Once it is out of the atmosphere, there is no drag and over the distance to the Van Allen belt a 1 G acceleration would bring it up to very high speed. There would be plenty of time after leaving the Van Allen belt to slow back down, again with mild acceleration.
What is it that I'm not seeing here? Would we not use some form of railgun technology to accelerate and decelerate the capsules? We might need a transfer platform above the atmosphere to change from a "crawler" capsule to a "bullet" capsule, but I think that is well within our technology.
A well engineered space elevator would be a new source of power, producing more than it would cost to maintain it. Assuming that some form of mass (captured asteroid, lunar regolith, etc) could be delivered to the geosynch platform.
Regenerative braking on material moving down the elevator would produce power. A particularly elegant system would launch cannisters of regolith from the lunar surface to the geosynch platform with a railgun, then the cannisters are "dropped" down the elevator with regenerative braking moderating the descent. At a way station in the stratosphere the cannisters are offloaded to gliders that then ship the regolith to its points of use: as low cost aggregate in road building and construction. Most of the cost of concrete is in transporting the aggregate from quarry to point of use; this approach eliminates those costs and is environmentally benign.
So long as the mass moving down the elevator is sufficiently large, there would be a surplus of power.
There is probably something basically wrong with this; it seems to simple. But I like the idea of seeing buildings in my neighborhood built of Moon rock.
Yeah, Ubuntu really screwed up with Unity. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, just as you were about to take the lead in the race.
Mint is pretty good, though, I hear. Also there is a retro Gnome 2 front end that I worked with for a while, that is also pretty good. But since my interests lie in graphics and CG, I went to Ubuntu Studio, which uses the stripped down xfce GUI and comes with a goodly assortment of graphics, video, and audio development tools folded into the distro itself.
I'm hearing good things about Ubuntu v14.10, due for release on April 17. This will be a Long Term Support version, and the good people at Ubuntu Studio promise to incorporate it into their distro. I'm looking forward to that.
Market share? Linux enjoys half [zdnet.com] the market share of Microsoft Vista...
Bullshit.
First, Linux was not measured in the study being done. Second, there is no mention of the methodology used to gather the statistics in the article. Is this from sales records? Web site visits to companies that sell Win-Mac software?
More to the point, there is now, and has never been, any way to measure the adoption of any FOSS software. That most especially applies to contemporary Linux users. You can't count Linux sales, because there are none. There is no other way to estimate distribution, because anyone who burns a Linux installation CD or USB stick is a distributor. Web sites can track how many visitors are using which OS at the time of their visit, but how do you get a representative sampling of web sites? Why would anyone who wanted to sell the statistical data they are producing even want to do that, since its in their best economic interest to ignore Linux (and FOSS) entirely?
How many "Vista users" have dual installed Linux on their machines? Do most of their computing with Linux, and keep Vista around only because it doesn't get in the way, and who knows if it might come in handy someday-- maybe Grandma once had a geneology database that can only be accessed with an ancient Microsoft OS? A lot of WinXP users are doing that-- I was one of them until WinXP crapped out on me and I decided that growing my Ubuntu partition had more value than reinstalling WinXP. My laptop still has a Win7 partition, but I only use that with some DeLorme mapping software that is now out of date.
Microsoft of itself is neither evil nor benign. It is the people who have shaped Microsoft's corporate culture and policies who can be judged in that way.
Microsoft's behavior became somewhat less obnoxious when Bill Gates stepped away from the daily management of the company. That still left the potty-mouthed, chair throwing, murder threatening, monkey dancer in charge. But he is now going away, too.
So maybe Microsoft will become respectable, at some point. Or maybe not-- there are deeply rooted corporate cultures that can make it impossible for good persons to survive long enough to make a difference.
The Linux distros continue to make significant headway, by any measure you care to apply, except dollar measures. So long as they stay healthy, which looks like a very long time, there will be no duopoly.
There is, though, a group of people who ignore the Linux distros while talking loudly about the health of the digital markets. While this group is diminishing in number it remains quite loud, because it can talk about dollar value, which has a way of catching everyone's attention. The thing is, the value of a Linux distro cannot be measured in dollars, so a good number of these loudmouths are self-blinded to Linux' existence.
