I'm a climate scientist--a modeler, in fact. I know C, C++, Fortran, Python, Java, bits of Perl and PHP. I figure I could get a job at Amazon on Google or Microsoft or some other big software shop and be making over $100k. I could certainly do better than what my salary has been: $25k for 2000-2006 (grad school), and for 2007-8 it was $40k (postdoc). Let's say I got a job for $50k/yr--that would be an extra $170k I would have made over the last 8 years.
Let me tell you buddy, I'm not in this for the money.
And if someone could find compelling evidence that indicated global warming wasn't happening, that would be welcomed by the climate science community. New evidence that overturns an old understanding is the holy grail of science.
I'm not totally sure how they do the calibration, I don't actually work with Argo, but I used to work in the same department as one of the main groups manufacturing floats. This is what I remember from papers I've read and stuff I picked up at seminars, so I may have the details wrong. Before they are launched, the sensors are calibrated using a sample of IAPSO Standard Seawater. Once they are out at sea, sensor drift is estimated a few ways.
First, if another Argo float moves through the same body of water as a previous one, the measurements they make are compared. Each year you get a few hundred matchup like this and that lets you get an indication of the drift.
Second, there are ship measurements that are taken periodically as research vessels cross the ocean. These measurements can be calibrated very exactly, and they sometimes cross float tracks, so you can compare the ship data with occasional float data. They can also send ships out specifically to compare with certain floats, cause the floats transmit their position home every few days.
Third, they've fished some of the floats out of the water and recalibrated them. The ones they've recalibrated this way are used as a sample to calculate drift rates.
Fourth, the reconstructions of ocean state that they do are based on interpolation and long averages, and if the drift is random, the average of a bunch of the floats should be close to reality. If a float is obviously drifting too far from reality (as measured by other floats or the climatology for the area) the data is flagged and removed from the main dataset.
They tried to make the floats accurate to within about.1 PSU over their lifetime (Ocean Salinity is generally between 32-36 PSU, depending on where you are) and I think their measured accuracies from the floats they retrieved and recalibrated are within about.2 PSU. So essentially, it's really hard to calibrate these things and they try every method they can think of to do so. 0.2 PSU error may not seem that great, but before the array went in the best guesses we had were probably more like within.5 PSU or so, and we didn't have any information about how it varied with time. There was not a lot of Salinity data from the deep ocean before Argo.
Similar methods are used to calibrate the temperature and oxygen sensors, but you get the idea.
They drift at depths of 1-2km most of the time, and down there the ocean mostly moves along topography lines so the floats actually tend to float parallel to coasts. Some of them wash ashore, but much less than would occur if they were at the surface all the time.
Note that the article make clear they aren't saying the Daily Show's reporting is good--just that it is equally good as serious news shows. What they are saying is, American TV news is a joke.
This is a very interesting discussion for me, since I took General Relativity from Dr. Cooperstock when I was at UVic 6 years ago. He was a great teacher, but he always had slightly... unconventional ideas? Such as he doesn't believe in the existence of black hole singularities. It doesn't surprise me that he would write a paper refuting the existence of dark matter, but knowing him, I'm not sure I would trust it.
Now, I'm not saying he won't turn out to be right. But I'm not holding my breath on this one.
The problem with all these plans to "solve the energy problem" is that they ignore the fact that human energy demand is constantly growing, and growing exponentially. It's the same problem that we have with hard drives; in 1990, my 40MB hard drive was barely enough space. In 2004, my 320GB RAID array is barely enough space. Unless we control the demand for energy, all the new energy sources in the solar system won't solve the problem.
At least, as far as non-renewable resources go. Solar energy, coupled with a focus on efficiency and maybe some population control, would do far more to solve our energy problems than mining space for Helium-3. It would be safer and easier as well. Why go to the moon for energy when the sun delivers it for free?
