Monsanto enforcement of their roundup ready canola patent makes the RIAA anti-piracy work look like a visit from the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Worse, Round-up resistance has already found to have transferred to weeds in the same genus as canola.
I am in favour of GM foods -- but only if the developer is held responsible for the side effects.
My assistant principal at the school I worked at decided to get his Master of Education from U of Phoenix. On occasions he asked me to proofread essays he was doing. Utter drivel, and badly written, and I told him so. He sent them anyway, then crowed about how the essays I had panned all received marks over 95%
And we wonder why the education system doesn't work...
A friend of mine has a ton of stickers on his laptop. Stickers for OpenBSD mostly. Another has a bunch of bumper stickers on it. My wife has flower stickers all over her iPhone.
I have reflective stickers on my nikon everywhere there is enough space for one.
Yet another guy uses a similar ploy with his bicycle. He sprays the bike with 2-3 colours of paint making it ugly.
The key here is to make the device unique in a way that takes effort to remove. If nothing else you are less likely to inadvertently swap laptops at a meeting. A bunch of stickers means that the thief either has to pawn a memorable item, or he has to spend time removing the stickers.
While this isn't guaranteed to work, it will give you a bit of an edge.
One of the things I would do if I were a RIAA member:
Option 1. Run lots of torrent servers just to track who's downloading.
Option 2. Seed bad versions of movies -- e.g. ones with the first hour of good data and then junk or degraded video at the end. Get enough bad versions out there, and torrenting falls into disrepute.
Option 3. Create MANY valid versions of a movie file with one byte different so there would be lots of checksums out there to muddy the waters.
Option 4. Seed movies but write special torrent software that seeded slower and slower on a given connection -- and never seeded some chunks at all. Again: Object is to make torrents a PITA to use.
I don't believe that it is measurably more expensive to build a plant elsewhere, if you can choose your elsewhere.
A recent report on shipping in the economist claimed that it cost $700 per cargo unit (20 foot container) to move a container from Shanhai to Amsterdam. That's 3 cents per T-shirt.
Components have much higher value/volume ratio. Moving the stuff around is dirt cheap.
So the question is, "Why are they all there in Thailand" My guess is that they have a training facility and an established corporate culture there. THAT is harder to move.
***
If I were underwriting insurance in such a location, I'd give a hefty discount on flood insurance for people who built on pylons to the height of the banks at the edge of the floodplain.
Putting both in the same can is the wrong way to do it.
A better way is to have SSD and hard disk as tiered storage. The OS is more likely to be able to make better decisions for what to store where. So think in terms of overmounting the SSD onto the HD file system.
The OS on reading a file from the HD looks at the access pattern and if it gets accessed frequently, it writes it out to the SDD. If a file hasn't been accessed for a while it gets deleted from the SSD if it's clean, written to the HD and deleted if it's dirty.
When a file is created it's written to the SSD. If it's not accessed for X hours, it's flushed to HD. If it's not accessed for Y hours (Y>X) it's deleted from HD.
With separate SSD/HD you can pick your components. You can also do things like mirror your SSD and RAID your HDs.
Surprised this sort of FS access not available on Linux/BSD yet.
You don't want to replace coal fired plants with oil fired ones. Remember that in these cells the carbon is just along for the ride. Only the hydrogen's energy is converted to electricity.
Google Direct Carbon Fuel Cell.
This is one that works with reformed coal (essentially powdered coke)
Similar efficiencies. CO2 is easily separated as a stream for injection into deep wells, or use as a feed stock for something else.
The numbers I've seen are not exactly low mass. The geosync point of the cable is tens to hundreds of meters in diameter. It's moving at roughly 2000 mph relative to the surface point below it.
Severing the elevator at that point would be very bad.
To prevent this from being a 'lash of fire' along the equator, you would have to break it up into chunks small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. This would require, what, football sized chunks? Unlike a space craft the chunks are very strong, so they are unlikely to fragment from aerodynamic stress, but will simple have to ablate.
