"CO2 is toxic in higher concentrations: 1% (10,000 ppm) will make some people feel drowsy.[7] Concentrations of 7% to 10% cause dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour.[8]"
So, if they say that 7-10% causes already unconsciousness in a few minutes (at the upper echelon of 10%), you can imagine what a bit more than that must do. It's just like anesthetics. Up to a certain ratio, you only feel numbness and mild euphoria; at some percentage you fall unconscious; a little bit more than that and you reach induced coma; a little bit more and you stop breathing or your heart stops beating (depends on the drug).
Just like with anything -- water, oxygen, sugar, etc. -- the dose and circumstances determine what is a poison and what not.
Any successful person, and any successful population, always has some advantage that gets resources in the current environment. No species survives if they don't have competitive strategies. An alien is not going to have some completely egalitarian civilization - they wouldn't evolve if they did.
Who ever said, that it is only the body that needs to evolve? Maybe, to be a long term resident of the Universe, the average collection of meatbags have to first grasp the concept and accept the full consequences of the fact that they also need to allow their minds, mores and intelligence to evolve.
After all, just like you inherit your genetic code, society at large inherits its cultural, moral and intellectual signature. If that signature is not on par with surviving for a long time as a society/species, then that can be just as bad as -- or even worse than -- having evolved a disadvantageous physical makeup.
No, if you do it that way you just end up with flat cardboard scenes with a bit of depth. If I can't observe parallax, say a slight rotation of someone's head, when I switch eyes, it's not real 3d.
That's why I said you need most likely strong AI to get it really perfect. You need to know not only the relations between things (like my example; a tree vs. a human), you also need to know the relations of things to themselves, i.e. the properties of a human face.
Imagine, that instead of lifting whole objects from the 2D-plane, you lift individual pixels, just like a modern computer game calculates the lighting, texturing and shadowing on a per-pixel basis to give you things like Normal mapping.
After all, when you see a face, you know which side is turned to you. Following from that, you know that one eye might be closer than another, or that the tip of the nose might be closer to you than either eyes. Thus, it all boils down to reconstruct the most likely 3D mesh of the head, apply it to the 2D texture you derived from the image and then create two appropriately stereoscopic images from it.
Any algorithm that can do that on a suitably wide range of scenes already borders on being AI. An algorithm that can do that so well that it can fool you does at least the same amount of work as your brain and thus might be regarded as either true AI, or part of a true AI.
Well, there is a way to do it, a very elegant way even. One that can be, for all purposes and intents, as good as you can get with the raw material; even to the point where the average human will not be able to tell the difference.
The thing is: That solution has a big catch. How big? Well, to put it mildly, you will most likely win the Turing Award in the process of doing so and will at some point end up with a Nobel Prize in your hand, too. As you can imagine, the solution is: Artificial Intelligence; and if you want to really do it, only strong artificial intelligence will do.
The fact is, as others have quite succinctly pointed out, that the issue is in determining what is "in front" and what is "in the background" on top of how far away everything is. This is, quite simply, impossible to do right if you approach it as a purely algorithmic picture-to-picture problem. There is just not enough information inside the frames/movie to do it well enough even at the best of times.
So, what do you do? Easy, you import external information. Things like: "This is a tree; That is a human. A tree is bigger than a human. Both take up the same space in the picture. Assumption: The human is closer than the tree. Proof: The tree casts a shadow on the human and the only light source is behind the tree. Angles point to a distance of 20 meters between human and tree. Etc. pp."
This line of reasoning imports lots of information from the outside; essential things like "What does a tree/human look like?", and "What are their relations to each other size-wise?". But if you grant that this information can be derived and used by an AI, the result can be a very precise derivation of the distances between objects.
It is exactly the same line of reasoning the human brain uses for large distances (where the parallax of your eyes is too small, focus is unimportant and difference between eye positions negligible), or when you have lost vision in one eye (or just plainly covered it). Even though your brain suddenly has only half the information, it is capable of giving you a good feeling for distance and depth.
Of course, it doesn't always work, as far too many optical illusions like the Ames-Room show, but it works significantly better than a "pure" picture-to-picture approach and is the sole reason why almost everyone here feels that 2D-3D conversions are so horrible:
Their brain tells them, that what they see just can't be correct, even if their eyes have actually seen it.
But of course, just using 2 cameras is much simpler. So good luck with (strong) AI. I would be surprised if you solved this issue all by yourself.:)
I'll have you know Beijing has McDonald's, plenty of them in fact... Did you know McDonald's in Shanghai deliver? If that is not true beauty, I don't know what is.:)
You're perfectly right, of course. But given that Warhol died in 1987, I think we might be allowed to be a tad more lenient towards his knowledge of the current state of affairs. But only a tad...;-)
The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald's. Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet. [Andy Warhol]
How truly great it is, to be living in a brave new world of unabashed consumerism!
Ethanol is a net loss of energy. It takes more energy to produce a gallon than you get by burning it.
Just as a neat reminder: As far as we know, the law of thermodynamics apply to all things. You can't create or destroy energy, the process is never fully reversible and you can't extract arbitrary amounts of energy from any limited thing. That means, you can't win the game, you can't cheat at the game and you can't even quit the game (as someone greater than me has so succinctly put).
This applies to E85 just as well as to pure Gasoline. After all, how much energy did you think was converted to allow simple carbon dioxide and water to be stored in the molecular form of hydrocarbons/carbohydrates? The same processes that lead to Ethanol were necessary to lead to Gasoline.
So yes, it takes more energy to produce Ethanol than you get by burning it. But that's true of gasoline, coal, wood and incautious lab assistants, too.
Given the fact that Germany had to be pretty much completely invaded before it surrendered is a sure sign that while a) actually worked, it would not have cost more than employing the nukes.
I guess you missed the part where 80% of the war against Germany was borne by the Russians.
Please note that I did not state who invaded most of Germany. As I am a German myself, I merely assumed this to be common knowledge, so I did not saw the need to explicitly state it. This was, perhaps, foolish of me.
Believe me when I tell you that the history of the 20th century -- in all its at times gory details -- is a big topic in German history lessons.
What was this comment of the Israeli ambassador to Germany when he attended the opening of the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" in Berlin, our capital, right next to our house of parliament?
"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation erect monuments to its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and humility."
While the universality ("only") of the statement may be incorrect, its gist is not.
I also find it highly likely that you are willing to sacrifice soldiers without actually ever having served. An armchar moralist. Gosh, we need more of them. Easy bet you think Iraq was about oil while topping up your SUV.