Fortran speed is totally overrated. I run ocean climate models--some of the most time-intensive computing in the world. An average model run takes 2-4 weeks to complete. However, typically the set-up time is 2-4 weeks as well! It takes forever to set up the initial conditions, do small modifications to the code to configure it the way we want it, etc. Fortran vs, say, C or C++ is a 10-20% speed increase at best, and usually the gap is actually much less. At best, you save a day of compute time with Fortran, but you have so much less choice!
There is currently no viable open source F95 compiler--gcc 4.0 will have one, but as of now, we don't. So you have to buy a compiler package if you want to program. Most comp sci grads never touch Fortran--so everyone coming into the compuational sciences has to learn a new programming language, which slows development further. And, where java and C and C++ and python have a huge amount of APIs and such to bolt onto your program so you don't have to re-code the wheel, Fortran has very little that isn't pure numerical codes.
Fortran is undeniably the best for speed. But speed isn't what matters anymore. Hell, Numerical Python can usually get within a factor of 3 of Fortran speed--and considering how fast you can write Python code, the cross-platform portability, and the fact that it costs nothing to use, Python wins hands down for me, every time. I can just use the extra time the python code takes to make a lovely little GUI for my app that everyone in my department can use--which will help the progress of science far more than a halving of the model runtime.
Well, take a look in the coal mines. They too are very gender biased. You don't see many chicks underground with a jack-hammer. Funny, you don't see them complaining about this, either.
Yeah, if I was a woman I would be totally fighting for the right to be stuck underground with a bunch of working class men who are probably going to resent my presence and make constant sexual innuendos. No matter how good the pay is, it's not worth having to constantly worry about sexual assaults.
Women are willing to do a remarkable amount of nasty, harsh work. Look at all the women in the military nowadays. The reason women aren't miners has nothing to do with preference and everything to do with society.
My Mom got laser eye surgery about 8 years ago, and it was a total debacle. Her eyes are now worse then they were before, so she essentially can't drive at night. This was a while ago, so perhaps the technique has improved, but there is definately a chance that this could mess up your vision.
I don't think I've seen this one yet, but it helped me immensely and it's something I wouldn't have normally thought of: make it as simple as possible to do your work.
What does this mean? Eliminate ANY possible hinderence to getting your work done. If you surf the web a lot, remove your browser shortcut from the desktop, quicklauch bar, dock, or whatever. Put it in the start menu or something. Only access the web through Explorer or Konqueror in filesystem mode, so you have two steps to accomplish before you start surfing; calling up Konq, and typing in a URL that you want to go to. Remove all games from easily accessible places. Put the documents you are working on as shortcuts on the desktop. Anything, as long as it makes it as easy as possible to work on things.
It feels silly when you do things like this (how can this make a real difference?), but every little bit helps.
Nanotech basically. They have basically discovered a way to use a distribution of electric charges on a configuration of three sphere to start one of the spheres rotating. This is different from current electric motors; they use magnetic fields to start things rotating. This kind of engine would use a lot less current to generate motion than conventional electromagnetic motors. This would be good for building little machines; it's really hard to make electromagnets at the subatomic scale, but metallic spheres? Much easier. And static charge? It's hard NOT to get something with static charge on it down at that scale.
Having said that, this is purely a proof-of-concept thingy. What they did was just say, "Look, we can use this simple setup to create rotation". It's like they stuck a magnet near another magnet dangling on a string ang made it rotate. That's a long way from an electromagnetic motor, but it is a first step...
Soft synths are the real problem here. Reason and VST are the two things that keep me from wiping my windows hard drive for good. We need stable, working, effect and synthesis plugins; it's LADSPA that needs the most dev work. Ardour and Rosegarden are great, but I need some synths to work with or my setup is useless.
I think this depends a lot on the kind of research you do. I do ocean modeling, and beyond the actual model code, which is written mostly in Fortran, the only packages I use are Matlab, Scientific Python, and an open source oceanography analysis package called Ferret. This is mostly because I don't have to solve any equations; all my results are based on number crunching. If you are doing theoretical work, and have to find polynomial roots or something, you use something different.
Actually though, I am trying to get away from Matlab more and more. It has some terrible features in it (Like a completely botched graphics library and a for loop command that takes EONS to run) and it costs at least $100 for a personal copy. Sci Py is free and does most of the same things, except that it has no standard plotting routines. At least, none I am aware of...