How do you put a value on my desktop system, which is running Ubuntu Studio and gives me, at no cost other than the download, the equivalent of $10,000 of software for audio, image, and video production, as well as all the office machinery? I am no longer in the market for Maya or Adobe products, so I can definitely say that Linux has an impact on dollar-related measures of commercial goods, but how much impact is that? I have never thought to do anything with audio mixing or MIDI work and I don't even know the terms, but since I have pro-am grade tools to play with I might someday goof around with them. My gain, but nobody selling commercial software will see a penny from my pockets.
That's if the strand is coiled in the same direction as it was twisted (anterograde coil, AC). From TFA, if it is coiled opposite to its twist (retrograde coil, RC), it lengthens with the application of heat and shrinks as it cools (doing as much work on cooling as AC does on heating).
TFA mentions that other triggers than heat can be used but doesn't say anything more about it. Want more info on that.
Stricter emission controls and carbon caps are adaptive responses to climate change. These begin the changes in society that are necessary for society to adapt. Without the increased societal awareness brought about by emission controls, we would not have an electric car industry, investments in wind farms and solar power, research into neighborhood sized fission power plants, etc. Taken together, these are the beginnings of society level adaptations to the changing environment.
Repeated failure to understand that society is beginning an adaptive response to global warming cannot be explained by any kind of logic or reason. It appears to be an entirely emotional form of denial. Fortunately it is limited to a few individuals who will either change or get increasingly marginalized as the world changes around them. I understand that there are a few flat earth crackpots still around; the remaining climate change denialists will soon be keeping them company.
He said: "The climate will change. We must adapt."
You said: "Then we must stop changing the climate."
I know very well what I said, and it was not that.
As for the rest of parent post: tl;dr. Not much point in doing otherwise since all that verbiage is built on some internal fantasy of the author. Truly a kind of mental masturbation.
About increased cloud formation and the planet's albedo...
What we know is that clouds, in the form of water droplets or ice, increases the albedo more than anything else that is likely to happen. But water vapor is a very strong greenhouse gas. Nobody is talking about the interplay of these factors, because nobody knows how to model them: how much of the increase in evaporation stays water vapor, what layers of the atmosphere will be affected. Another complication is that the atmosphere is expanding as it warms (and we have direct evidence of that: LEO satellites put up 40 years ago have de-orbited from unanticipated increases in drag). How a larger atmospheric envelope will affect the troposphere where our climate and weather live is also unknown.
But expect to see bigger storms as you get older. They maybe warm and wet with lots of flooding, or cold with lots of snow drifts, but they are definitely going to be bigger and stronger than any that anyone today has ever seen. Which in turn suggests that the sea coasts will have it easy compared to the raging river floods that will destroy infrastructure in Colorado, Kansas, the Dakotas, the Missouri and Mississippi drainages, etc.
To expect things to stay the way they are just because we happened to evolve at this particular point in history is kind of silly. The climate *will* change. *We* must adapt.
So you are a proponent of stricter emission controls, carbon caps, and forced adoption of green technologies even if they are more expensive? Being as how
those are the surest ways of adapting rapidly enough to preserve the greatest amount of your freedom of choice as can be preserved over the next 30 to 50 years? Because that's the direction your train of logic is going toward.
It's a liberty issue. I'd rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices.
The "liberty issue" here is making sure that those 0ne-Percenters who are either too short-sighted or too wrapped up in their own fantasies don't trample your freedom to make wrong choices.
You think young Americans have early exposure to chaos theory and non-linear systems...
YES, I am sure of that. Some of the concepts of chaos theory and fractals, especially those concepts that can be vividly presented in graphics, are as well understood by today's grade schoolers as atomic theory and rocket engineering were understood by grade schoolers in the 1960s.