Every country is perfectly willing to sacrifice soldiers -- that's pretty much the raison d'etre (the reason to be) of the military. You teach some of your own to be really good at fighting others who were taught to fight really well against others. That's the entire point of it. If it's for defense or offence is unimportant in that respect. The purpose of soldiers in the military is to fight, and if need be, to lay down their life. "For their country" being a relatively recent addition, admittedly, as previously most countries just gang-pressed peasants into their army, employed mercenaries or just used their excess nobles for the purpose, i.e. those who had a stake in defending their turf or winning new turfs.
Sacrificing them, while still morally wrong, is still infinitely better than sacrificing unarmed civilians. Not to an unlimited amount (after all, that'd be unreasonable) but still with a very large ratio.
But I like both your ad-hominem attacks really well. For one, I come from a country (Germany, to be precise) where a large percentage of young males needed to serve in the military while I grew up. This included me. Thanks for asking. Just because someone served, that does not mean he/she needs to support such things; nor does it mean that someone who hasn't served can't be for or against it. Thankfully, there are preciously few questions of morality that can only be examined by those who were put under the pressure of having to answer them.
Further more, partly because I'm a German, I don't drive an SUV. I actually drive a Suzuki Intruder M800 -- a motorcycle that needs ~5 litres of gas per 100 kilometers -- or converted, moves me 47 miles per gallon (US). As I still deem that unreasonably high for 1-2 passengers, I drive mostly by bicycle and take the train to pretty much anywhere else I can't bicycle to.
From what I've seen in history, only democracies nuke civilians.
And it's a good job they did too. For practically everyone including Japan.
Why? By that point, the war was pretty much over anyway. The only two at least semi-sensible arguments for using the nukes was: a) it'd likely make an invasion of Japan unnecessary and b) we have them, so we might as well just use them.
Given the fact that Germany had to be pretty much completely invaded before it surrendered is a sure sign that while a) actually worked, it would not have cost more than employing the nukes. Compared to the cost of getting to the point of invading the home-turf, the actual act of doing it is much less costly. And the USA were already ready to invade the home-turf of Japan at that point, so the down-payment was pretty much already done. And if you look at the post-war recovery speed, both Japan and Germany did not differ much, so invading Japan would have worked just as well as nuking two cities full of civilians -- only that the former is somewhat less morally questionable, as it'd have mostly killed armed soldiers, instead of unarmed civilians and would've given the individual soldiers at least a chance to surrender.
So, given that fact a) is neither really pro-use nor fully contra-use, the most likely reason why they used the nukes was simply b). They had them, they wanted to test them for real, so they tested them for real. All in all, it just shows the banality of evil, and that a democracy is not immune against committing morally questionable or downright morally evil acts.
Oh, and using the argument "But it saved the lives of US-American soldiers" -- while certainly right -- is even worse, as it simply shows that your moral compass is blind in certain areas. It is basically trading the few or your own for the many of the others -- and good luck with morally justifying that without sounding just like those who you set out to defeat.
The easiest way to do that is to cut up the files into blocks and compress them. If two blocks are the same, you don't recompress them but just put in a link to the previous compression. This is what (roughly speaking) BZIP2, RAR, ACE and some other formats do.
That's very interesting! Thank you - I will look into BZIP2 more deeply as time permits.
Do note though, that BZIP2 only follows my description very roughly and indirectly, as it will not actually cross-link what its documentation calls "blocks" directly. While it does split up the input stream into blocks, it will not actually cross-link them. It still processes the different blocks separately. The cross-linking compression is only done inside the blocks and indirectly through the properties of the so called "Burrows-Wheeler Transform" -- so in a way BZIP2 forms "sub-blocks" inside its blocks. This is a necessary compromise due to its stream-based nature.
So, in other words: While dedup and compression do follow the same general approaches as I outlined above, their specific implementations of course do differ in some big, but also sometimes deviously little ways. So when I say "roughly speaking", I really do mean roughly speaking.:)
Deciding to believe we don't exist, or covering up that we exist so their populace won't be scared of us...
You know the drill: A Kzr'karch is smart. Many Krz'karch are dumb, panicky dangerous Sib'narch and you know it. Fifteen hundred yar'en ago everybody knew the Nar'karch was the center of the universe. Five hundred yar'en ago, everybody knew the Nar'karch was flat, and fifteen cent'ons ago, you knew that we Krz'karcha were alone on this Nar'net. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
Isn't de-dup a fairly trivial application for a DB of MD5sums, even if you don't have the chops to use the filesystem at a more fundamental level?
Yes, but in that case, two multi-GB files that share all of their data except one bit will not be deduplicated. The difference between your approach and Microsofts is grounded in the same though-process that make modern compression algorithms better than older ones:
First you treat all files separately, which is really simple but has the drawback of not cross-linking chances for compression/dedup across files. This is what deflate (ZIP/GZIP) and your approach to dedup do. The same data simply gets recompressed twice -- or in your case not duplicated if the data is even marginally different. You will never reach the maximum space-saving that way, even though you can at least be sure to be reasonably fast.
Then you notice that files sharing most data should only be compressed/deduped once and then just linked together. The easiest way to do that is to cut up the files into blocks and compress them. If two blocks are the same, you don't recompress them but just put in a link to the previous compression. This is what (roughly speaking) BZIP2, RAR, ACE and some other formats do. In deduping terms this means creating multi-level hashes for each files. It works much better, but has the price of being more complex and time consuming.
Finally, you notice that cutting up files at fixed boundaries is also wasteful. If two blocks are the same, but one has all bytes shifted left one position, you needlessly waste space. Thus, you try to identify if you can dynamically cut up the files/stream into chunks that you have already compressed, plus a handful of spare bytes here or there or with a very simple substitution/transposition function applied. This is (extremely roughly speaking) what LZMA of the 7-Zip fame does and what Microsoft tries to do different in their dedup approach.
Of course, going that way is even MORE complex and time consuming, but may be well worth it, if space-saving is what you're intested in. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch -- you either pay with time or with space (or with general applicability in some corner cases).
So, all in all, the approach itself is not new -- neither yours nor Microsofts -- but the magic lies in actually creating a working product out of the theoretical approach outlined above.
You just answered your own question there, that's precisely why we didn't do it and why we never will. Europe converted on a nation by nation basis and in the aftermath of WWI and WWII had the option of redoing that with some consistency. The US OTOH has had a consistent, and enforced, set of units for a long, long time and those were based on the system developed by the British.
