I think the important thing one learns in college from any STEM degree is "the engineering mindset". The ability to approach complex problems analytically and solve them a piece at a time with the tools available. It doesn't much matter how you learn this (what major), as long as you develop the skill.
I do wish there were more professional career-oriented vocational training in college, to help those who actually go into the careers their major suggests, but for many reasons people go a different direction after college. Some learn they don't actually enjoy the work they thought they would, others are finally escaping parental control only after college graduation, and so on. Still, it couldn't hurt.
I see non-STEM degrees as just a scam as this point.
So why is it a big deal if the coasts move? It's an economic cost with a price tag attached - that's all. It's far less worrisome than a war, which would similarly destroy cities, but also kill a great many people. Stuff is just stuff; people matter.
Contrast a warm Earth with a return of glaciation in the current ice age. There it's not just some coastline lost, it's most of Europe and the Northern US gone, Canada and Russia vanish, and habitable land area is quite significantly reduced. Still just an economic cost, but a far higher one.
While not a cube addict, I am a Numberphile junkie, and they have several cube-related videos. The Rubik's Cube is pretty interesting from the point of view of abstract algebra: a large but finite set of values and an interesting set of operators - very different from + and *. It's a neat example of algebra that's not an obvious analog to numbers, but that you can wrap your head (and hands) around.
Sure, they're appropriate for utility industrial-scale power generation, not home use. While sun-tracking mirrors are neat and all, a mirrored trench is a fair concentrator, as the working fluid accumulates heat along the length of the pipe (the external input heat source is quite hot, after all, so it's just a matter of heat flow).
Don't tell California that. Seriously, this stuff was built and operated at real scale providing real base load power. My reality beats your speculation, I'm afraid.
This is provided we don't turn Earth into another Venus by continually ramping up faster and faster fossil fuel extraction rates.
You were probably going for hyperbole, but some people actually believe this sort of BS. All the carbon in all the worlds known fossil fuel reserves (plus all the carbon in the air plus all the carbon in the oceans, plus all the carbon in the worlds biomass, combined) are really quite tiny in comparison to the geological carbon cycle.
If we try really hard we might end the Quaternary Ice Age early, or we might not, we don't know enough to say, but a Warm Earth is overall more biosphere-friendly than current conditions: more exposed land, and with higher atmospheric CO2, plant life vibrant enough to sustain 15 ton herbivores across that land. We face possibly quite expensive relocation if we go and melt the ice caps, and sure, it would suck to rebuild most major cities, but that's as bad as it gets. Long term (i.e., geological time scales, don't get your hopes up), it won't matter at all.
California built a solar thermal plant that could also burn natural gas as needed. In practice, 90% of power was solar. 90%. Not theoretical.
But the green hate it as it's not pure solar, and the geeks hate it as it's not photoelectric, and the energy companies hate it as it's only 10% fossil, so it lost the political games and was eventually decommissioned.
Photoelectric isn't there yet. Might not be in my lifetime.
But solar thermal? A black pipe and a mirrored trench? Works for anyone, developed or otherwise. No, it's not cheaper than the price of natural gas today, but no rush. No, you can't really do it at home scale, but as an inexhaustible low-tech power generation solution to fall back on? It's got us covered.
Personally, I think fossil fuels will be fine for the 50-100 years that fusion is still 20 years away, but just in case I'm wrong, the fallback plan of solar thermal just isn't that bad. (And while a magic battery would be nice, molten salt works OK, as does plants that are natural gas backed when needed to take up the slack.)
Bah, philosophy is just applied psychology. Bah, psychology is just applied biology. Bah, biology is just applied chemistry. Bah, chemistry is just applied physics. Bah, physics is just applied mathematics. Bah, mathematics is just applied philosophy.
Function programming optimizes well in a functional language. That was the point of Guy L Steele's dissertation, lo these many years ago: a tail call is just a branch. Tail recursion is just a different way to spell iteration, and a compiler should understand that.
I enjoy blending both styles, each where it's useful, in C# with its linq extensions. All the proper list processing constructs (albeit with ridiculous names: "select"? really?), all quite efficient and lazy.
OTOH passing lambdas around everywhere just because that's the music you listened to in college isn't helping either performance or clarity.
But it wouldn't be "10% better", it would be "10% better growth", so the people doing it wrong would remain bit players. As long as the majority are fair, who cares about the rest?
Freedom is important, and that includes freedom for different people to have different ideas about fair practices what "merit" consists of. Rule out the worst sorts of obvious abuses? Sure, no harm there. But try to pick some "perfect" system ahead of time and force it on everyone else? Guess what, now you're the asshole.
How cool would it be if we had some system whereby companies compete, and thus the companies that aren't as good at selecting and promoting the best fail while those who do choose the best dominate the landscape. No one would need to pick the rules ahead of time, no Intelligent Design needed for the economy, just evolution in action. Wouldn't that be an interesting system?
Only if you believe China actually works that way. Certainly people are shot by the government for any number of reasons. And I'm sure from time to time the actual reasons are the stated reasons. But you can be sure that if a CEO gets killed for "defrauding the government" the truth includes "and the right guy didn't get his cut".