Severing at various points could allow you to salvage much of it, and minimize the amount that will enter the atmosphere. E.g. a point half way up still has enough velocity to stay out of the earth's atmosphere. If built on the west side of the Pacific, you might be able to get away with just killing a lot of fish.
I live in central Alberta, about an hour outside of Edmonton.
Rural highways don't get an hourly treatment, but it is unusual to have more than 2-3 inches of snow on them. Here, 2 inches per hour is heavy snowfall.
Farm roads will generally be plowed within 24 hours if they are on a bus route, 72 hours if they are not.
Small towns generally have a grader. Depending on the town policy they may wait until the dawn of the next business day (to not pay overtime or shift differential).
Edmonton has followed a policy of NOT plowing residential streets in order to save money. Last year we had the heaviest accumulated snowfall on record. The city council broke down and plowed all the residential streets. Took over a month.
It also revealed a problem with the cute curvy maze streets with 7 houses per acre: Where do you put the snow? Cul-de-sacs had 15 foot high piles in the centre of the turn-a-round with barely a lane around them. People who owned multiple vehicles were used to parking one on the street, and found that everyone else was pissed off with them. Between the windrows of snow and the vehicles lanes were just inches wider than most cars. God help you if you had a hummer.
If you don't have snow, you don't have winter. You have extended fall and early spring.
Living in the Great White North we have some extra seasons:
Winter is the longest one, starting usually in November and running through to April. Then we have Thaw, when the snow disappears, followed by Mud. Then we get Spring, when things start greening up, followed by Summer and Autumn.
Sometimes we get Monsoon between Spring and Summer.
***
I looked at the Aptera. I thought it VERY cool. It looked like it was going fast just when it was parked.
A 3 wheel vehicle doesn't have to be unusable in winter: Consider if you used a variable frequency diesel generator coupled to VFD electric motors on each wheel. This would give you 3wd.
The Aptera may still have had issues due to it's low ground clearance. (City of Edmonton doesn't plow it's non-arterial streets, so residential areas are a mine field of 8" deep ruts.)
Another issue it may have had would be low visibility in drifting snow. Both becuase it be hard to see the car, and the driver would have a hard time seeing anything else.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not surprising at all. Read any paper on integrated pest management.
In almost all cases poisons work by blocking some metabolic pathway. However most critters have multliple paths that achieve the same result. So a given poison selects for species that have somewhat higher levels of the alternate pathway.
This has an energy/efficiency cost. The critter doesn't grow as fast, doesn't lay as many eggs. So if you stop administering the agent, the population reverts to the old pathway fairly quickly.
Administering sub-lethal doses on a continuous basis is the best way to quickly evolve an immune response.
In the case, cited earlier, of almonds (actually the whole cherry family) and cyanide: Current thoughts are that this is an anti-browsing feature. But deer will eat cherry leaves -- just in low quantity. But repeated doses will allow deer to build up a tolerance.
Integrated pest management practice is to use a dose heavy enough to get close to a 100% kill. Then, when the critter starts requiring heavier doses, switch to a different agent that affects a different metabolic pathway.
BT corn is exactly the wrong way to do it. Much better to create the BT agent outside of the corn plant, and apply a heavy dose all at once.
I normally have two-three mugs of near expresso strength coffee a day. Some years ago I went on a two week canoe trip. The guy running the food wasn't a coffee drinker and didn't bring any along. While I missed my sugar fix I had no symptoms of caffeine withdrawal.
At various other times I've been denied coffee for one reason or another. No problem.
I dislike instant coffee enough that when the choice is instant or none, I'll take none.
Like many statements about addiction, take this one with a grain of salt. It's over generalized.
AFAIK cm level accuracy requires differential GPS. Between 1 and 3 meters of the GPS error is due to atmospheric issues. By siting one receiver at a known point, and broadcasting the current 'location' your field instrument can correct it's idea of where you are.
In essence differential GPS is a local version of WAAS. The closer the receivers are, the better the accuracy.
Another trick is done by tracking the phase of the carriers. Requires much better electronics, and if you lose carrier sync you have to return to a known good location to re-establish it. This system is a real pain in forested areas.