Indeed, the only European countries that converted after World War 1 or 2 were Russia (1918), Greece (1959) and Ireland (1967). Do note that Greece did so 14 years after WW2 ended and Ireland a whopping 22 years.
Nope, the Wars weren't any reason to switch, except for Russia.
Actually, if you're driving any vehicle at all, be it a car, motorcycle, bicycle, boat, aeroplane or whatever -- and even if you intend to walk anywhere, most people should care about when exactly water usually freezes, instead of where the stable point of brine is.
If I tell a European that it's going to be 0C and raining/snowing outside today, they will think twice before attempting anything of the above. Calibrating your scale to something that covers 2/3rd of the globe all the time and the other third very nearly most of the time is just a very sane approach to things.
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
Well, Europe also likes to export to and import from countries using the imperial system. One country in particular, to be precise. A country where most people are very peculiar about using the metric system or doing the conversion themselves. So it has to be done for them or after you got stuff from them -- and for some goods it's even easier to just produce/use things in round numbers from their system to begin with.
Reminds one of the old adage about the prophet and mountain.:)
The elemental mercury released by burning coal sticks around not for years, or decades, or hundreds of thousands of years. It sticks around practically forever. At least as long as it'll take for current organisms to absorb it, die, and turn into coal themselves. Yet we're happily pumping it into the atmosphere because we're too afraid of nuclear.
Do notice that I explicitly mentioned that coal/gas is also bad. But here's the thing: Virtually all heavy metals, fine-dusts, the more exotic carbon- and nitrogen-oxides and other assorted chemicals can be gotten rid of, as we know how to extract and treat them. As nuclear supporters like to point out: You can't compare old power stations with the newer ones. But has that ever stopped countries and companies from using the old stuff till they quite literally break?
Unfortunately, we don't know how to make something stop being radioactive. Sure, we can re-use stuff, but that only delays when the waste occurs, as you can't reuse something infinitely. And while it is true that this might alter what kinds of radiation is generated by the waste, we can't change the total amount of radiation released. All we can do is distribute it to the point where nobody cares (similar to the observation that coal contains radioactive elements, too) while they still get irradiated, or concentrate it and store it where people can delude themselves into a "bury-and-forget" mentality.
Again, yes, you can process radioactive waste, and yes, by volume it isn't much. But the latter wasn't my point and the former begs the question, as the total amount of radiation released is not changed.
In Europe, strict regulations for gas and coal burning are now the norm (exactly because of those numbers you quoted) and nuclear reactors are shut down in favour of renewables that produce no or negligible amounts of waste. I'm all for continuing to make those laws stricter. As I said, the economy is a fleeting thing; ecology is not. I'd gladly sacrifice the cherry on top of the cake to save those that come after us from having to clean up the inevitable waste product the cake gets turned into.
Just how do you define "problem"? People see the evacuation zone around Fukushima as a problem. A hydroelectric dam creates a permanent evacuation zone behind it larger than Fukushima's. It's called a reservoir. Why is vacating people for one bad, while the other acceptable? Because one has the N word and the other is just water? Water kills nearly 100x more people each year than nuclear power has in its entire history. So which is truly more dangerous?
Remove the dam, wait ~5 years, resettling is easily possible.
Remove Fukushima/Chernobyl... wait 30 years and you may be able to let tourists in again, for short amounts of time... if they don't touch or inhale the wrong stuff... and don't forget to not eat anything from there. Ohh, and we're not liable if you still develop cancer in 10 years.
Of course, the measured response is: Don't build a dam where you have to forcibly relocate people, villages, cities or cultural heritage. I mean, it's not as if you couldn't go solar or use wind power instead if you really don't find such a spot. As with everything, choosing where to build stuff needs a level-headed decision. The problem with nuclear power is that no power of any magnitude can guarantee that it won't cause a multi-generational problem.
Measured in lives lost per unit of energy generated, nuclear is by far the safest power source. So your "less than a decade" and "what problem" assessments are only accurate if you assign zero value to people's lives.
Measured in lives lost per ton transported, bicycles are much safer than cars, trains or airplanes; if used in isolation from each other. Measured in lives lost per beverage consumed, fruit juice is much safer than alcohol. Measured in l
renewable: only feasible theoretically unless massive commitment from people to reduce their energy requirements 10-fold or more, never actually feasible for base-load generation unless your location wins the geological lottery.
I think realistically the most efficient power generating schema based on current technologies is nuclear plants supplemented by renewable sources.
Actually, the amount of sunlight streaming into Earth from the sun over even very modest amounts of time is orders of magnitude higher than the energy humankind can release by burning all the coal and gas on this world and using all the nuclear fuel that is available without digging exceedingly deep. What else do you think powered the plants and simple and complex lifeforms that created the coal and gas we use? What else do you think powers wind, tornados and hurricanes? Where do you think ocean currents (currents, not tides) get most of its energy from?
You are right that it currently is a bit more expensive and location-dependent so go full renewable than to keep on burning and fissioning. But that won't hold up long. After all, renewable energies get cheaper year by year and the economics of scale apply to it as well as to everything else. And as for getting solar energy out of those countries that have ample sunlight... where do you think most of your oil comes from?
If we really wanted to, building huge solar arrays in suitable sunny spots and laying down the power grids to move the generated electricity from point A to all the other points is no more difficult than laying down oil pipes across continents and building oil shipping fleets that have enough possible payload to blacken all oceans on this planet if they just released it at once.
Renewables might not be good for the short-term profit, but those who fail to see the mid- and long-term are doomed to lose their profits as fast as they have gained them.
As far as I understand it, the main problem most people have with Nuclear Reactors -- at least over here in Europe -- is not that they can go kablooie when something deemed "unlikely" hits them. This is just a problem as long as they are actually running, and a few years after for cooling down.
The problem is rather: Where do you put all that irradiated waste, ranging from water over metals, concrete, oils, various sealants and so on? After all, most of this stuff happily glows for a few decades at minimum and hundreds of thousands of years at the upper echelon. I mean, if I look at the Egyptian tombs for example, I find it hard to believe that anybody could guarantee that a sign of "Keep out or else you'll die horribly" would actually stop future people from digging up that stuff.
And that already excludes the observation that nothing humankind has ever built or excavated managed to stay permanently, physically sealed for more than a few hundred in most cases and a few thousand years in all cases. That's at least two orders of decimal magnitudes too few time to guarantee anything.
Of course things like coal, gas, etc. are not better -- especially regarding the climate. But at least they don't cause such extremely permanent issues that we can't even imagine a kind of physical or chemical process to get rid of it. They are still bad, but in a less... distant way.