Is it that common now that what specifically you get your degree in matters? Of my circle of friends from college, none of them are working in the field their degree would suggest. Now, they're still technical degrees for technical work, but that's a far as it goes. (Software dev with a physics phd, tech CEO with an environmental engineering degree, etc.)
Sure, your degree is important for landing that first job, but life rarely takes the path you imagined when in high school (and thank goodness for that!).
There's a cremation service in the US that you can sign up for that will be... aggressive... in seeing your body cremated according to your wishes, (relatively) cheaply and quickly. Their market is precisely people who want to trump their family on this issue. But I'm blocking on the company name - anyone?
Well, there are also tubes that people might loosely call "siphons" that do work by atmospheric pressure involved in some clever pumpless perpetual fountain designs, where the high air pressure in one chamber pumps water up through a pipe. But if we want to change even the non-technical definition of siphon to exclude that, that also seems reasonable. "Reverse-siphon" maybe, since it goes against gravity?
Netflix is a struggling, midsized company. Amazon is bigger than Comcast. Netflix doesn't actually buy all that much bandwidth, as they use a clever CDN (much of which is host by Amazon). Amazon is, I think, the one of the bigger ISP customers in the world (not sure who actually has the biggest pipe in the world these days, but Amazon is up there). For a lot of consumer ISP customers (the kind of customers they like, the ones that don't do much), Amazon == online shopping.
Microsoft and Google are similarly powerful. You can kick Netflix around, but that short list are the most cash-rich and tech aggressive companies around (needing facebook to make the list of heavy-hitters complete).
Give it time, it's growing. It won't ever have titles from EA of course (and nothing of value was lost), but indie dev studios have discovered it, and the percentage of new small titles available on both Steam and GOG is growing. And who knows, with the success of their own AAA title, some of the bigger studios might finally cave as well - at least those not so arrogant as to be exclusive to their own homebrew distribution network.
Do you know geekoid's posting history? I wasn't just guessing that he wants college primarily for the purpose of indoctrination, with any incidental education being secondary.
I support social support for getting the sort of education needed to land a job, as clearly we aren't achieving enough of that now. But non-useful stuff is luxury, and I'm not OK with tax dollars going to provide people with luxuries.
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I think the important thing one learns in college from any STEM degree is "the engineering mindset". The ability to approach complex problems analytically and solve them a piece at a time with the tools available. It doesn't much matter how you learn this (what major), as long as you develop the skill.
I do wish there were more professional career-oriented vocational training in college, to help those who actually go into the careers their major suggests, but for many reasons people go a different direction after college. Some learn they don't actually enjoy the work they thought they would, others are finally escaping parental control only after college graduation, and so on. Still, it couldn't hurt.
I see non-STEM degrees as just a scam as this point.
The Tao gave birth to machine language. Machine language gave birth to the assembler.
The assembler gave birth to the compiler. Now there are ten thousand languages.
Each language has its purpose, however humble. Each language expresses the Yin and Yang of software. Each language has its place within the Tao.
But do not program in Java if you can avoid it.
So why is it a big deal if the coasts move? It's an economic cost with a price tag attached - that's all. It's far less worrisome than a war, which would similarly destroy cities, but also kill a great many people. Stuff is just stuff; people matter.
Contrast a warm Earth with a return of glaciation in the current ice age. There it's not just some coastline lost, it's most of Europe and the Northern US gone, Canada and Russia vanish, and habitable land area is quite significantly reduced. Still just an economic cost, but a far higher one.
While not a cube addict, I am a Numberphile junkie, and they have several cube-related videos. The Rubik's Cube is pretty interesting from the point of view of abstract algebra: a large but finite set of values and an interesting set of operators - very different from + and *. It's a neat example of algebra that's not an obvious analog to numbers, but that you can wrap your head (and hands) around.
Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.
Tell it to geologists. And paleontologists. A warm Earth simply isn't a nightmare scenario: it's the most prolific life we have evidence for.
Sure, they're appropriate for utility industrial-scale power generation, not home use. While sun-tracking mirrors are neat and all, a mirrored trench is a fair concentrator, as the working fluid accumulates heat along the length of the pipe (the external input heat source is quite hot, after all, so it's just a matter of heat flow).
Sure, but there's no "off the net" geek appeal there, was my point.
Don't tell California that. Seriously, this stuff was built and operated at real scale providing real base load power. My reality beats your speculation, I'm afraid.
This is provided we don't turn Earth into another Venus by continually ramping up faster and faster fossil fuel extraction rates.
You were probably going for hyperbole, but some people actually believe this sort of BS. All the carbon in all the worlds known fossil fuel reserves (plus all the carbon in the air plus all the carbon in the oceans, plus all the carbon in the worlds biomass, combined) are really quite tiny in comparison to the geological carbon cycle.
If we try really hard we might end the Quaternary Ice Age early, or we might not, we don't know enough to say, but a Warm Earth is overall more biosphere-friendly than current conditions: more exposed land, and with higher atmospheric CO2, plant life vibrant enough to sustain 15 ton herbivores across that land. We face possibly quite expensive relocation if we go and melt the ice caps, and sure, it would suck to rebuild most major cities, but that's as bad as it gets. Long term (i.e., geological time scales, don't get your hopes up), it won't matter at all.