Which is not to say that today's average youngster (a kid less than 40 years old) have any real grasp of these subjects. It is just that some of these concepts have influenced their world views as those views were being formed (and not as bolt-on additions, which is all that us older guys have to work with). E.g., for those under 30, that some things are fractal (self-similar at every level of scaling) has as much impact on their world view as Newton's third law. So the ancient astrology expression "as above, so below" carries more truthiness for them than it does for us older ones who grew up in a cause and effect (and nothing else) universe.
which makes them more likely to believe in astrology?
NO! I would not go that far. HOWEVER, youngsters are much less likely to dismiss astrology out of hand, since they are aware that there are other things affecting their world than just cause and effect chains. I think they are much more likely to accept that there are other forms of science (of self-consistent bodies of knowledge) than the cause and effect sciences that are all that classical western thought allows.
Blowing off a mod point to post this. But I want to see any responses, so I don't want to AC this.
Bringing this back on topic, an increasing number of young people use the word "science" in its older sense, back when it meant an internally self-consistent body of knowledge. Back before the experimental method was described. In the original sense of the word, astrology is a science, just as the medicine of ancient Greece was a science, or artists' study of color theory, perspective, and proportion is a science.
The real question is why so many youngsters today are using the word "science" in this larger sense? I think the answer has to do with their early exposure to fractals, to strange attractors and butterfly effects, and to the mixing of eurocentric world views with the world views of India and east Asia.
It might be that the apparent increase in belief in astrology has more to do with a shift in how the word "science" is now used among young people. Among those under 30 yo, talking about the science of acupuncture, or the science of yoga or of meditation is not uncommon. In this sense, the science of astrology fits right in.
What would be interesting is if the poll had also asked the question, "Does astrology have less, as much, or more impact on your daily life as chemistry and physics?" I would guess the answer to that would show no significant change over the years.
If I understand your point correctly, then it would be easy for someone bilingual in Chinese and English to test this by Googling on the same terms, once in each language. Alas, I do not understand Chinese.
Anyone want to take that on? See if the same thing happens with Google as with Bing?
It is one thing to apply censorship filters to comply with various countries laws when operating inside that country. But it is an entirely different thing to apply those same filters in other countries where there are no censorship laws.
I think we need a word for that. It is after all an entirely new type of corporate fuck-up. I think "bingled" would be an excellent word for when a corporation does unnecessary censoring to comply with some other country's laws. And stuff like that.
...the amount of effort required... outweighs the efficiencies gained....
True on a one-shot basis, but if two commuters agree to do this every day five days a week so long as their jobs last, then the setup cost is insignificant. There would be significant long term gains.
Text is also a very "hot" medium, to resurrect Marshall McLuhan's term. Hot media are those that require the audience to invest in the work. In a story I might say
"Jim dove out of the car as it skidded sideways over the edge of the cliff. His coat caught on the edge of the door, almost dragging him into the chasm before it tore loose, leaving him rumpled but safe. His arm and leg were raw with road rash, but he was not yet feeling its pain, not while his heart was racing from the adrenaline rush. The pain would come later."
What kind of car? Was the cliff the edge of a canyon, or of a quarry? What kind of coat? Was Jim's road rash on his left side or his right side?
Those details would be critical if this was a movie script, as in the recent Star Trek movie. But they are not needed, and would get in the way, in text. Because in text the reader gets to fill in the details, and create the story imagery that works best for him. That kind of audience involvement is what McLuhan meant by a hot medium.
We problem solve in hot ways: we talk about the advantages of buffering and sorting the data locally before sending it over the wire to the storage center, but we don't say what kind buffer (memory? disk?) or what kind of sort (bubble??). We don't say anything more than what is needed to evoke the kind of image we want the reader to see. Pseudocode is one way of refrigerating text so it is cold enough to use as a guide in writing the program code. Pseudocode is very wordy; the conciseness of natural language evocative descriptions is replaced by precision. And computer languages are all about precision, which is why they are so damn hard to work with.
We need better refrigerators in our problem solving. But I don't think that can be done with visuals. McLuhan regarded visual presentations as being "cold", since they don't allow the audience to bring their own imagination into active play. Problem solving in a visual system would limit what the imagination can bring to the process.