And if you finally arrive at hydroelectric, geothermal, solar and wind generation, the scope of the problems you cause by running them can be measured in "less than a decade" for cleaning up a broken dam and "what problems?" for solar and wind. That fundamental difference between nuclear, coal/gas and finally regenerative power is what is important to most environmentalists and general critics of the first and to a lesser extend next two kinds of power generation. The fact that they can go kablooie is just icing on the cake compared to that.
I always wonder if people who fully and blindly support nuclear power have ever heard what the term "neglectful precursors" means. After all, economy is mostly a private affair and expires with the generation who had to live in it, but ecology gets inherited fully and permanently.
Just as broke as pretty much every other large economy these days, perhaps with the exception of China (but that's hard to measure). Take away any country's credit rating, and its great financial plan of financing everything through vast inter-dependent credits goes right down the toilet bowl. But that was hardly the point of my posting wasn't it?
And yeah, certain European officials quite willingly cooperated with the United States government at that time (and I'm speaking about Afghanistan first and Iraq second, for quite obvious reasons) -- partially to not seem unsupportive of a grieving superpower whose populace at that point would have supported almost any wacky plan (as most people do when you rock their safety net just hard enough), and partially out of conviction of doing the right thing; the point is: you can always find such people.
But, and that's important, they were not the ones that decided that war's the way to go. As bad as being an enabler for war is, having the mindset to actually take the torch and start the fire is quite another thing.
We have had 2 world wars within a century because European pacifist douche bags like you sit back and watch every time the next Hitler crops up while the US goes out and smacks them upside the head.
Actually, World War 1 started because Europe was full of militaristic (and mostly aristocratic) douche bags who wouldn't even take the offer not to start the War, because they already had all the plans made up and their little toy soldiers moved down from the attic to play with them.
Now, World War 2 was a direct consequence of the winning militaristic idiots deciding that peace means giving the other militaristic dimwits a huge reason to start another war. In that climate, being a pacifist only saved peace for roughly 20 years (even less if you count Spain). After that, the militaristic and obscenely patriotic/nationalist side decided it'd be jolly good to start playing with toy soldiers again.
The only reason we didn't have a Third and Fourth World War was that the militaristic idiots in all participating countries didn't get another chance to fuck the post-war peace up again. It may have been the military that won the war, but it were the pacifists that ensured that peace would last more than another 20 years.
And what was the end result? The United States led one bloody war after another, whereas Europe saw continuously progressing unification and over 60 years of mostly peace... up until an US-American, patriotic fuckwad decided a full blown war in two countries with hundred of thousands of dead would be the best response to a small group of confused people killing some 3000 US-Americans.
Yeah, the military is great, isn't it? And for good measure, a big hooray for the war-mongers of the future!
Actually, you're quite confused about two very, very different terms here -- which might be understandable as European political systems are impressively more complex and varied than the "Two Parties - plus various nutjobs" system that seems prevalent in the United States (from a European point of view).
You have to understand the fundamental difference between socialist -- which is the political system that Karl Marx described as the dictatorship of the masses to break the hold of the few over production -- and social democrat, which realizes that dictatorships are bad, but also that having more should mean that you can also do more for those that have less.
Further more, there are conservative central parties -- that mostly believe that social responsibility is a worthwhile goal, but should flow from moral responsibility and incentives instead of direct governmental pressure. Then there are right-wing conservatives, that are mostly like the central conservative parties as far as their social approach is concerned, but put more pressure on morals, up to reaching semi-tacit demands for more socio-moral homogeneity. In themselves, these conservative parties are not actually economically more conservative. At best, they are more open towards working WITH big companies to reach a particular goal instead of AGAINST them.
But mostly, the economic outlook depends more on whether you adhere to the more liberal wing of your chosen political stream, or the more social/rightist (as in rights of the people, not right as in right vs left).
In Europe (and especially Germany from which I hail), you can be a liberal conservative, a social democrat, a liberal, a conservative, a green, a leftist, a socialist, a communist, a liberal-economist, a rights-liberal, a rights-conservative, an extreme leftist (note: != socialist or communist), a green, a leftist green, a liberal green, a conservative green, a liberal social democrat with ecological interests (a.k.a. green); and so on. Ohh, and you can of course be a neo-fascist, if that's to your liking.
And the best: Depending on where you live in Europe, all these streams (except for maybe the neo-fascists and extreme leftists) are represented by parties that have between 10-25% of the popular vote with actual voices in the respective parliaments -- and sometimes governments.
Compared to the US-System, Europe is a melting pot of political ideals, where you can be in a conservative party which collectively tries to keep Nuclear Reactors running while allowing gay marriage, wanting minimum wage, and trying to introduce religious lessons in school. The same applies to leftists, liberals, greens, etc. to the same degree.
Isn't having a (non-exclusively) plurality vote system great?
Bikes consume even more fossil fuels than a Hummer. It turns out you're a really inefficient engine for propulsion, and while you don't consume fossil fuels, the things you consume do.
Well, I could say now, that I can't remember the last time I drank fossil fuels to recharge my batteries.
Of course, that was not what you were getting at. It's clear that currently the production of our food consumes lots of fossil fuels by the indirect processes of transportation, fertilizer production, etc. pp.
But get that: We still need to eat even if we're not using a bicycle, so you can subtract the fossil fuel in the food needed to sustain you lying in bed all day. If you drive a modern bicycle with modest speed (~20km/h); and you're not trying to cross the Alps, you're not burning much more energy than if you had just walked during that time -- all the while crossing much more distance. Thus, over almost all distances, the energy usage of a car is much higher than that of a bicyclist. For one, you only need to lug around some few kilograms of extra mass (even if you transport your own food) instead of the hundreds of kilograms of dead mass that your average car has.
Furthermore, using less fossil fuel for human food production is much easier than using less fossil fuels for cars; just by the fact that you can reduce the use of fossil fuels on much more fronts with a much broader impact.
All in all, using Bikes consumes massively less fossil fuels than cars -- even hybrids and full electrics. Just ask the humans of the 19th and early 20th century.
Slashdot Mirror
(Also, is it just me, or is S nowhere near Y on any keyboard layout ever?)
It is -- on German keyboard layouts.
