And the flip side is that the P'n'S that you bring to everything can never take a really decent photo.
A decent photo is one that can you work with in Photoshop (or the Gimp, which is better for everything except a few types of professional work). The kinds of things you want to be able to do are cropping and rescaling, selective blurring of background distractions, selective sharpening with the "unsharp" capability, often some tweaking of colors. In this day and age, a photo is not finished until it has been photoshopped at least a little bit. The quality of the P'n'S image will limit what can be done, sometimes severely limit it. A DSLR camera will let you go further since the raw image is better. At this point I believe all DSLRs offer a.tiff or.raw format that the Gimp can work with, or an uncompressed.jpg format which is usually just as good as a.tiff. These uncompressed files give you all the detail that the camera actually saw. But P'n'S cameras generally only offer a lossy compression jpg format at around 85%, so the images you get from them are lower quality.
To go to the thread's original question, anyone getting into photography these days should plan to use two different cameras. A DSLR for things like birthday parties, graduation photos, and so on, which should be the best camera that one can budget for. And a P'n'S that is easy to carry around and cheap enough that you are willing to risk breaking or losing it so you can take it everywhere. So I think the real question is which one should you buy first, and I think that depends on what you will be doing first: Christmas tree photos of the kids? Or snapshots taken from your seat on the ski lift?
A little background is in order. I am squarely in the "pro-am" level of photography: I have sold a few photos but I do not aspire to be a professional. I currently own a one year old Canon Powershot P'n'S, a Minolta Z-1 DSLR that cost about $300 seven years ago, and a $1,500 Minolta DSLR (camera with $350 does-everything flash and other accessories). I carry around the P'n'S most of the time and even take photos with it sometimes. I take Z-1 on outdoor photo shoots at the beach, etc, and the really fancy camera only gets out of the house for safe events, far from sand, salt water, or other hazards.
And the flames of candles have been thoroughly studied since the time before science. So we know how to handle wildfires, which is why the fire currently burning through the homes of Reno, NV cannot possibly be happening.
Even in theory, there is a tremendous amount of blinding ignorance between what goes on in the laboratory and what happens in uncontrolled reality. In practice it is worse than that. For instance, parent post demonstrates one facet of that ignorance: the misbegotten faith that complex real world phenomena can be thoroughly understood with a few highly controlled laboratory experiments coupled with any sophomore's ability to extrapolate from a gram of known results to a tonne of real world activity.
I have been free of the need to support any Windows users for years now, but from around 2000 through 2007 I made a few hundred USB thumb drives loaded with office and graphics software from PortableApps, as well as job related documents, Firefox bookmarks, word processor and spreadsheet templates, and just about everything else a new employee at a particular hospital (2000 - 2002) or a student in a job training program (2003 - 2007) would need. Costs of distribution were lower than hardcopy, the material was more easily available to the user, and with so many persons working from the same USB image, some of the advantages of standardization were realized (students were able to help each other find documents or learn to use some feature).
If you go ahead with this, do consider using PortableApps. If I recall correctly, they had a fairly painless process for updates, for one thing.
If I were doing this for a family, I would do as others suggested and build a photo album on the stick as well. And maybe digitize some family documents, collections of ancestors' letters, the family tree, a recording of the family singing Christmas carols, etc.
I would also start thinking about how to make updating the data stash a family yuletide tradition.
Oops, I did end up with "nucleotide" when I meant "nuclide" (and typed "nucleide"). Good catch. That is not the first time, and probably will not be the last, when I accept a suggested spelling correction from a computer without realizing the stupid thing had given me the wrong word for the particular context.
As to the rest of parent post, there really is no need to say anything. Just another A.C. who went ballistic when someone posted something that tipped over his favorite house of cards.
This post should be moderated "-1: snarky", but that is not a score that slashdot recognizes. This is an imperfect world, far outside the simplicities of the laboratory. Deal with it. Or at least get out of the way of those who are dealing with it.