I have worked with several declarative languages: the regular expression engine in Perl, and also HTML, and CSS. I cannot visualize any of these in a graphical way.
The only true graphical languages I have worked with are in Blender and Maya (mostly Blender, since it is the better choice for solo CG artwork). These languages are excellent for modeling: Blender set to 1 meter units has sub-millimeter accuracy in a 10 cubic kilometer space.
I don't see any intersection between what can be done in Blender and what can be done in a regular expression engine. Yet both are declarative languages,
The work in HTML5 and CSS3 in separating content and presentation shows the direction of growth of declarative languages as a whole. This suggests that we need to teach newbie programmers that pseudocode is a declarative language to use in developing the programming solution, that is independent of the coding process. And that existing programming languages-- Assembly, C, Pascal, Python, etc-- should be regarded as methods of presentation of the underlying pseudocode.
I learned some time ago to not bother with learning anything I can look up when I need it. So now I'm dependent on a bunch of brain prosthetics: shopping lists, todo lists, calendars with notes. The biggest one of all being Google.
Now I'm more concerned with remembering how to rediscover that nugget I once knew than in trying to remember the nugget itself. If I can't get to Google, I sometimes look slow and dense in conversations with kids less than 40 years old. But so long as I've got one of my Android gadgets in reach (and charged up), I'm one of the brighter bulbs in the tool shed.
The problem with worshiping Science as a religion is that we spent several thousand years learning core technologies like, oh, handling fire, talking and writing, building boats that could sail thousands of miles. All of it before there was science.
It is quite clear to anyone with an unfettered mind that there is an awful lot that can be learned that does not fit the scientific paradigm. Try using the whole of your brain, and not just that fraction that handles "scientific" abstractions.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes all kinds of sense. There must be something wrong...
Separate cables for going up and going down, with redundancy. That would be the way to build the things.
Why would the elevator be limited to ~200m/s?
Once it is out of the atmosphere, there is no drag and over the distance to the Van Allen belt a 1 G acceleration would bring it up to very high speed. There would be plenty of time after leaving the Van Allen belt to slow back down, again with mild acceleration.
What is it that I'm not seeing here? Would we not use some form of railgun technology to accelerate and decelerate the capsules? We might need a transfer platform above the atmosphere to change from a "crawler" capsule to a "bullet" capsule, but I think that is well within our technology.
A well engineered space elevator would be a new source of power, producing more than it would cost to maintain it. Assuming that some form of mass (captured asteroid, lunar regolith, etc) could be delivered to the geosynch platform.
Regenerative braking on material moving down the elevator would produce power. A particularly elegant system would launch cannisters of regolith from the lunar surface to the geosynch platform with a railgun, then the cannisters are "dropped" down the elevator with regenerative braking moderating the descent. At a way station in the stratosphere the cannisters are offloaded to gliders that then ship the regolith to its points of use: as low cost aggregate in road building and construction. Most of the cost of concrete is in transporting the aggregate from quarry to point of use; this approach eliminates those costs and is environmentally benign.
So long as the mass moving down the elevator is sufficiently large, there would be a surplus of power.
There is probably something basically wrong with this; it seems to simple. But I like the idea of seeing buildings in my neighborhood built of Moon rock.
That should be v14.04, of course.
Yeah, Ubuntu really screwed up with Unity. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot, just as you were about to take the lead in the race.
Mint is pretty good, though, I hear. Also there is a retro Gnome 2 front end that I worked with for a while, that is also pretty good. But since my interests lie in graphics and CG, I went to Ubuntu Studio, which uses the stripped down xfce GUI and comes with a goodly assortment of graphics, video, and audio development tools folded into the distro itself.
I'm hearing good things about Ubuntu v14.10, due for release on April 17. This will be a Long Term Support version, and the good people at Ubuntu Studio promise to incorporate it into their distro. I'm looking forward to that.
Market share? Linux enjoys half [zdnet.com] the market share of Microsoft Vista...
Bullshit.