Sust yo sou know, just like the one I use. ;)
From the English Wikipedia:
"CO2 is toxic in higher concentrations: 1% (10,000 ppm) will make some people feel drowsy.[7] Concentrations of 7% to 10% cause dizziness, headache, visual and hearing dysfunction, and unconsciousness within a few minutes to an hour.[8]"
[7] is http://www.inspect-ny.com/hazmat/CO2gashaz.htm
[8] is http://www.epa.gov/ozone/snap/fire/co2/co2report.html
So, if they say that 7-10% causes already unconsciousness in a few minutes (at the upper echelon of 10%), you can imagine what a bit more than that must do. It's just like anesthetics. Up to a certain ratio, you only feel numbness and mild euphoria; at some percentage you fall unconscious; a little bit more than that and you reach induced coma; a little bit more and you stop breathing or your heart stops beating (depends on the drug).
Just like with anything -- water, oxygen, sugar, etc. -- the dose and circumstances determine what is a poison and what not.
Any successful person, and any successful population, always has some advantage that gets resources in the current environment. No species survives if they don't have competitive strategies. An alien is not going to have some completely egalitarian civilization - they wouldn't evolve if they did.
Who ever said, that it is only the body that needs to evolve? Maybe, to be a long term resident of the Universe, the average collection of meatbags have to first grasp the concept and accept the full consequences of the fact that they also need to allow their minds, mores and intelligence to evolve.
After all, just like you inherit your genetic code, society at large inherits its cultural, moral and intellectual signature. If that signature is not on par with surviving for a long time as a society/species, then that can be just as bad as -- or even worse than -- having evolved a disadvantageous physical makeup.
No, if you do it that way you just end up with flat cardboard scenes with a bit of depth. If I can't observe parallax, say a slight rotation of someone's head, when I switch eyes, it's not real 3d.
That's why I said you need most likely strong AI to get it really perfect. You need to know not only the relations between things (like my example; a tree vs. a human), you also need to know the relations of things to themselves, i.e. the properties of a human face.
Imagine, that instead of lifting whole objects from the 2D-plane, you lift individual pixels, just like a modern computer game calculates the lighting, texturing and shadowing on a per-pixel basis to give you things like Normal mapping.
After all, when you see a face, you know which side is turned to you. Following from that, you know that one eye might be closer than another, or that the tip of the nose might be closer to you than either eyes. Thus, it all boils down to reconstruct the most likely 3D mesh of the head, apply it to the 2D texture you derived from the image and then create two appropriately stereoscopic images from it.
Any algorithm that can do that on a suitably wide range of scenes already borders on being AI. An algorithm that can do that so well that it can fool you does at least the same amount of work as your brain and thus might be regarded as either true AI, or part of a true AI.
Don't do it.
Well, there is a way to do it, a very elegant way even. One that can be, for all purposes and intents, as good as you can get with the raw material; even to the point where the average human will not be able to tell the difference.
The thing is: That solution has a big catch. How big? Well, to put it mildly, you will most likely win the Turing Award in the process of doing so and will at some point end up with a Nobel Prize in your hand, too. As you can imagine, the solution is: Artificial Intelligence; and if you want to really do it, only strong artificial intelligence will do.
The fact is, as others have quite succinctly pointed out, that the issue is in determining what is "in front" and what is "in the background" on top of how far away everything is. This is, quite simply, impossible to do right if you approach it as a purely algorithmic picture-to-picture problem. There is just not enough information inside the frames/movie to do it well enough even at the best of times.
So, what do you do? Easy, you import external information. Things like: "This is a tree; That is a human. A tree is bigger than a human. Both take up the same space in the picture. Assumption: The human is closer than the tree. Proof: The tree casts a shadow on the human and the only light source is behind the tree. Angles point to a distance of 20 meters between human and tree. Etc. pp."
This line of reasoning imports lots of information from the outside; essential things like "What does a tree/human look like?", and "What are their relations to each other size-wise?". But if you grant that this information can be derived and used by an AI, the result can be a very precise derivation of the distances between objects.
It is exactly the same line of reasoning the human brain uses for large distances (where the parallax of your eyes is too small, focus is unimportant and difference between eye positions negligible), or when you have lost vision in one eye (or just plainly covered it). Even though your brain suddenly has only half the information, it is capable of giving you a good feeling for distance and depth.
Of course, it doesn't always work, as far too many optical illusions like the Ames-Room show, but it works significantly better than a "pure" picture-to-picture approach and is the sole reason why almost everyone here feels that 2D-3D conversions are so horrible:
Their brain tells them, that what they see just can't be correct, even if their eyes have actually seen it.
But of course, just using 2 cameras is much simpler. So good luck with (strong) AI. I would be surprised if you solved this issue all by yourself. :)
I'll have you know Beijing has McDonald's, plenty of them in fact... Did you know McDonald's in Shanghai deliver? If that is not true beauty, I don't know what is. :)
You're perfectly right, of course. But given that Warhol died in 1987, I think we might be allowed to be a tad more lenient towards his knowledge of the current state of affairs. But only a tad... ;-)
The most beautiful thing in Tokyo is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Stockholm is McDonald's. The most beautiful thing in Florence is McDonald's. Peking and Moscow don't have anything beautiful yet.
[Andy Warhol]
How truly great it is, to be living in a brave new world of unabashed consumerism!
Ethanol is a net loss of energy. It takes more energy to produce a gallon than you get by burning it.
Just as a neat reminder: As far as we know, the law of thermodynamics apply to all things. You can't create or destroy energy, the process is never fully reversible and you can't extract arbitrary amounts of energy from any limited thing. That means, you can't win the game, you can't cheat at the game and you can't even quit the game (as someone greater than me has so succinctly put).
This applies to E85 just as well as to pure Gasoline. After all, how much energy did you think was converted to allow simple carbon dioxide and water to be stored in the molecular form of hydrocarbons/carbohydrates? The same processes that lead to Ethanol were necessary to lead to Gasoline.
So yes, it takes more energy to produce Ethanol than you get by burning it. But that's true of gasoline, coal, wood and incautious lab assistants, too.
And I would say that I happen to know for a fact, that there are at least 8.
Given the fact that Germany had to be pretty much completely invaded before it surrendered is a sure sign that while a) actually worked, it would not have cost more than employing the nukes.
I guess you missed the part where 80% of the war against Germany was borne by the Russians.
Please note that I did not state who invaded most of Germany. As I am a German myself, I merely assumed this to be common knowledge, so I did not saw the need to explicitly state it. This was, perhaps, foolish of me.
Believe me when I tell you that the history of the 20th century -- in all its at times gory details -- is a big topic in German history lessons.
What was this comment of the Israeli ambassador to Germany when he attended the opening of the "Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe" in Berlin, our capital, right next to our house of parliament?