I think it appropriate here to point out that the past tense should not be used in describing either the Fukishima or the Chernobyl incidents. Fukishima is a long way from being contained or even put into a "cold shutdown" state. It is known that Chernobyl's sarcophagus will fail, maybe in decades, maybe next year (there are too many unknowns, too much pure guesswork, in the projections to know what to expect).
At this point, the problems with understanding these situations appears to be as much chemical as nuclear. No one has done any serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium, that constantly changing compound that forms when fuel rods melt, puddle, and interact chemically with casing material, coolant and coolant contaminates, concrete and whatever was in the stone of the aggregate, ground water, water vapor from slowly cooking the aquifer below the corium, etc. We do know from the naturally occurring nuclear reactors that aqueous chemistry is capable of concentrating nucleotides (and moderating neutrons) sufficiently to reawaken chain reactions in sites that had been dormant for geologic periods of time. Things will probably happen much quicker in these man-made corium deposits.
Just exactly how one would do serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium is left as an exercise for the student.
Are these enough doses to adequately protect a multinational, Israeli-led humanitarian effort to deal with the sudden outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of smallpox, and the complete breakdown in government services that would happen simultaneously, when this happens in Iran??
Should Iran be worrying about such a thing? Would the world be a better place if Iran started to worry about it? Would instigating that worry be worth $433 million?
Now that is the kind of tinfoil hat thinking that I come to Slashdot for. It is really disappointing that I have to bring it here myself.
Paul has some good ideas when it comes to dealing with foreign lands (like not being the world's police)
That sounds like Obama talking. Also with the Libya thing it looks like we already have a President (and Secretary of State) who have learned a little something about how to walk that talk.
Like the parent post, I too have problems with Paul's faith-based economics. I mean, capitalism is the best theory we may have for explaining economic phenomena, but if it was a successful theory, then the USA would have foreseen and avoided the economic disaster that started in 2007, eh?
Capitalism needs to be recognized for what it is: a kind of emotional security blanket for those who do not want to be part of the 99% but are not willing to face up to the cold hard truth that you have to screw a lot of people if you want to get to the top of the heap.
Can you not smell a bad cover story when you step in it? Did you never read about Howard Hughes, the CIA, and the Glomar Explorer? Sheesh, you people should turn in your tinfoil hats, you do not deserve them.
Hard saying what the $433 million is really buying, or where the money is going, but it is pretty obviously not going to a smallpox vaccine.
I do not use Unity and I will stay with Ubuntu 10.4 as long as I can. One of the reasons why I finally migrated from WinXP to Ubuntu was because the GUIs seemed more similar to me than the "new and improved" Windows GUI. I have also used a qwerty keyboard all my life and I will avoid any attempt to change that.
The GUI needs to do what I need it to do, and I would prefer for it to do that fairly efficiently. But even more important than its efficiency is that the GUI needs to get out of my way and stay out of my way. The overheads involved in learning a new interface are an unnecessary PITA. I do not have so many years left in my life that I want to waste time learning new ways of doing things when the old ways may not be as good, but are still good enough to get on with the work at hand.
Well, there's fracking. This was a shallow quake and all.
Also, if you are far enough away, eastern Oklahoma and the New Madrid fault line look very close to each other. And stories about the beginnings of the Mississippi Rift Valley are appropriate to the average developmental age of slashdot's readers and their interest in weird fictions.
So the story sort of fits here. About as well as many of slashdot's other stories.
If we had any sense at all, we would shut down every nuclear power plant until we had evidence that we had developed human beings who are smart enough to run them properly without ever screwing up.
And, by the same logic we'd shut down every fossil fueled power plant until we knew it was safe to operate them while dumping their emissions willy nilly into the atmosphere.
Tim.
And if you look at the history of coal-fired power plants, you would see that we are in fact using regulatory mechanisms combined with market forces to slowly shut down the coal-burners. Granted, progress is much slower than many would like to see, but then again any coal-fired catastrophe will take decades to unfold. While nuclear catastrophes happen much faster, typically in a handful of hours from working nuclear power facility to incredibly expensive mess to clean up.
BTW, what have the Japanese decided to do with all that contaminated trash? Bury it somewhere out of reach of tsunamis and earthquakes? Or just toss it into Mount Fuji?