The advantage of video in a non-classroom situation:
1. You can pause it.
2. The speaker can ask a question of the viewer and the viewer can check/try/lookup/think about it.
Some people are visual learners. Some are audio learners. In University I could get a 'B' in anything by sitting near the front of the class and paying rapt attention to the lecturer.
Because books are expensive on a per page basis, they often elide over bits of the development. And on the other hand, having all the development of an idea every time can cause you to lose track of the direction overall.
Video on computer with GOOD performances and GOOD editing could do something like this:
Screen is 3/4 vid, and 1/4 navigation. At any given point the main thread goes pretty fast, but in the navigation pane there is a 'review topic A' 'Expand previous step', 'Skip to next chunk'
Or the navigation bar has in essence an outline of the talk down to about the 1 minute level.
Or look at Ted Talks -- With them you have a transcript of the talk itself. Click any word in the transcript, and get to that point on the vid.
Good video is tough to do. And like software it should be done iteratively.
1. Create a talk.
2. Edit it for delivery.
3. Redo the bits you need to.
4. Present it with the lecturer standing beside.
5. Stop and take questions whenever a hand comes up.
6. Rewrite the script from the basis of the questions.
7. Reshoot the talk.
8. GOTO 2
Execute this loop 4 times or so. This would mean that a given teacher should teach a course 4 semesters in a row this way, with a vid geek doing the shooting and editing. A good teacher would spend most of a day shooting the next day's work, and reshooting the bits from that day's talk that were needed. So while it's being developed, it takes roughly 8 times as much time. (E.g. two people for a semester to do one course instead of one teacher teaching 3-4 courses)
Very cool. Would that I could do this for my Nikon D70.
Anyone know of a similar project for Nikons?
You are so right -- it depends of location.
They're stuffing houses 7/acre hear, and that includes the street access.
An average 6 years per car seems a bit quick. I figure that a car is pretty reliable for the first quarter million kilometers. (160,000 miles)
I consider 4 bedrooms larger than average. Square feet would be a better measure however.
As another data point: I consider myself lower middle class or perhaps upper lower class now. My wife and I have a combined pre-tax income of about $40,000 per year.
We have a 2500 square foot house on 80 acres of land that we paid 180K for 12 years ago. It's paid for. (We used to be upper middle class with combined income of about 120K) We have a 2006 Silverado bought used and a 2010 Subaru Outback, bought new. They get about 5000 and 30000 km usage annually.
Minimum wage here is $8 per hour. Industrial wages start at $15 per hour. First year apprentices get $18/hour. Journeymen get $30 per hour. If you have the strength to work in resources you can get 60-80K a year working on the rigs or in the mines.
Years ago I was a sysadmin working for 35K for the University of Alberta. I got an offer from NeXT to work in redwood city. My mom lived near San Jose, so I asked her to send me a copy of the San Jose Mercury. (Pre world wide web)
Here, I was able to live in a small lake cottage 40 minutes commute to work. The mountains were 3 hours away. My house payments were $500 per month. There I couldn't rent a one room apartment for a thousand a month. Comparing other prices it would have cost twice as much to have a comparible life style, and still end up with a longer commute. I told them that I wasn't interested unless they were offering at least 120,000/year, and explained my thinking. I didn't hear back.
I disagree. Many of the teachers in the current system are reasonably smart, and talented. However:
A: Streaming. Put the behaviour problems in the classroom with the normal kids. Put the genuinely stupid, the spinal bifida kids, the Fetal Alchohol kids in the classroom. Don't give the teachers any help dealing with them.
B: The parent is always right. Teachers can't keep kids after school if they act out. My sister in law got raked over the coals for keeping a grade 4 girl in over lunch break for 10 minutes to talk to her about her behaviour.
***
Addressing the original topic of this post.
Smart boards have their place. So do computers. Educational software generally sucks golf balls through a garden hose. But internet access beats the hell out of a school library with 6 30 year old sets of encyclopedias.
So far there is no good reader program I've run into that allows you to easily bookmark and annotate multiple books, and switch easily between them.