"Where in the world has one ever seen a nation erect monuments to its own shame? Only the Germans had the bravery and humility."
While the universality ("only") of the statement may be incorrect, its gist is not.
I also find it highly likely that you are willing to sacrifice soldiers without actually ever having served. An armchar moralist. Gosh, we need more of them. Easy bet you think Iraq was about oil while topping up your SUV.
Every country is perfectly willing to sacrifice soldiers -- that's pretty much the raison d'etre (the reason to be) of the military. You teach some of your own to be really good at fighting others who were taught to fight really well against others. That's the entire point of it. If it's for defense or offence is unimportant in that respect. The purpose of soldiers in the military is to fight, and if need be, to lay down their life. "For their country" being a relatively recent addition, admittedly, as previously most countries just gang-pressed peasants into their army, employed mercenaries or just used their excess nobles for the purpose, i.e. those who had a stake in defending their turf or winning new turfs.
Sacrificing them, while still morally wrong, is still infinitely better than sacrificing unarmed civilians. Not to an unlimited amount (after all, that'd be unreasonable) but still with a very large ratio.
But I like both your ad-hominem attacks really well. For one, I come from a country (Germany, to be precise) where a large percentage of young males needed to serve in the military while I grew up. This included me. Thanks for asking. Just because someone served, that does not mean he/she needs to support such things; nor does it mean that someone who hasn't served can't be for or against it. Thankfully, there are preciously few questions of morality that can only be examined by those who were put under the pressure of having to answer them.
Further more, partly because I'm a German, I don't drive an SUV. I actually drive a Suzuki Intruder M800 -- a motorcycle that needs ~5 litres of gas per 100 kilometers -- or converted, moves me 47 miles per gallon (US). As I still deem that unreasonably high for 1-2 passengers, I drive mostly by bicycle and take the train to pretty much anywhere else I can't bicycle to.
From what I've seen in history, only democracies nuke civilians.
And it's a good job they did too. For practically everyone including Japan.
Why? By that point, the war was pretty much over anyway. The only two at least semi-sensible arguments for using the nukes was: a) it'd likely make an invasion of Japan unnecessary and b) we have them, so we might as well just use them.
Given the fact that Germany had to be pretty much completely invaded before it surrendered is a sure sign that while a) actually worked, it would not have cost more than employing the nukes. Compared to the cost of getting to the point of invading the home-turf, the actual act of doing it is much less costly. And the USA were already ready to invade the home-turf of Japan at that point, so the down-payment was pretty much already done.
And if you look at the post-war recovery speed, both Japan and Germany did not differ much, so invading Japan would have worked just as well as nuking two cities full of civilians -- only that the former is somewhat less morally questionable, as it'd have mostly killed armed soldiers, instead of unarmed civilians and would've given the individual soldiers at least a chance to surrender.
So, given that fact a) is neither really pro-use nor fully contra-use, the most likely reason why they used the nukes was simply b). They had them, they wanted to test them for real, so they tested them for real. All in all, it just shows the banality of evil, and that a democracy is not immune against committing morally questionable or downright morally evil acts.
Oh, and using the argument "But it saved the lives of US-American soldiers" -- while certainly right -- is even worse, as it simply shows that your moral compass is blind in certain areas. It is basically trading the few or your own for the many of the others -- and good luck with morally justifying that without sounding just like those who you set out to defeat.
That's very interesting! Thank you - I will look into BZIP2 more deeply as time permits.
Do note though, that BZIP2 only follows my description very roughly and indirectly, as it will not actually cross-link what its documentation calls "blocks" directly. While it does split up the input stream into blocks, it will not actually cross-link them. It still processes the different blocks separately. The cross-linking compression is only done inside the blocks and indirectly through the properties of the so called "Burrows-Wheeler Transform" -- so in a way BZIP2 forms "sub-blocks" inside its blocks. This is a necessary compromise due to its stream-based nature.
So, in other words: While dedup and compression do follow the same general approaches as I outlined above, their specific implementations of course do differ in some big, but also sometimes deviously little ways. So when I say "roughly speaking", I really do mean roughly speaking. :)
Deciding to believe we don't exist, or covering up that we exist so their populace won't be scared of us...
You know the drill: A Kzr'karch is smart. Many Krz'karch are dumb, panicky dangerous Sib'narch and you know it. Fifteen hundred yar'en ago everybody knew the Nar'karch was the center of the universe. Five hundred yar'en ago, everybody knew the Nar'karch was flat, and fifteen cent'ons ago, you knew that we Krz'karcha were alone on this Nar'net. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow.
Isn't de-dup a fairly trivial application for a DB of MD5sums, even if you don't have the chops to use the filesystem at a more fundamental level?
Yes, but in that case, two multi-GB files that share all of their data except one bit will not be deduplicated. The difference between your approach and Microsofts is grounded in the same though-process that make modern compression algorithms better than older ones:
First you treat all files separately, which is really simple but has the drawback of not cross-linking chances for compression/dedup across files. This is what deflate (ZIP/GZIP) and your approach to dedup do. The same data simply gets recompressed twice -- or in your case not duplicated if the data is even marginally different. You will never reach the maximum space-saving that way, even though you can at least be sure to be reasonably fast.
Then you notice that files sharing most data should only be compressed/deduped once and then just linked together. The easiest way to do that is to cut up the files into blocks and compress them. If two blocks are the same, you don't recompress them but just put in a link to the previous compression. This is what (roughly speaking) BZIP2, RAR, ACE and some other formats do. In deduping terms this means creating multi-level hashes for each files. It works much better, but has the price of being more complex and time consuming.
Finally, you notice that cutting up files at fixed boundaries is also wasteful. If two blocks are the same, but one has all bytes shifted left one position, you needlessly waste space. Thus, you try to identify if you can dynamically cut up the files/stream into chunks that you have already compressed, plus a handful of spare bytes here or there or with a very simple substitution/transposition function applied. This is (extremely roughly speaking) what LZMA of the 7-Zip fame does and what Microsoft tries to do different in their dedup approach.
Of course, going that way is even MORE complex and time consuming, but may be well worth it, if space-saving is what you're intested in. After all, there is no such thing as a free lunch -- you either pay with time or with space (or with general applicability in some corner cases).
So, all in all, the approach itself is not new -- neither yours nor Microsofts -- but the magic lies in actually creating a working product out of the theoretical approach outlined above.
You just answered your own question there, that's precisely why we didn't do it and why we never will. Europe converted on a nation by nation basis and in the aftermath of WWI and WWII had the option of redoing that with some consistency. The US OTOH has had a consistent, and enforced, set of units for a long, long time and those were based on the system developed by the British.