First, Linux was not measured in the study being done. Second, there is no mention of the methodology used to gather the statistics in the article. Is this from sales records? Web site visits to companies that sell Win-Mac software?
More to the point, there is now, and has never been, any way to measure the adoption of any FOSS software. That most especially applies to contemporary Linux users. You can't count Linux sales, because there are none. There is no other way to estimate distribution, because anyone who burns a Linux installation CD or USB stick is a distributor. Web sites can track how many visitors are using which OS at the time of their visit, but how do you get a representative sampling of web sites? Why would anyone who wanted to sell the statistical data they are producing even want to do that, since its in their best economic interest to ignore Linux (and FOSS) entirely?
How many "Vista users" have dual installed Linux on their machines? Do most of their computing with Linux, and keep Vista around only because it doesn't get in the way, and who knows if it might come in handy someday-- maybe Grandma once had a geneology database that can only be accessed with an ancient Microsoft OS? A lot of WinXP users are doing that-- I was one of them until WinXP crapped out on me and I decided that growing my Ubuntu partition had more value than reinstalling WinXP. My laptop still has a Win7 partition, but I only use that with some DeLorme mapping software that is now out of date.
This whole discussion is pretty bogus.
Microsoft of itself is neither evil nor benign. It is the people who have shaped Microsoft's corporate culture and policies who can be judged in that way.
Microsoft's behavior became somewhat less obnoxious when Bill Gates stepped away from the daily management of the company. That still left the potty-mouthed, chair throwing, murder threatening, monkey dancer in charge. But he is now going away, too.
So maybe Microsoft will become respectable, at some point. Or maybe not-- there are deeply rooted corporate cultures that can make it impossible for good persons to survive long enough to make a difference.
The Linux distros continue to make significant headway, by any measure you care to apply, except dollar measures. So long as they stay healthy, which looks like a very long time, there will be no duopoly.
There is, though, a group of people who ignore the Linux distros while talking loudly about the health of the digital markets. While this group is diminishing in number it remains quite loud, because it can talk about dollar value, which has a way of catching everyone's attention. The thing is, the value of a Linux distro cannot be measured in dollars, so a good number of these loudmouths are self-blinded to Linux' existence.
How do you put a value on my desktop system, which is running Ubuntu Studio and gives me, at no cost other than the download, the equivalent of $10,000 of software for audio, image, and video production, as well as all the office machinery? I am no longer in the market for Maya or Adobe products, so I can definitely say that Linux has an impact on dollar-related measures of commercial goods, but how much impact is that? I have never thought to do anything with audio mixing or MIDI work and I don't even know the terms, but since I have pro-am grade tools to play with I might someday goof around with them. My gain, but nobody selling commercial software will see a penny from my pockets.
That's if the strand is coiled in the same direction as it was twisted (anterograde coil, AC). From TFA, if it is coiled opposite to its twist (retrograde coil, RC), it lengthens with the application of heat and shrinks as it cools (doing as much work on cooling as AC does on heating).
TFA mentions that other triggers than heat can be used but doesn't say anything more about it. Want more info on that.
Stricter emission controls and carbon caps are adaptive responses to climate change. These begin the changes in society that are necessary for society to adapt. Without the increased societal awareness brought about by emission controls, we would not have an electric car industry, investments in wind farms and solar power, research into neighborhood sized fission power plants, etc. Taken together, these are the beginnings of society level adaptations to the changing environment.
Repeated failure to understand that society is beginning an adaptive response to global warming cannot be explained by any kind of logic or reason. It appears to be an entirely emotional form of denial. Fortunately it is limited to a few individuals who will either change or get increasingly marginalized as the world changes around them. I understand that there are a few flat earth crackpots still around; the remaining climate change denialists will soon be keeping them company.
No, you're wrong.
He said: "The climate will change. We must adapt."
You said: "Then we must stop changing the climate."
I know very well what I said, and it was not that.
As for the rest of parent post: tl;dr. Not much point in doing otherwise since all that verbiage is built on some internal fantasy of the author. Truly a kind of mental masturbation.
About increased cloud formation and the planet's albedo...