There is no good intuitive math entry software program I've run into that allows you to type math as fast as a pencil.
"We don't have enough people to do what needs to be done"
Right. I'm a farmer. I've got 5 months a year that I can't do much so this fall I went looking for work.
I have no credentials, save for a degree in physics. but I do have experience with most power tools, have built buildings, changed well pumps, done home renos (my own) I'm smart. I learn fast. I also have 20 years unix sysadmin experience.
My criteria for employment was twice minimum wage. Less than that isn't worth the commute.
Of the 40 or 50 positions I applied for, I got two replies. One wanted me to work for free as a house framer, with the potential for a pay cheque after a couple months. The other redirected to another online questionaire (filter)
Certainly for temporary work, there seem to be enough people, at least in winter in Alberta.
As a school teacher of some 30 years experience, I can say that:
1. Our curriculum does not put any emphasis on critical thinking. CT is a grab back of a whole bunch of techniques. The following come to mind:
a. Logical fallacies.
b. Qualifications of the source.
c. Reputation of the source.
d. Numerically reasonable.
e. Logical consequences.
f. Understanding statistical arguments.
g. Semantically loaded vocabulary.
2. Our curriculum doesn't teach cynicism:
a. What is the spin? Who is doing the spinning?
b. Who gains from this spin? Who loses? Who speaks for the losers?
c. Follow the money.
Logical fallacies themselves take significant practice to spot consistently.
Qualifications of the source: Celebrity !== qualification. On the other hand, an MD decrying alternative medicine is not necessarily credible either.
Reputation of the source: Generally I put more credence in something published in Discover than I do in National Inquirer. We need to teach how to evaluate sources.
Numerically reasonable. This requires substantial skill in doing back of the envelope calculation. News story: Domestic cats kill 110 million song birds in America per year. Shock! Dismay!. Look at the numbers:
300 million people. Average household of, say 4. 75 million households. 1 in 3 have cats. 25 million cats. each cat responsible for 4.5 birds.
Now look at it differently. Continental US has about 3 million square miles. 110 million birds is 35 birds per square mile. Can't speak for the US but on my farm I estimate that the bird density is over 100 birds per acre. Which is 64,000 birds per square mile.
Now look at it differently. Most song birds lay 2-4 eggs per session. I'm betting that on the average they bring one to adulthood in a batch. So the bird population has the potential to replace itself every year.
Questions arise: What is the natural predation on birds? How significant is cat predation by comparison? Now you need to dig into the natural history of several representative species to get to the core.
Logical consequences:
If such and such happens, what happens as a result? If 5 million sub prime mortgage holders default what does that do to the economy? Some of these require special knowledge to predict, but should be understandable to most people who are taught to think. Of course many sneak up on us. In the transition from horse to car, decreased crap in the streets was pretty obvious. Suburbia was less so, and the change in teenage courtship patterns was a real surprise.
I won't go on. Suffice to say, this has to be integrated into every subject, as well as some courses aimed specifically at it.
One of our local 'all news' radio stations has the same people who report the news doing ads. This shocked me, as it meant that their voice was for sale, and hence the news is also for sale.
I've spoken of this to several people, and have yet to discover anyone who shares my view. Most people figure that an ad by a well known person is more reliable than an ad from
Not clear to me how to deal with the following:
1. In many cases you *DO* have to deal with confidential information. How do you secure the BYOD.
2. A corporate device is surrendered on the employee quitting or being fired. How do you deal with this?
3. An employee expects to have a personal life. Can a phone have two numbers, with distinctive ring?
4. Almost any phone smarter than a rock can be used to carry files. And thumb drives are common. What is a reasonable policy for working on confidential material at home on the same PC that your kid uses to surf the net?
There are two anwers:
1. Confidential information is locked down. Systems are locked down.
2. People are trained in the risks and the ways to minimize them.
Neither is easy.
Teaching kids critical thinking isn't easy. (If any of you actually have a curriculum the purports to do this please send me a message sgbotsford@gmail.com)
Raising kids generally:
We pack them in cotton wool, and protect them from all possible hazards. Drive them 5 blocks to the local 7-11 for a slurpy.