No, that is false. There is quite a bit of petroleum product used in extracting and refining uranium. Not to mention all those diesel powered cement mixers and cranes used in construction of the power plant. And of course there is the manufacture of the containment vessel, all the fancy piping, the pump stations, etc, etc, etc.
It would be amusing to add up all the calories of petroleum product needed to build and fuel a nuclear power plant and compare it to the calories needed to run a modern coal fired generator. I am guessing that you could run a coal fired plant for a couple of years or more with the petrochemical energy required to get a nuclear plant to the point where you could push its start button.
Hmm. In these discussions it probably would be useful for someone who knew how to tackle the cost analysis to estimate the amount of petrochemicals consumed in getting uranium out of the ground and into the fuel rods.
Nuclear is probably the most regulated industry in the world. You do realize the issue was not caused by lack of regulations.
Which strongly suggests that we do not have the beginnings of a clue about how to build a safe and environmentally sound nuclear power industry.
There are no technical problems with using nuclear fission as a power source. There are clearly problems with using human beings to design, operate, and maintain such power plants. Failure of those components is what the regulations are supposed to protect us against, but clearly we do not yet know how to solve that critical part of the problem.
If we had any sense at all, we would shut down every nuclear power plant until we had evidence that we had developed human beings who are smart enough to run them properly without ever screwing up.
Mountain Dew in the USA uses a lot of high fructose corn syrup and not sugar. HFCS can cause stomach problems, among other things (we were not built to handle huge dumps of fructose into the bloodstream, not to mention any trace allergens the HFCS picks up as it is piped from the refinery into the railroad tank car for delivery to the Pepsi factory).
First, there is a need to define what "addictive" means.
If you are talking about physiological addiction, then marijuana is much less addictive than caffeine (whose withdrawal symptoms include headaches and mild malaise as portions of the brain that had become accustomed to caffeine re-adjust). I am unaware of any work that suggests marijuana causes a physiologic dependence. I am aware of many persons, including myself at times, who are not functioning at their best until they have that morning cup of coffee.
If you are talking about psychological addiction, then you are talking about an area where the nomenclature is not well defined; where the words mean whatever the hell you want them to mean. Research papers into psychological dependence on drugs invariably provide a definition of that term because there is no commonly held definition.
But "addiction" in common parlance is often used only to carry a lot of emotional connotations but no actual meaning in terms of logical argument. Neither the White House nor anyone else is threatening to shut down Starbucks or force Jolt Cola off the market, despite the large number of USA citizens who are addicted to caffeine from childhood. The claim that "marijuana is addictive" is a completely emotional attempt at persuasion, not a logical argument. If it were otherwise, the screed would have provided some definition of addiction.
I had to take a phone call while writing the above reply, and I now see that I had lost track of which thread I was in. The main points I made are valid, but I confused this thread with the one about the neutrinos.
The definition of QM vacuum being used is inadequate for the current purpose, for it implies that there is at least one quantum state with a probability of 1, which would break quite a lot of the quantum mechanics model. I suspect that the definition was imported from some other aspect of the QM model where it works as well as centrifugal force works in classical physics. That is, as a convenient fiction that can sometimes be used within a specific context to hide a lot of unnecessary complexity that is not germane to the issue at hand. Those kinds of convenient fictions do not fare well when they are taken out of context and plugged in somewhere else.
To be blunt about it, do not confuse logic with reality, and theory with truth. Physics is a game of model building where the goal is to make new models that are closer to reality. But physics works only with models, it says nothing directly about reality. This is especially important in the quantum realms. Do not confuse the baubles of the QM model with the bight shines that we work so hard to observe.
Back closer to topic: Assume that the neutrinos are traveling at light speed and that there are no errors in measurement of time or locations. Then the question changes: How can the actual distance traveled by the neutrinos be longer than the calculated distance between the locations? Is there, perhaps, enough mass in between the two locations to curve space in such a way that the 'straight line' distance is 17 meters longer than it would be if the points were located in interstellar space?