What we know is that clouds, in the form of water droplets or ice, increases the albedo more than anything else that is likely to happen. But water vapor is a very strong greenhouse gas. Nobody is talking about the interplay of these factors, because nobody knows how to model them: how much of the increase in evaporation stays water vapor, what layers of the atmosphere will be affected. Another complication is that the atmosphere is expanding as it warms (and we have direct evidence of that: LEO satellites put up 40 years ago have de-orbited from unanticipated increases in drag). How a larger atmospheric envelope will affect the troposphere where our climate and weather live is also unknown.
But expect to see bigger storms as you get older. They maybe warm and wet with lots of flooding, or cold with lots of snow drifts, but they are definitely going to be bigger and stronger than any that anyone today has ever seen. Which in turn suggests that the sea coasts will have it easy compared to the raging river floods that will destroy infrastructure in Colorado, Kansas, the Dakotas, the Missouri and Mississippi drainages, etc.
There is a strong argument that can be made that we are a major cataclysm.
To expect things to stay the way they are just because we happened to evolve at this particular point in history is kind of silly. The climate *will* change. *We* must adapt.
So you are a proponent of stricter emission controls, carbon caps, and forced adoption of green technologies even if they are more expensive? Being as how those are the surest ways of adapting rapidly enough to preserve the greatest amount of your freedom of choice as can be preserved over the next 30 to 50 years? Because that's the direction your train of logic is going toward.
It's a liberty issue. I'd rather be free to choose, even if I make the wrong choices.
The "liberty issue" here is making sure that those 0ne-Percenters who are either too short-sighted or too wrapped up in their own fantasies don't trample your freedom to make wrong choices.
You think young Americans have early exposure to chaos theory and non-linear systems...
YES, I am sure of that. Some of the concepts of chaos theory and fractals, especially those concepts that can be vividly presented in graphics, are as well understood by today's grade schoolers as atomic theory and rocket engineering were understood by grade schoolers in the 1960s.
Which is not to say that today's average youngster (a kid less than 40 years old) have any real grasp of these subjects. It is just that some of these concepts have influenced their world views as those views were being formed (and not as bolt-on additions, which is all that us older guys have to work with). E.g., for those under 30, that some things are fractal (self-similar at every level of scaling) has as much impact on their world view as Newton's third law. So the ancient astrology expression "as above, so below" carries more truthiness for them than it does for us older ones who grew up in a cause and effect (and nothing else) universe.
which makes them more likely to believe in astrology?
NO! I would not go that far. HOWEVER, youngsters are much less likely to dismiss astrology out of hand, since they are aware that there are other things affecting their world than just cause and effect chains. I think they are much more likely to accept that there are other forms of science (of self-consistent bodies of knowledge) than the cause and effect sciences that are all that classical western thought allows.
We got Google. We don't need no steenking maps.
Blowing off a mod point to post this. But I want to see any responses, so I don't want to AC this.
Bringing this back on topic, an increasing number of young people use the word "science" in its older sense, back when it meant an internally self-consistent body of knowledge. Back before the experimental method was described. In the original sense of the word, astrology is a science, just as the medicine of ancient Greece was a science, or artists' study of color theory, perspective, and proportion is a science.
The real question is why so many youngsters today are using the word "science" in this larger sense? I think the answer has to do with their early exposure to fractals, to strange attractors and butterfly effects, and to the mixing of eurocentric world views with the world views of India and east Asia.
It might be that the apparent increase in belief in astrology has more to do with a shift in how the word "science" is now used among young people. Among those under 30 yo, talking about the science of acupuncture, or the science of yoga or of meditation is not uncommon. In this sense, the science of astrology fits right in.
What would be interesting is if the poll had also asked the question, "Does astrology have less, as much, or more impact on your daily life as chemistry and physics?" I would guess the answer to that would show no significant change over the years.
If I understand your point correctly, then it would be easy for someone bilingual in Chinese and English to test this by Googling on the same terms, once in each language. Alas, I do not understand Chinese.
Anyone want to take that on? See if the same thing happens with Google as with Bing?