Compare to a 1910 scoutmaster's manual I've got where it was assumed that a group of 12-15 year olds could plan and carry out a weekend hike on their own.
Gossip.
We have an avid taste for it. I wish that one network would actually carry a news show, as opposed to an entertainment show. The difference: If it doesn't affect most people's lives, it doesn't air. E.g. Most items regarding celebrities. Much of the show would be laws and stats. Laws: changes that our government is proposing that affect our lives. Stats. The numbers that are measured, and what they mean for our lives. Good graphics. Lucid explanations.
And the news would be followed by a show called "The Backgrounder" which ran perspective pieces on how we got into this mess.
One segment of the news could be "One year ago" with stories that did followup on what was deemed important last year, and what the long term fallout was.
Climate change:
People have troubles dealing with slow onset crises. If it's only a little worse than last year, grin and bear it. This is especially true with climate, as the signal is buried deeply in the noise of everyday weather. Few people understand what 3-5 degrees C means as applied to their daily lives.
(I know that even as someone with a background in science there are days that I chant to myself: "What do we want?" "Global warming" "When do we want it?" "Now!")
Not as huge a boon as you may think. If BT chemicals are present all the time in the plant, then there is serious pressure on the caterpillar to evolve resistance. The key to a lot of agents is to use them in a large enough dose that it stomps the population flat. Low doses kill off only the most sensitive ones.
This is a chronic problem with all herbicides/pesticides. During the heyday of DDT there was a fly in Texas that not only metabolized it, but developed a dependency on it.
I don't object to GM foods in terms of their safety, but rather due to their environmental impact and the politics of their use.
Monsanto enforcement of their roundup ready canola patent makes the RIAA anti-piracy work look like a visit from the Sugar Plum Fairy.
Worse, Round-up resistance has already found to have transferred to weeds in the same genus as canola.
I am in favour of GM foods -- but only if the developer is held responsible for the side effects.
I'll add to this:
My assistant principal at the school I worked at decided to get his Master of Education from U of Phoenix. On occasions he asked me to proofread essays he was doing. Utter drivel, and badly written, and I told him so. He sent them anyway, then crowed about how the essays I had panned all received marks over 95%
And we wonder why the education system doesn't work...
My christmas donation goes to the Salvation Army.
1. Their staff are pretty dedicated, working for small salaries, hence low overhead.
2. They take care of a real need.
3. It's local.
A friend of mine has a ton of stickers on his laptop. Stickers for OpenBSD mostly. Another has a bunch of bumper stickers on it. My wife has flower stickers all over her iPhone.
I have reflective stickers on my nikon everywhere there is enough space for one.
Yet another guy uses a similar ploy with his bicycle. He sprays the bike with 2-3 colours of paint making it ugly.
The key here is to make the device unique in a way that takes effort to remove. If nothing else you are less likely to inadvertently swap laptops at a meeting. A bunch of stickers means that the thief either has to pawn a memorable item, or he has to spend time removing the stickers.
While this isn't guaranteed to work, it will give you a bit of an edge.
One of the things I would do if I were a RIAA member:
Option 1. Run lots of torrent servers just to track who's downloading.
Option 2. Seed bad versions of movies -- e.g. ones with the first hour of good data and then junk or degraded video at the end. Get enough bad versions out there, and torrenting falls into disrepute.
Option 3. Create MANY valid versions of a movie file with one byte different so there would be lots of checksums out there to muddy the waters.
Option 4. Seed movies but write special torrent software that seeded slower and slower on a given connection -- and never seeded some chunks at all. Again: Object is to make torrents a PITA to use.
I don't believe that it is measurably more expensive to build a plant elsewhere, if you can choose your elsewhere.
A recent report on shipping in the economist claimed that it cost $700 per cargo unit (20 foot container) to move a container from Shanhai to Amsterdam. That's 3 cents per T-shirt.
Components have much higher value/volume ratio. Moving the stuff around is dirt cheap.
So the question is, "Why are they all there in Thailand" My guess is that they have a training facility and an established corporate culture there. THAT is harder to move.