Most of parent post's points are disagreements on style of presentation, and can be summed up by saying "If you do not know how to use certain presentation skills, do not use them." Which I certainly do not disagree with. That is most certainly true with using code snippets as jump-off points to discuss similarities between languages, the logic that underlies all programming, etc. If all you know how to do with a code snippet is to analyze the damn thing, then do not use them.
I do take issue with parent post's objection to using PHP and Javascript. These are very accessible to high school students RIGHT NOW, and the author of TFA states he is comfortable with them, so they are the logical choice. In 3 sessions of 20 minutes each, this is not going to be about learning how to program; It will be about much more general questions. Probably variants on "When I grow up and go to college, would I really like to take courses in computer science?"
Yeah, put together an arsenal of Dilbert cartoons. Use them to season the presentation-- especially effective when you can put an appropriate one on the screen in (partial) response to a student's question.
Lead off with a Dilbert cartoon. Then spend the first half of the first session doing a general presentation on Javascript and PHP, how they fit together, how much they influence the student's lives, and how students could get involved in using them. Be as interactive as possible. Show a lot of code snippets but keep the discussion at about 10,000 feet: no detail, but low enough to talk about the similarities and differences between the languages. Basically use the server - browser as a concrete example from which you can discuss the larger issues of security, conformity with conventions, dealing with weaknesses in a language, etc, etc.
Use the last half of the first session as a discussion session, with you asking them what topics they would like you to talk about in the next two sessions. Give them a list of general topics that you could talk about and encourage them to hash it out amongst themselves. Possibilities include design and implementation issues, debts incurred during schooling and salaries and job security, dealing with PHBs and other external job pressures, handling collaboration issues. Use the results to figure out what to do with the following sessions.
If you run into dead spots, put up a Dilbert cartoon and try to get some discussion going about it. So go in with maybe 100 or so cartoons on tap, with the intention of showing only a few as part of the presentation but with the rest a click away, to be brought in as needed.
Handouts: No handouts in this day and age. Give them access to a web page written by you for this presentation that has links to basic tutorials on Javascrpt and PHP, and to more material on the subjects you choose to cover in the 10,000 foot overview. Get the student's input on what kinds of things should go on this web page (it should be working by the last session, but it does not have to be finished before then).
An experienced teacher who knows their subject and their students will need 40 minutes to prepare for each 20 minute session. You know the subject, but you do not know the students and presumably you do not know how to teach (or you would not have asked Slashdot for input). So give yourself an hour to prepare for each 20 minute session, and use feedback from the first session to shape the second and third sessions.
I do not think there is any problem with what you suggest. That is pretty much how things work with acetylene and oxygen tanks.
The battery charging stations could be held responsible for assuring that any batteries approaching failure are pulled out of service and returned to the manufacturer who would refurbish or recycle them. The overheads involved would be passed on to the customer of course, but since it is distributed over years and presumably many, many drivers, the cost per battery swap would be too small to notice.
Yeah! Just like they fight so hard today to keep their proprietary gasoline mixtures. It would be so much easier if we could just put Exxon gas into Hondas, and Sinclair gas into Chevies.
Flywheel energy storage has found several niches. IIRC, the New York City subways use stationary flywheels as a kind of load leveller when trains are using regenerative braking at some of the platforms. Also I believe they are still in use on some research vessels to supply steady power to fancy equipment.
The theoretical energy density is very high. The practical limitations seem to be failure containment systems and cost of materials. In mobile situations, there is also the size of the gimbal mechanism.
In the "I don't know but I've been told" category, when a carbon fiber flywheel fails catastrophically it can result in a cloud of carbon dust massing a few kilograms expanding outward at high velocity. If that cloud hits an open flame, the resulting secondary explosion would be comparable to a grain elevator explosion.
Slashdot Mirror
And the flip side is that the P'n'S that you bring to everything can never take a really decent photo.