Re:Still have the orginal three brown books
on
A 1974 Review of D&D
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· Score: 1
Waste of time? Perhaps. But it's cheaper than drugs...
My personal experience with both drugs and D&D forces me to disagree with you.
These things kick ass. I'm a grad student at UW in Oceanography--the pink seagliders in the second picture are built two floors below where I am typing. They're amazing--they communicate home with a cellphone antenna, and there's a 386 laptop connected to a phone line down the hall that accepts their dial-up connections. This allows them to upload their data and recieve new instructions for their mission. Currently they just have a conventional phone on-board for testing, but that will hopefully be upgraded to something like the remains of the Iridium network for the real version. They are the result of an amazing confluence of technologies--low-power cpus, which turn on something like once every five minutes to check their situation and take a measurement, temperature and salinity probes that give reliable data without calibration for a year, battery packs, cellular communication, GPS. The great application for these, however, is not to other worlds--it's to our own. In a few years, it is hoped that there will be a global array of automated seagliders and buoys taking temperature, salinity and velocity measurements everywhere in the ocean. Basically, it will be used to construct a global climate monitoring system--something we'd never be able to do without low-power computers and sattellite tech.
Ok, I over-simplified. Geostrophic motion is difficult to picture, and harder to explain. The water does run downhill; it's just that the coriolis force bends it--to the right in the northern hemisphere, to the left in the southern. If the hill is big enough, the water will eventually enter into a force balance between gravity and the coriolis force, endlessly running around the hill in a circle.
As for the winds, it all depends on how you look at it. The main thing the winds do is pile up water into hills or valleys by Ekman pumping. The actual large scale circulation is driven by the water running down those hills and reaching geostrophic balance. The geoid is the most significant piece of data that one need to understand this process, since on the earth "downhill" actually means "the direction in which the geopotential decreases". That's why the thermal wind relations have you assume a level of no motion in the deep ocean--there's no way to measure absolute velocities, since you don't really know what the sea surface slope is relative to the geoid. Once we have the geoid, we can get the sea surface height relative to the geoid, and once we have that, geostrophy will tell us the large-scale ocean circulation.
It's the small anomalies in the geoid that make it so hard to measure. Since the sea surface height varies by only a meter or two, an anomaly in the geopotential surface height of only a meter will cause a radical change in the distribution of surface currents.
(I'm an oceanographer, too.)
This is so COOL!
on
Mapping Gravity
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· Score: 4, Informative
Mapping the geoid is one of the most fundamental problems in oceanography. Ocean currents are all basically caused by water running downhill. The problem is that "downhill" in this case is relative to the geoid, which is a bumpy, not-nice surface. With this kind of map, we should be able to map surface currents from space; their velocity, their position, everything you want to know about how the surface currents are moving. This is important for climate studies of global warming, since the ocean currents are one of the main transporters of heat from the equator to the poles. This will allow us to get a much better idea of where the heat in the world is going, and how long it takes to get there, which in turn will give us a better handle on global warming.
Oceanographers have been trying to figure out a way to remove the geoid from their equations for a hundred years. Now we can just measure the damn thing. Crazy.
Some of us actually use midi to make interesting music (if you consider techno to be interesting music), since it is the primary way to control hardware synthesizers and samplers. The lack of good midi/audio support in linux is actually the main reason I don't have linux on my home computer. If this program is dead, it's just one more reason for me to stay with Windows...
Re:Mozilla 0.9.5 is getting better and better
on
Mozilla 0.9.5
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· Score: 1
... originally I used to come across sites that had problems with mozilla and had to use IE or Opera, but now, without even realizing it, mozilla has become my default browser of choice.
I wish I had your luck. I think I find about one website a day that Mozilla still doesn't render, and I have to switch to IE. Endlessly frustrating.
It's still my default browser of choice, though...