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If I were underwriting insurance in such a location, I'd give a hefty discount on flood insurance for people who built on pylons to the height of the banks at the edge of the floodplain.
There's a very old book published by Dover Press "How to calculate quickly" that is a whole book of methods like this.
Putting both in the same can is the wrong way to do it.
A better way is to have SSD and hard disk as tiered storage. The OS is more likely to be able to make better decisions for what to store where. So think in terms of overmounting the SSD onto the HD file system.
The OS on reading a file from the HD looks at the access pattern and if it gets accessed frequently, it writes it out to the SDD. If a file hasn't been accessed for a while it gets deleted from the SSD if it's clean, written to the HD and deleted if it's dirty.
When a file is created it's written to the SSD. If it's not accessed for X hours, it's flushed to HD. If it's not accessed for Y hours (Y>X) it's deleted from HD.
With separate SSD/HD you can pick your components. You can also do things like mirror your SSD and RAID your HDs.
Surprised this sort of FS access not available on Linux/BSD yet.
You don't want to replace coal fired plants with oil fired ones. Remember that in these cells the carbon is just along for the ride. Only the hydrogen's energy is converted to electricity.
Google Direct Carbon Fuel Cell.
This is one that works with reformed coal (essentially powdered coke)
Similar efficiencies. CO2 is easily separated as a stream for injection into deep wells, or use as a feed stock for something else.
The numbers I've seen are not exactly low mass. The geosync point of the cable is tens to hundreds of meters in diameter. It's moving at roughly 2000 mph relative to the surface point below it.
Severing the elevator at that point would be very bad.
To prevent this from being a 'lash of fire' along the equator, you would have to break it up into chunks small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. This would require, what, football sized chunks? Unlike a space craft the chunks are very strong, so they are unlikely to fragment from aerodynamic stress, but will simple have to ablate.
Severing at various points could allow you to salvage much of it, and minimize the amount that will enter the atmosphere. E.g. a point half way up still has enough velocity to stay out of the earth's atmosphere. If built on the west side of the Pacific, you might be able to get away with just killing a lot of fish.
I live in central Alberta, about an hour outside of Edmonton.
Rural highways don't get an hourly treatment, but it is unusual to have more than 2-3 inches of snow on them. Here, 2 inches per hour is heavy snowfall.
Farm roads will generally be plowed within 24 hours if they are on a bus route, 72 hours if they are not.
Small towns generally have a grader. Depending on the town policy they may wait until the dawn of the next business day (to not pay overtime or shift differential).
Edmonton has followed a policy of NOT plowing residential streets in order to save money. Last year we had the heaviest accumulated snowfall on record. The city council broke down and plowed all the residential streets. Took over a month.
It also revealed a problem with the cute curvy maze streets with 7 houses per acre: Where do you put the snow? Cul-de-sacs had 15 foot high piles in the centre of the turn-a-round with barely a lane around them. People who owned multiple vehicles were used to parking one on the street, and found that everyone else was pissed off with them. Between the windrows of snow and the vehicles lanes were just inches wider than most cars. God help you if you had a hummer.
If you don't have snow, you don't have winter. You have extended fall and early spring.
Living in the Great White North we have some extra seasons:
Winter is the longest one, starting usually in November and running through to April. Then we have Thaw, when the snow disappears, followed by Mud. Then we get Spring, when things start greening up, followed by Summer and Autumn.
Sometimes we get Monsoon between Spring and Summer.
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I looked at the Aptera. I thought it VERY cool. It looked like it was going fast just when it was parked.
A 3 wheel vehicle doesn't have to be unusable in winter: Consider if you used a variable frequency diesel generator coupled to VFD electric motors on each wheel. This would give you 3wd.
The Aptera may still have had issues due to it's low ground clearance. (City of Edmonton doesn't plow it's non-arterial streets, so residential areas are a mine field of 8" deep ruts.)
Another issue it may have had would be low visibility in drifting snow. Both becuase it be hard to see the car, and the driver would have a hard time seeing anything else.