A decent photo is one that can you work with in Photoshop (or the Gimp, which is better for everything except a few types of professional work). The kinds of things you want to be able to do are cropping and rescaling, selective blurring of background distractions, selective sharpening with the "unsharp" capability, often some tweaking of colors. In this day and age, a photo is not finished until it has been photoshopped at least a little bit. The quality of the P'n'S image will limit what can be done, sometimes severely limit it. A DSLR camera will let you go further since the raw image is better. At this point I believe all DSLRs offer a .tiff or .raw format that the Gimp can work with, or an uncompressed .jpg format which is usually just as good as a .tiff. These uncompressed files give you all the detail that the camera actually saw. But P'n'S cameras generally only offer a lossy compression jpg format at around 85%, so the images you get from them are lower quality.
To go to the thread's original question, anyone getting into photography these days should plan to use two different cameras. A DSLR for things like birthday parties, graduation photos, and so on, which should be the best camera that one can budget for. And a P'n'S that is easy to carry around and cheap enough that you are willing to risk breaking or losing it so you can take it everywhere. So I think the real question is which one should you buy first, and I think that depends on what you will be doing first: Christmas tree photos of the kids? Or snapshots taken from your seat on the ski lift?
A little background is in order. I am squarely in the "pro-am" level of photography: I have sold a few photos but I do not aspire to be a professional. I currently own a one year old Canon Powershot P'n'S, a Minolta Z-1 DSLR that cost about $300 seven years ago, and a $1,500 Minolta DSLR (camera with $350 does-everything flash and other accessories). I carry around the P'n'S most of the time and even take photos with it sometimes. I take Z-1 on outdoor photo shoots at the beach, etc, and the really fancy camera only gets out of the house for safe events, far from sand, salt water, or other hazards.
Yeah, right.
And the flames of candles have been thoroughly studied since the time before science. So we know how to handle wildfires, which is why the fire currently burning through the homes of Reno, NV cannot possibly be happening.
Even in theory, there is a tremendous amount of blinding ignorance between what goes on in the laboratory and what happens in uncontrolled reality. In practice it is worse than that. For instance, parent post demonstrates one facet of that ignorance: the misbegotten faith that complex real world phenomena can be thoroughly understood with a few highly controlled laboratory experiments coupled with any sophomore's ability to extrapolate from a gram of known results to a tonne of real world activity.
FINALLY a mention of PortableApps!
I have been free of the need to support any Windows users for years now, but from around 2000 through 2007 I made a few hundred USB thumb drives loaded with office and graphics software from PortableApps, as well as job related documents, Firefox bookmarks, word processor and spreadsheet templates, and just about everything else a new employee at a particular hospital (2000 - 2002) or a student in a job training program (2003 - 2007) would need. Costs of distribution were lower than hardcopy, the material was more easily available to the user, and with so many persons working from the same USB image, some of the advantages of standardization were realized (students were able to help each other find documents or learn to use some feature).
If you go ahead with this, do consider using PortableApps. If I recall correctly, they had a fairly painless process for updates, for one thing.
If I were doing this for a family, I would do as others suggested and build a photo album on the stick as well. And maybe digitize some family documents, collections of ancestors' letters, the family tree, a recording of the family singing Christmas carols, etc.
I would also start thinking about how to make updating the data stash a family yuletide tradition.
Oops, I did end up with "nucleotide" when I meant "nuclide" (and typed "nucleide"). Good catch. That is not the first time, and probably will not be the last, when I accept a suggested spelling correction from a computer without realizing the stupid thing had given me the wrong word for the particular context.
As to the rest of parent post, there really is no need to say anything. Just another A.C. who went ballistic when someone posted something that tipped over his favorite house of cards.
This post should be moderated "-1: snarky", but that is not a score that slashdot recognizes. This is an imperfect world, far outside the simplicities of the laboratory. Deal with it. Or at least get out of the way of those who are dealing with it.
Citation very much needed, since as far as I can tell, using Google to search the news, parent post is a bald faced lie.
This story, date line 11/18 is typical:
It is most likely that Tokyo Electric Power Co., Inc. will achieve its target of reaching cold shutdown by the end of the year.
Even if the cold shutdown target is achieved, there still is a long road ahead before completely containing the accident.