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a climate scientist--a modeler, in fact. I know C, C++, Fortran, Python, Java, bits of Perl and PHP. I figure I could get a job at Amazon on Google or Microsoft or some other big software shop and be making over $100k. I could certainly do better than what my salary has been: $25k for 2000-2006 (grad school), and for 2007-8 it was $40k (postdoc). Let's say I got a job for $50k/yr--that would be an extra $170k I would have made over the last 8 years.
Let me tell you buddy, I'm not in this for the money.
And if someone could find compelling evidence that indicated global warming wasn't happening, that would be welcomed by the climate science community. New evidence that overturns an old understanding is the holy grail of science.
Seconded. My wife and I played through the whole thing together on PC, and she doesn't even like video games; she made an exception for this one.
I'm not totally sure how they do the calibration, I don't actually work with Argo, but I used to work in the same department as one of the main groups manufacturing floats. This is what I remember from papers I've read and stuff I picked up at seminars, so I may have the details wrong. Before they are launched, the sensors are calibrated using a sample of IAPSO Standard Seawater. Once they are out at sea, sensor drift is estimated a few ways.
.1 PSU over their lifetime (Ocean Salinity is generally between 32-36 PSU, depending on where you are) and I think their measured accuracies from the floats they retrieved and recalibrated are within about .2 PSU. So essentially, it's really hard to calibrate these things and they try every method they can think of to do so. 0.2 PSU error may not seem that great, but before the array went in the best guesses we had were probably more like within .5 PSU or so, and we didn't have any information about how it varied with time. There was not a lot of Salinity data from the deep ocean before Argo.
First, if another Argo float moves through the same body of water as a previous one, the measurements they make are compared. Each year you get a few hundred matchup like this and that lets you get an indication of the drift.
Second, there are ship measurements that are taken periodically as research vessels cross the ocean. These measurements can be calibrated very exactly, and they sometimes cross float tracks, so you can compare the ship data with occasional float data. They can also send ships out specifically to compare with certain floats, cause the floats transmit their position home every few days.
Third, they've fished some of the floats out of the water and recalibrated them. The ones they've recalibrated this way are used as a sample to calculate drift rates.
Fourth, the reconstructions of ocean state that they do are based on interpolation and long averages, and if the drift is random, the average of a bunch of the floats should be close to reality. If a float is obviously drifting too far from reality (as measured by other floats or the climatology for the area) the data is flagged and removed from the main dataset.
They tried to make the floats accurate to within about
Similar methods are used to calibrate the temperature and oxygen sensors, but you get the idea.
Here's a link to an online tool that lets you plot data from the Argo arrays. Got it from Wikipedia.
http://dapper.pmel.noaa.gov/dchart/
They drift at depths of 1-2km most of the time, and down there the ocean mostly moves along topography lines so the floats actually tend to float parallel to coasts. Some of them wash ashore, but much less than would occur if they were at the surface all the time.
Note that the article make clear they aren't saying the Daily Show's reporting is good--just that it is equally good as serious news shows. What they are saying is, American TV news is a joke.
Oh, so true, so true!
Downtown Vancouver's Future Shop (Best Buy in Canada) has 2 core system left at 11:30. Seems like we're a little more hype-immune up here...
This is a very interesting discussion for me, since I took General Relativity from Dr. Cooperstock when I was at UVic 6 years ago. He was a great teacher, but he always had slightly... unconventional ideas? Such as he doesn't believe in the existence of black hole singularities. It doesn't surprise me that he would write a paper refuting the existence of dark matter, but knowing him, I'm not sure I would trust it.
Now, I'm not saying he won't turn out to be right. But I'm not holding my breath on this one.
Who wants to bet this has been going on for decades, and that modern networks and communications tech is just making it easier to find the fakes?
The problem with all these plans to "solve the energy problem" is that they ignore the fact that human energy demand is constantly growing, and growing exponentially. It's the same problem that we have with hard drives; in 1990, my 40MB hard drive was barely enough space. In 2004, my 320GB RAID array is barely enough space. Unless we control the demand for energy, all the new energy sources in the solar system won't solve the problem.