France: 1795
Belgium: 1820
Netherlands: 1820
Spain: 1852
Italy: 1861
Romania: 1862
Austria: 1871
Germany: 1872
Norway: 1875
[...]
Indeed, the only European countries that converted after World War 1 or 2 were Russia (1918), Greece (1959) and Ireland (1967). Do note that Greece did so 14 years after WW2 ended and Ireland a whopping 22 years.
Nope, the Wars weren't any reason to switch, except for Russia.
Actually, if you're driving any vehicle at all, be it a car, motorcycle, bicycle, boat, aeroplane or whatever -- and even if you intend to walk anywhere, most people should care about when exactly water usually freezes, instead of where the stable point of brine is.
If I tell a European that it's going to be 0C and raining/snowing outside today, they will think twice before attempting anything of the above. Calibrating your scale to something that covers 2/3rd of the globe all the time and the other third very nearly most of the time is just a very sane approach to things.
Even in Europe, ostensibly metric, they haven't really made this transition at all.
Well, Europe also likes to export to and import from countries using the imperial system. One country in particular, to be precise. A country where most people are very peculiar about using the metric system or doing the conversion themselves. So it has to be done for them or after you got stuff from them -- and for some goods it's even easier to just produce/use things in round numbers from their system to begin with.
Reminds one of the old adage about the prophet and mountain. :)
The elemental mercury released by burning coal sticks around not for years, or decades, or hundreds of thousands of years. It sticks around practically forever. At least as long as it'll take for current organisms to absorb it, die, and turn into coal themselves. Yet we're happily pumping it into the atmosphere because we're too afraid of nuclear.
Do notice that I explicitly mentioned that coal/gas is also bad. But here's the thing: Virtually all heavy metals, fine-dusts, the more exotic carbon- and nitrogen-oxides and other assorted chemicals can be gotten rid of, as we know how to extract and treat them. As nuclear supporters like to point out: You can't compare old power stations with the newer ones. But has that ever stopped countries and companies from using the old stuff till they quite literally break?
Unfortunately, we don't know how to make something stop being radioactive. Sure, we can re-use stuff, but that only delays when the waste occurs, as you can't reuse something infinitely. And while it is true that this might alter what kinds of radiation is generated by the waste, we can't change the total amount of radiation released. All we can do is distribute it to the point where nobody cares (similar to the observation that coal contains radioactive elements, too) while they still get irradiated, or concentrate it and store it where people can delude themselves into a "bury-and-forget" mentality.
Again, yes, you can process radioactive waste, and yes, by volume it isn't much. But the latter wasn't my point and the former begs the question, as the total amount of radiation released is not changed.
In Europe, strict regulations for gas and coal burning are now the norm (exactly because of those numbers you quoted) and nuclear reactors are shut down in favour of renewables that produce no or negligible amounts of waste. I'm all for continuing to make those laws stricter. As I said, the economy is a fleeting thing; ecology is not. I'd gladly sacrifice the cherry on top of the cake to save those that come after us from having to clean up the inevitable waste product the cake gets turned into.
Just how do you define "problem"? People see the evacuation zone around Fukushima as a problem. A hydroelectric dam creates a permanent evacuation zone behind it larger than Fukushima's. It's called a reservoir. Why is vacating people for one bad, while the other acceptable? Because one has the N word and the other is just water? Water kills nearly 100x more people each year than nuclear power has in its entire history. So which is truly more dangerous?
Remove the dam, wait ~5 years, resettling is easily possible.
Remove Fukushima/Chernobyl ... wait 30 years and you may be able to let tourists in again, for short amounts of time ... if they don't touch or inhale the wrong stuff ... and don't forget to not eat anything from there. Ohh, and we're not liable if you still develop cancer in 10 years.
Of course, the measured response is: Don't build a dam where you have to forcibly relocate people, villages, cities or cultural heritage. I mean, it's not as if you couldn't go solar or use wind power instead if you really don't find such a spot. As with everything, choosing where to build stuff needs a level-headed decision. The problem with nuclear power is that no power of any magnitude can guarantee that it won't cause a multi-generational problem.
Measured in lives lost per unit of energy generated, nuclear is by far the safest power source. So your "less than a decade" and "what problem" assessments are only accurate if you assign zero value to people's lives.
Measured in lives lost per ton transported, bicycles are much safer than cars, trains or airplanes; if used in isolation from each other.
Measured in lives lost per beverage consumed, fruit juice is much safer than alcohol.
Measured in l
renewable: only feasible theoretically unless massive commitment from people to reduce their energy requirements 10-fold or more, never actually feasible for base-load generation unless your location wins the geological lottery.
I think realistically the most efficient power generating schema based on current technologies is nuclear plants supplemented by renewable sources.
Actually, the amount of sunlight streaming into Earth from the sun over even very modest amounts of time is orders of magnitude higher than the energy humankind can release by burning all the coal and gas on this world and using all the nuclear fuel that is available without digging exceedingly deep. What else do you think powered the plants and simple and complex lifeforms that created the coal and gas we use? What else do you think powers wind, tornados and hurricanes? Where do you think ocean currents (currents, not tides) get most of its energy from?
You are right that it currently is a bit more expensive and location-dependent so go full renewable than to keep on burning and fissioning. But that won't hold up long. After all, renewable energies get cheaper year by year and the economics of scale apply to it as well as to everything else. And as for getting solar energy out of those countries that have ample sunlight ... where do you think most of your oil comes from?
If we really wanted to, building huge solar arrays in suitable sunny spots and laying down the power grids to move the generated electricity from point A to all the other points is no more difficult than laying down oil pipes across continents and building oil shipping fleets that have enough possible payload to blacken all oceans on this planet if they just released it at once.
Renewables might not be good for the short-term profit, but those who fail to see the mid- and long-term are doomed to lose their profits as fast as they have gained them.
As far as I understand it, the main problem most people have with Nuclear Reactors -- at least over here in Europe -- is not that they can go kablooie when something deemed "unlikely" hits them. This is just a problem as long as they are actually running, and a few years after for cooling down.
The problem is rather: Where do you put all that irradiated waste, ranging from water over metals, concrete, oils, various sealants and so on? After all, most of this stuff happily glows for a few decades at minimum and hundreds of thousands of years at the upper echelon. I mean, if I look at the Egyptian tombs for example, I find it hard to believe that anybody could guarantee that a sign of "Keep out or else you'll die horribly" would actually stop future people from digging up that stuff.