I think it appropriate here to point out that the past tense should not be used in describing either the Fukishima or the Chernobyl incidents. Fukishima is a long way from being contained or even put into a "cold shutdown" state. It is known that Chernobyl's sarcophagus will fail, maybe in decades, maybe next year (there are too many unknowns, too much pure guesswork, in the projections to know what to expect).
At this point, the problems with understanding these situations appears to be as much chemical as nuclear. No one has done any serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium, that constantly changing compound that forms when fuel rods melt, puddle, and interact chemically with casing material, coolant and coolant contaminates, concrete and whatever was in the stone of the aggregate, ground water, water vapor from slowly cooking the aquifer below the corium, etc. We do know from the naturally occurring nuclear reactors that aqueous chemistry is capable of concentrating nucleotides (and moderating neutrons) sufficiently to reawaken chain reactions in sites that had been dormant for geologic periods of time. Things will probably happen much quicker in these man-made corium deposits.
Just exactly how one would do serious hands-on research on the chemistry of corium is left as an exercise for the student.
Are these enough doses to adequately protect a multinational, Israeli-led humanitarian effort to deal with the sudden outbreak of a particularly virulent strain of smallpox, and the complete breakdown in government services that would happen simultaneously, when this happens in Iran??
Should Iran be worrying about such a thing? Would the world be a better place if Iran started to worry about it? Would instigating that worry be worth $433 million?
Now that is the kind of tinfoil hat thinking that I come to Slashdot for. It is really disappointing that I have to bring it here myself.
Paul has some good ideas when it comes to dealing with foreign lands (like not being the world's police)
That sounds like Obama talking. Also with the Libya thing it looks like we already have a President (and Secretary of State) who have learned a little something about how to walk that talk.
Like the parent post, I too have problems with Paul's faith-based economics. I mean, capitalism is the best theory we may have for explaining economic phenomena, but if it was a successful theory, then the USA would have foreseen and avoided the economic disaster that started in 2007, eh?
Capitalism needs to be recognized for what it is: a kind of emotional security blanket for those who do not want to be part of the 99% but are not willing to face up to the cold hard truth that you have to screw a lot of people if you want to get to the top of the heap.
Can you not smell a bad cover story when you step in it? Did you never read about Howard Hughes, the CIA, and the Glomar Explorer? Sheesh, you people should turn in your tinfoil hats, you do not deserve them.
Hard saying what the $433 million is really buying, or where the money is going, but it is pretty obviously not going to a smallpox vaccine.
I do not use Unity and I will stay with Ubuntu 10.4 as long as I can. One of the reasons why I finally migrated from WinXP to Ubuntu was because the GUIs seemed more similar to me than the "new and improved" Windows GUI. I have also used a qwerty keyboard all my life and I will avoid any attempt to change that.
The GUI needs to do what I need it to do, and I would prefer for it to do that fairly efficiently. But even more important than its efficiency is that the GUI needs to get out of my way and stay out of my way. The overheads involved in learning a new interface are an unnecessary PITA. I do not have so many years left in my life that I want to waste time learning new ways of doing things when the old ways may not be as good, but are still good enough to get on with the work at hand.
Well, there's fracking. This was a shallow quake and all.
Also, if you are far enough away, eastern Oklahoma and the New Madrid fault line look very close to each other. And stories about the beginnings of the Mississippi Rift Valley are appropriate to the average developmental age of slashdot's readers and their interest in weird fictions.
So the story sort of fits here. About as well as many of slashdot's other stories.
You should probably stay where you are. What else could possibly go wrong?
If we had any sense at all, we would shut down every nuclear power plant until we had evidence that we had developed human beings who are smart enough to run them properly without ever screwing up.
And, by the same logic we'd shut down every fossil fueled power plant until we knew it was safe to operate them while dumping their emissions willy nilly into the atmosphere.
Tim.
And if you look at the history of coal-fired power plants, you would see that we are in fact using regulatory mechanisms combined with market forces to slowly shut down the coal-burners. Granted, progress is much slower than many would like to see, but then again any coal-fired catastrophe will take decades to unfold. While nuclear catastrophes happen much faster, typically in a handful of hours from working nuclear power facility to incredibly expensive mess to clean up.