At least, as far as non-renewable resources go. Solar energy, coupled with a focus on efficiency and maybe some population control, would do far more to solve our energy problems than mining space for Helium-3. It would be safer and easier as well. Why go to the moon for energy when the sun delivers it for free?
Fortran speed is totally overrated. I run ocean climate models--some of the most time-intensive computing in the world. An average model run takes 2-4 weeks to complete. However, typically the set-up time is 2-4 weeks as well! It takes forever to set up the initial conditions, do small modifications to the code to configure it the way we want it, etc. Fortran vs, say, C or C++ is a 10-20% speed increase at best, and usually the gap is actually much less. At best, you save a day of compute time with Fortran, but you have so much less choice!
There is currently no viable open source F95 compiler--gcc 4.0 will have one, but as of now, we don't. So you have to buy a compiler package if you want to program. Most comp sci grads never touch Fortran--so everyone coming into the compuational sciences has to learn a new programming language, which slows development further. And, where java and C and C++ and python have a huge amount of APIs and such to bolt onto your program so you don't have to re-code the wheel, Fortran has very little that isn't pure numerical codes.
Fortran is undeniably the best for speed. But speed isn't what matters anymore. Hell, Numerical Python can usually get within a factor of 3 of Fortran speed--and considering how fast you can write Python code, the cross-platform portability, and the fact that it costs nothing to use, Python wins hands down for me, every time. I can just use the extra time the python code takes to make a lovely little GUI for my app that everyone in my department can use--which will help the progress of science far more than a halving of the model runtime.
Yeah, if I was a woman I would be totally fighting for the right to be stuck underground with a bunch of working class men who are probably going to resent my presence and make constant sexual innuendos. No matter how good the pay is, it's not worth having to constantly worry about sexual assaults.
Women are willing to do a remarkable amount of nasty, harsh work. Look at all the women in the military nowadays. The reason women aren't miners has nothing to do with preference and everything to do with society.
My Mom got laser eye surgery about 8 years ago, and it was a total debacle. Her eyes are now worse then they were before, so she essentially can't drive at night. This was a while ago, so perhaps the technique has improved, but there is definately a chance that this could mess up your vision.
I don't think I've seen this one yet, but it helped me immensely and it's something I wouldn't have normally thought of: make it as simple as possible to do your work.
What does this mean? Eliminate ANY possible hinderence to getting your work done. If you surf the web a lot, remove your browser shortcut from the desktop, quicklauch bar, dock, or whatever. Put it in the start menu or something. Only access the web through Explorer or Konqueror in filesystem mode, so you have two steps to accomplish before you start surfing; calling up Konq, and typing in a URL that you want to go to. Remove all games from easily accessible places. Put the documents you are working on as shortcuts on the desktop. Anything, as long as it makes it as easy as possible to work on things.
It feels silly when you do things like this (how can this make a real difference?), but every little bit helps.
The energy comes from the batteries they had attached to the spheres. Read the paper; the spheres had a voltage applied to them.
Nanotech basically. They have basically discovered a way to use a distribution of electric charges on a configuration of three sphere to start one of the spheres rotating. This is different from current electric motors; they use magnetic fields to start things rotating. This kind of engine would use a lot less current to generate motion than conventional electromagnetic motors. This would be good for building little machines; it's really hard to make electromagnets at the subatomic scale, but metallic spheres? Much easier. And static charge? It's hard NOT to get something with static charge on it down at that scale.
Having said that, this is purely a proof-of-concept thingy. What they did was just say, "Look, we can use this simple setup to create rotation". It's like they stuck a magnet near another magnet dangling on a string ang made it rotate. That's a long way from an electromagnetic motor, but it is a first step...
Soft synths are the real problem here. Reason and VST are the two things that keep me from wiping my windows hard drive for good. We need stable, working, effect and synthesis plugins; it's LADSPA that needs the most dev work. Ardour and Rosegarden are great, but I need some synths to work with or my setup is useless.