And that already excludes the observation that nothing humankind has ever built or excavated managed to stay permanently, physically sealed for more than a few hundred in most cases and a few thousand years in all cases. That's at least two orders of decimal magnitudes too few time to guarantee anything.
Of course things like coal, gas, etc. are not better -- especially regarding the climate. But at least they don't cause such extremely permanent issues that we can't even imagine a kind of physical or chemical process to get rid of it. They are still bad, but in a less ... distant way.
And if you finally arrive at hydroelectric, geothermal, solar and wind generation, the scope of the problems you cause by running them can be measured in "less than a decade" for cleaning up a broken dam and "what problems?" for solar and wind. That fundamental difference between nuclear, coal/gas and finally regenerative power is what is important to most environmentalists and general critics of the first and to a lesser extend next two kinds of power generation. The fact that they can go kablooie is just icing on the cake compared to that.
I always wonder if people who fully and blindly support nuclear power have ever heard what the term "neglectful precursors" means. After all, economy is mostly a private affair and expires with the generation who had to live in it, but ecology gets inherited fully and permanently.
Just as broke as pretty much every other large economy these days, perhaps with the exception of China (but that's hard to measure). Take away any country's credit rating, and its great financial plan of financing everything through vast inter-dependent credits goes right down the toilet bowl. But that was hardly the point of my posting wasn't it?
And yeah, certain European officials quite willingly cooperated with the United States government at that time (and I'm speaking about Afghanistan first and Iraq second, for quite obvious reasons) -- partially to not seem unsupportive of a grieving superpower whose populace at that point would have supported almost any wacky plan (as most people do when you rock their safety net just hard enough), and partially out of conviction of doing the right thing; the point is: you can always find such people.
But, and that's important, they were not the ones that decided that war's the way to go. As bad as being an enabler for war is, having the mindset to actually take the torch and start the fire is quite another thing.
We have had 2 world wars within a century because European pacifist douche bags like you sit back and watch every time the next Hitler crops up while the US goes out and smacks them upside the head.
Actually, World War 1 started because Europe was full of militaristic (and mostly aristocratic) douche bags who wouldn't even take the offer not to start the War, because they already had all the plans made up and their little toy soldiers moved down from the attic to play with them.
Now, World War 2 was a direct consequence of the winning militaristic idiots deciding that peace means giving the other militaristic dimwits a huge reason to start another war. In that climate, being a pacifist only saved peace for roughly 20 years (even less if you count Spain). After that, the militaristic and obscenely patriotic/nationalist side decided it'd be jolly good to start playing with toy soldiers again.
The only reason we didn't have a Third and Fourth World War was that the militaristic idiots in all participating countries didn't get another chance to fuck the post-war peace up again. It may have been the military that won the war, but it were the pacifists that ensured that peace would last more than another 20 years.
And what was the end result? The United States led one bloody war after another, whereas Europe saw continuously progressing unification and over 60 years of mostly peace ... up until an US-American, patriotic fuckwad decided a full blown war in two countries with hundred of thousands of dead would be the best response to a small group of confused people killing some 3000 US-Americans.
Yeah, the military is great, isn't it? And for good measure, a big hooray for the war-mongers of the future!
Actually, you're quite confused about two very, very different terms here -- which might be understandable as European political systems are impressively more complex and varied than the "Two Parties - plus various nutjobs" system that seems prevalent in the United States (from a European point of view).
You have to understand the fundamental difference between socialist -- which is the political system that Karl Marx described as the dictatorship of the masses to break the hold of the few over production -- and social democrat, which realizes that dictatorships are bad, but also that having more should mean that you can also do more for those that have less.
Further more, there are conservative central parties -- that mostly believe that social responsibility is a worthwhile goal, but should flow from moral responsibility and incentives instead of direct governmental pressure. Then there are right-wing conservatives, that are mostly like the central conservative parties as far as their social approach is concerned, but put more pressure on morals, up to reaching semi-tacit demands for more socio-moral homogeneity. In themselves, these conservative parties are not actually economically more conservative. At best, they are more open towards working WITH big companies to reach a particular goal instead of AGAINST them.
But mostly, the economic outlook depends more on whether you adhere to the more liberal wing of your chosen political stream, or the more social/rightist (as in rights of the people, not right as in right vs left).
In Europe (and especially Germany from which I hail), you can be a liberal conservative, a social democrat, a liberal, a conservative, a green, a leftist, a socialist, a communist, a liberal-economist, a rights-liberal, a rights-conservative, an extreme leftist (note: != socialist or communist), a green, a leftist green, a liberal green, a conservative green, a liberal social democrat with ecological interests (a.k.a. green); and so on. Ohh, and you can of course be a neo-fascist, if that's to your liking.
And the best: Depending on where you live in Europe, all these streams (except for maybe the neo-fascists and extreme leftists) are represented by parties that have between 10-25% of the popular vote with actual voices in the respective parliaments -- and sometimes governments.
Compared to the US-System, Europe is a melting pot of political ideals, where you can be in a conservative party which collectively tries to keep Nuclear Reactors running while allowing gay marriage, wanting minimum wage, and trying to introduce religious lessons in school. The same applies to leftists, liberals, greens, etc. to the same degree.
Isn't having a (non-exclusively) plurality vote system great?
Bikes consume even more fossil fuels than a Hummer. It turns out you're a really inefficient engine for propulsion, and while you don't consume fossil fuels, the things you consume do.
Well, I could say now, that I can't remember the last time I drank fossil fuels to recharge my batteries.
Of course, that was not what you were getting at. It's clear that currently the production of our food consumes lots of fossil fuels by the indirect processes of transportation, fertilizer production, etc. pp.
But get that: We still need to eat even if we're not using a bicycle, so you can subtract the fossil fuel in the food needed to sustain you lying in bed all day. If you drive a modern bicycle with modest speed (~20km/h); and you're not trying to cross the Alps, you're not burning much more energy than if you had just walked during that time -- all the while crossing much more distance. Thus, over almost all distances, the energy usage of a car is much higher than that of a bicyclist. For one, you only need to lug around some few kilograms of extra mass (even if you transport your own food) instead of the hundreds of kilograms of dead mass that your average car has.
Furthermore, using less fossil fuel for human food production is much easier than using less fossil fuels for cars; just by the fact that you can reduce the use of fossil fuels on much more fronts with a much broader impact.
All in all, using Bikes consumes massively less fossil fuels than cars -- even hybrids and full electrics. Just ask the humans of the 19th and early 20th century.