California built a solar thermal plant that could also burn natural gas as needed. In practice, 90% of power was solar. 90%. Not theoretical.
But the green hate it as it's not pure solar, and the geeks hate it as it's not photoelectric, and the energy companies hate it as it's only 10% fossil, so it lost the political games and was eventually decommissioned.
Photoelectric isn't there yet. Might not be in my lifetime.
But solar thermal? A black pipe and a mirrored trench? Works for anyone, developed or otherwise. No, it's not cheaper than the price of natural gas today, but no rush. No, you can't really do it at home scale, but as an inexhaustible low-tech power generation solution to fall back on? It's got us covered.
Personally, I think fossil fuels will be fine for the 50-100 years that fusion is still 20 years away, but just in case I'm wrong, the fallback plan of solar thermal just isn't that bad. (And while a magic battery would be nice, molten salt works OK, as does plants that are natural gas backed when needed to take up the slack.)
Bah, philosophy is just applied psychology.
Bah, psychology is just applied biology.
Bah, biology is just applied chemistry.
Bah, chemistry is just applied physics.
Bah, physics is just applied mathematics.
Bah, mathematics is just applied philosophy.
Function programming optimizes well in a functional language. That was the point of Guy L Steele's dissertation, lo these many years ago: a tail call is just a branch. Tail recursion is just a different way to spell iteration, and a compiler should understand that.
I enjoy blending both styles, each where it's useful, in C# with its linq extensions. All the proper list processing constructs (albeit with ridiculous names: "select"? really?), all quite efficient and lazy.
OTOH passing lambdas around everywhere just because that's the music you listened to in college isn't helping either performance or clarity.
But it wouldn't be "10% better", it would be "10% better growth", so the people doing it wrong would remain bit players. As long as the majority are fair, who cares about the rest?
Freedom is important, and that includes freedom for different people to have different ideas about fair practices what "merit" consists of. Rule out the worst sorts of obvious abuses? Sure, no harm there. But try to pick some "perfect" system ahead of time and force it on everyone else? Guess what, now you're the asshole.
How cool would it be if we had some system whereby companies compete, and thus the companies that aren't as good at selecting and promoting the best fail while those who do choose the best dominate the landscape. No one would need to pick the rules ahead of time, no Intelligent Design needed for the economy, just evolution in action. Wouldn't that be an interesting system?
I would move to get sewer service over septic (yes, subjective), to get reliable electric service over rotating brownouts: utilities matter.
Only if you believe China actually works that way. Certainly people are shot by the government for any number of reasons. And I'm sure from time to time the actual reasons are the stated reasons. But you can be sure that if a CEO gets killed for "defrauding the government" the truth includes "and the right guy didn't get his cut".
Is it that common now that what specifically you get your degree in matters? Of my circle of friends from college, none of them are working in the field their degree would suggest. Now, they're still technical degrees for technical work, but that's a far as it goes. (Software dev with a physics phd, tech CEO with an environmental engineering degree, etc.)
Sure, your degree is important for landing that first job, but life rarely takes the path you imagined when in high school (and thank goodness for that!).
There's a cremation service in the US that you can sign up for that will be ... aggressive ... in seeing your body cremated according to your wishes, (relatively) cheaply and quickly. Their market is precisely people who want to trump their family on this issue. But I'm blocking on the company name - anyone?
Depends on what data Nest collects. Bet it can't figure out your sex habits?
Well, there are also tubes that people might loosely call "siphons" that do work by atmospheric pressure involved in some clever pumpless perpetual fountain designs, where the high air pressure in one chamber pumps water up through a pipe. But if we want to change even the non-technical definition of siphon to exclude that, that also seems reasonable. "Reverse-siphon" maybe, since it goes against gravity?
Netflix is a struggling, midsized company. Amazon is bigger than Comcast. Netflix doesn't actually buy all that much bandwidth, as they use a clever CDN (much of which is host by Amazon). Amazon is, I think, the one of the bigger ISP customers in the world (not sure who actually has the biggest pipe in the world these days, but Amazon is up there). For a lot of consumer ISP customers (the kind of customers they like, the ones that don't do much), Amazon == online shopping.
Microsoft and Google are similarly powerful. You can kick Netflix around, but that short list are the most cash-rich and tech aggressive companies around (needing facebook to make the list of heavy-hitters complete).
Give it time, it's growing. It won't ever have titles from EA of course (and nothing of value was lost), but indie dev studios have discovered it, and the percentage of new small titles available on both Steam and GOG is growing. And who knows, with the success of their own AAA title, some of the bigger studios might finally cave as well - at least those not so arrogant as to be exclusive to their own homebrew distribution network.
Do you know geekoid's posting history? I wasn't just guessing that he wants college primarily for the purpose of indoctrination, with any incidental education being secondary.
I support social support for getting the sort of education needed to land a job, as clearly we aren't achieving enough of that now. But non-useful stuff is luxury, and I'm not OK with tax dollars going to provide people with luxuries.