I think this depends a lot on the kind of research you do. I do ocean modeling, and beyond the actual model code, which is written mostly in Fortran, the only packages I use are Matlab, Scientific Python, and an open source oceanography analysis package called Ferret. This is mostly because I don't have to solve any equations; all my results are based on number crunching. If you are doing theoretical work, and have to find polynomial roots or something, you use something different.
Actually though, I am trying to get away from Matlab more and more. It has some terrible features in it (Like a completely botched graphics library and a for loop command that takes EONS to run) and it costs at least $100 for a personal copy. Sci Py is free and does most of the same things, except that it has no standard plotting routines. At least, none I am aware of...
Waste of time? Perhaps. But it's cheaper than drugs...
My personal experience with both drugs and D&D forces me to disagree with you.
These things kick ass. I'm a grad student at UW in Oceanography--the pink seagliders in the second picture are built two floors below where I am typing. They're amazing--they communicate home with a cellphone antenna, and there's a 386 laptop connected to a phone line down the hall that accepts their dial-up connections. This allows them to upload their data and recieve new instructions for their mission. Currently they just have a conventional phone on-board for testing, but that will hopefully be upgraded to something like the remains of the Iridium network for the real version.
They are the result of an amazing confluence of technologies--low-power cpus, which turn on something like once every five minutes to check their situation and take a measurement, temperature and salinity probes that give reliable data without calibration for a year, battery packs, cellular communication, GPS. The great application for these, however, is not to other worlds--it's to our own. In a few years, it is hoped that there will be a global array of automated seagliders and buoys taking temperature, salinity and velocity measurements everywhere in the ocean. Basically, it will be used to construct a global climate monitoring system--something we'd never be able to do without low-power computers and sattellite tech.
Ok, I over-simplified. Geostrophic motion is difficult to picture, and harder to explain. The water does run downhill; it's just that the coriolis force bends it--to the right in the northern hemisphere, to the left in the southern. If the hill is big enough, the water will eventually enter into a force balance between gravity and the coriolis force, endlessly running around the hill in a circle.
As for the winds, it all depends on how you look at it. The main thing the winds do is pile up water into hills or valleys by Ekman pumping. The actual large scale circulation is driven by the water running down those hills and reaching geostrophic balance. The geoid is the most significant piece of data that one need to understand this process, since on the earth "downhill" actually means "the direction in which the geopotential decreases". That's why the thermal wind relations have you assume a level of no motion in the deep ocean--there's no way to measure absolute velocities, since you don't really know what the sea surface slope is relative to the geoid. Once we have the geoid, we can get the sea surface height relative to the geoid, and once we have that, geostrophy will tell us the large-scale ocean circulation.
It's the small anomalies in the geoid that make it so hard to measure. Since the sea surface height varies by only a meter or two, an anomaly in the geopotential surface height of only a meter will cause a radical change in the distribution of surface currents.
(I'm an oceanographer, too.)
Mapping the geoid is one of the most fundamental problems in oceanography. Ocean currents are all basically caused by water running downhill. The problem is that "downhill" in this case is relative to the geoid, which is a bumpy, not-nice surface. With this kind of map, we should be able to map surface currents from space; their velocity, their position, everything you want to know about how the surface currents are moving. This is important for climate studies of global warming, since the ocean currents are one of the main transporters of heat from the equator to the poles. This will allow us to get a much better idea of where the heat in the world is going, and how long it takes to get there, which in turn will give us a better handle on global warming.
Oceanographers have been trying to figure out a way to remove the geoid from their equations for a hundred years. Now we can just measure the damn thing. Crazy.
Some of us actually use midi to make interesting music (if you consider techno to be interesting music), since it is the primary way to control hardware synthesizers and samplers. The lack of good midi/audio support in linux is actually the main reason I don't have linux on my home computer. If this program is dead, it's just one more reason for me to stay with Windows...
... originally I used to come across sites that had problems with mozilla and had to use IE or Opera, but now, without even realizing it, mozilla has become my default browser of choice.
I wish I had your luck. I think I find about one website a day that Mozilla still doesn't render, and I have to switch to IE. Endlessly frustrating.
It's still my default browser of choice, though...