BTW, what have the Japanese decided to do with all that contaminated trash? Bury it somewhere out of reach of tsunamis and earthquakes? Or just toss it into Mount Fuji?
Recent news is that India has committed to the development of a commercial scale thorium reactor, with a target date for completion of 2020.
No, that is false. There is quite a bit of petroleum product used in extracting and refining uranium. Not to mention all those diesel powered cement mixers and cranes used in construction of the power plant. And of course there is the manufacture of the containment vessel, all the fancy piping, the pump stations, etc, etc, etc.
It would be amusing to add up all the calories of petroleum product needed to build and fuel a nuclear power plant and compare it to the calories needed to run a modern coal fired generator. I am guessing that you could run a coal fired plant for a couple of years or more with the petrochemical energy required to get a nuclear plant to the point where you could push its start button.
Hmm. In these discussions it probably would be useful for someone who knew how to tackle the cost analysis to estimate the amount of petrochemicals consumed in getting uranium out of the ground and into the fuel rods.
Nuclear is probably the most regulated industry in the world. You do realize the issue was not caused by lack of regulations.
Which strongly suggests that we do not have the beginnings of a clue about how to build a safe and environmentally sound nuclear power industry.
There are no technical problems with using nuclear fission as a power source. There are clearly problems with using human beings to design, operate, and maintain such power plants. Failure of those components is what the regulations are supposed to protect us against, but clearly we do not yet know how to solve that critical part of the problem.
If we had any sense at all, we would shut down every nuclear power plant until we had evidence that we had developed human beings who are smart enough to run them properly without ever screwing up.
Mountain Dew in the USA uses a lot of high fructose corn syrup and not sugar. HFCS can cause stomach problems, among other things (we were not built to handle huge dumps of fructose into the bloodstream, not to mention any trace allergens the HFCS picks up as it is piped from the refinery into the railroad tank car for delivery to the Pepsi factory).
First, there is a need to define what "addictive" means.
If you are talking about physiological addiction, then marijuana is much less addictive than caffeine (whose withdrawal symptoms include headaches and mild malaise as portions of the brain that had become accustomed to caffeine re-adjust). I am unaware of any work that suggests marijuana causes a physiologic dependence. I am aware of many persons, including myself at times, who are not functioning at their best until they have that morning cup of coffee.
If you are talking about psychological addiction, then you are talking about an area where the nomenclature is not well defined; where the words mean whatever the hell you want them to mean. Research papers into psychological dependence on drugs invariably provide a definition of that term because there is no commonly held definition.
But "addiction" in common parlance is often used only to carry a lot of emotional connotations but no actual meaning in terms of logical argument. Neither the White House nor anyone else is threatening to shut down Starbucks or force Jolt Cola off the market, despite the large number of USA citizens who are addicted to caffeine from childhood. The claim that "marijuana is addictive" is a completely emotional attempt at persuasion, not a logical argument. If it were otherwise, the screed would have provided some definition of addiction.
Ahem. Apologies are in order.
I had to take a phone call while writing the above reply, and I now see that I had lost track of which thread I was in. The main points I made are valid, but I confused this thread with the one about the neutrinos.
The definition of QM vacuum being used is inadequate for the current purpose, for it implies that there is at least one quantum state with a probability of 1, which would break quite a lot of the quantum mechanics model. I suspect that the definition was imported from some other aspect of the QM model where it works as well as centrifugal force works in classical physics. That is, as a convenient fiction that can sometimes be used within a specific context to hide a lot of unnecessary complexity that is not germane to the issue at hand. Those kinds of convenient fictions do not fare well when they are taken out of context and plugged in somewhere else.
To be blunt about it, do not confuse logic with reality, and theory with truth. Physics is a game of model building where the goal is to make new models that are closer to reality. But physics works only with models, it says nothing directly about reality. This is especially important in the quantum realms. Do not confuse the baubles of the QM model with the bight shines that we work so hard to observe.