It is one thing to apply censorship filters to comply with various countries laws when operating inside that country. But it is an entirely different thing to apply those same filters in other countries where there are no censorship laws.
I think we need a word for that. It is after all an entirely new type of corporate fuck-up. I think "bingled" would be an excellent word for when a corporation does unnecessary censoring to comply with some other country's laws. And stuff like that.
...the amount of effort required ... outweighs the efficiencies gained....
True on a one-shot basis, but if two commuters agree to do this every day five days a week so long as their jobs last, then the setup cost is insignificant. There would be significant long term gains.
Text is also a very "hot" medium, to resurrect Marshall McLuhan's term. Hot media are those that require the audience to invest in the work. In a story I might say
"Jim dove out of the car as it skidded sideways over the edge of the cliff. His coat caught on the edge of the door, almost dragging him into the chasm before it tore loose, leaving him rumpled but safe. His arm and leg were raw with road rash, but he was not yet feeling its pain, not while his heart was racing from the adrenaline rush. The pain would come later."
What kind of car? Was the cliff the edge of a canyon, or of a quarry? What kind of coat? Was Jim's road rash on his left side or his right side?
Those details would be critical if this was a movie script, as in the recent Star Trek movie. But they are not needed, and would get in the way, in text. Because in text the reader gets to fill in the details, and create the story imagery that works best for him. That kind of audience involvement is what McLuhan meant by a hot medium.
We problem solve in hot ways: we talk about the advantages of buffering and sorting the data locally before sending it over the wire to the storage center, but we don't say what kind buffer (memory? disk?) or what kind of sort (bubble??). We don't say anything more than what is needed to evoke the kind of image we want the reader to see. Pseudocode is one way of refrigerating text so it is cold enough to use as a guide in writing the program code. Pseudocode is very wordy; the conciseness of natural language evocative descriptions is replaced by precision. And computer languages are all about precision, which is why they are so damn hard to work with.
We need better refrigerators in our problem solving. But I don't think that can be done with visuals. McLuhan regarded visual presentations as being "cold", since they don't allow the audience to bring their own imagination into active play. Problem solving in a visual system would limit what the imagination can bring to the process.
I have worked with several declarative languages: the regular expression engine in Perl, and also HTML, and CSS. I cannot visualize any of these in a graphical way.
The only true graphical languages I have worked with are in Blender and Maya (mostly Blender, since it is the better choice for solo CG artwork). These languages are excellent for modeling: Blender set to 1 meter units has sub-millimeter accuracy in a 10 cubic kilometer space.
I don't see any intersection between what can be done in Blender and what can be done in a regular expression engine. Yet both are declarative languages,
The work in HTML5 and CSS3 in separating content and presentation shows the direction of growth of declarative languages as a whole. This suggests that we need to teach newbie programmers that pseudocode is a declarative language to use in developing the programming solution, that is independent of the coding process. And that existing programming languages-- Assembly, C, Pascal, Python, etc-- should be regarded as methods of presentation of the underlying pseudocode.
Or maybe it is all bullshit.
I learned some time ago to not bother with learning anything I can look up when I need it. So now I'm dependent on a bunch of brain prosthetics: shopping lists, todo lists, calendars with notes. The biggest one of all being Google.
Now I'm more concerned with remembering how to rediscover that nugget I once knew than in trying to remember the nugget itself. If I can't get to Google, I sometimes look slow and dense in conversations with kids less than 40 years old. But so long as I've got one of my Android gadgets in reach (and charged up), I'm one of the brighter bulbs in the tool shed.
Uh, wait a minute,.. what did I just say...
The problem with worshiping Science as a religion is that we spent several thousand years learning core technologies like, oh, handling fire, talking and writing, building boats that could sail thousands of miles. All of it before there was science.
It is quite clear to anyone with an unfettered mind that there is an awful lot that can be learned that does not fit the scientific paradigm. Try using the whole of your brain, and not just that fraction that handles "scientific" abstractions.
Well, there comes a point when too little sleep definitely makes you feel older faster...