Back closer to topic: Assume that the neutrinos are traveling at light speed and that there are no errors in measurement of time or locations. Then the question changes: How can the actual distance traveled by the neutrinos be longer than the calculated distance between the locations? Is there, perhaps, enough mass in between the two locations to curve space in such a way that the 'straight line' distance is 17 meters longer than it would be if the points were located in interstellar space?
Most of parent post's points are disagreements on style of presentation, and can be summed up by saying "If you do not know how to use certain presentation skills, do not use them." Which I certainly do not disagree with. That is most certainly true with using code snippets as jump-off points to discuss similarities between languages, the logic that underlies all programming, etc. If all you know how to do with a code snippet is to analyze the damn thing, then do not use them.
I do take issue with parent post's objection to using PHP and Javascript. These are very accessible to high school students RIGHT NOW, and the author of TFA states he is comfortable with them, so they are the logical choice. In 3 sessions of 20 minutes each, this is not going to be about learning how to program; It will be about much more general questions. Probably variants on "When I grow up and go to college, would I really like to take courses in computer science?"
Yeah, put together an arsenal of Dilbert cartoons. Use them to season the presentation-- especially effective when you can put an appropriate one on the screen in (partial) response to a student's question.
Lead off with a Dilbert cartoon. Then spend the first half of the first session doing a general presentation on Javascript and PHP, how they fit together, how much they influence the student's lives, and how students could get involved in using them. Be as interactive as possible. Show a lot of code snippets but keep the discussion at about 10,000 feet: no detail, but low enough to talk about the similarities and differences between the languages. Basically use the server - browser as a concrete example from which you can discuss the larger issues of security, conformity with conventions, dealing with weaknesses in a language, etc, etc.
Use the last half of the first session as a discussion session, with you asking them what topics they would like you to talk about in the next two sessions. Give them a list of general topics that you could talk about and encourage them to hash it out amongst themselves. Possibilities include design and implementation issues, debts incurred during schooling and salaries and job security, dealing with PHBs and other external job pressures, handling collaboration issues. Use the results to figure out what to do with the following sessions.
If you run into dead spots, put up a Dilbert cartoon and try to get some discussion going about it. So go in with maybe 100 or so cartoons on tap, with the intention of showing only a few as part of the presentation but with the rest a click away, to be brought in as needed.
Handouts: No handouts in this day and age. Give them access to a web page written by you for this presentation that has links to basic tutorials on Javascrpt and PHP, and to more material on the subjects you choose to cover in the 10,000 foot overview. Get the student's input on what kinds of things should go on this web page (it should be working by the last session, but it does not have to be finished before then).
An experienced teacher who knows their subject and their students will need 40 minutes to prepare for each 20 minute session. You know the subject, but you do not know the students and presumably you do not know how to teach (or you would not have asked Slashdot for input). So give yourself an hour to prepare for each 20 minute session, and use feedback from the first session to shape the second and third sessions.
Let us know how this goes.
I do not think there is any problem with what you suggest. That is pretty much how things work with acetylene and oxygen tanks.
The battery charging stations could be held responsible for assuring that any batteries approaching failure are pulled out of service and returned to the manufacturer who would refurbish or recycle them. The overheads involved would be passed on to the customer of course, but since it is distributed over years and presumably many, many drivers, the cost per battery swap would be too small to notice.
Yeah! Just like they fight so hard today to keep their proprietary gasoline mixtures. It would be so much easier if we could just put Exxon gas into Hondas, and Sinclair gas into Chevies.
Oh, wait...
Flywheel energy storage has found several niches. IIRC, the New York City subways use stationary flywheels as a kind of load leveller when trains are using regenerative braking at some of the platforms. Also I believe they are still in use on some research vessels to supply steady power to fancy equipment.
The theoretical energy density is very high. The practical limitations seem to be failure containment systems and cost of materials. In mobile situations, there is also the size of the gimbal mechanism.
In the "I don't know but I've been told" category, when a carbon fiber flywheel fails catastrophically it can result in a cloud of carbon dust massing a few kilograms expanding outward at high velocity. If that cloud hits an open flame, the resulting secondary explosion would be comparable to a grain elevator explosion.