Having gone through an entire long term consulting gig assessing EMRs (electronic medical record packages) and installing and helping to run and EMR for a largish medical practice, I've seen firsthand a bit of the mess that is IT in medical practice. IDC-9 and IDC-10 are just the tip of a very big iceberg. It is already (for all practical purposes) impossible to run a medical practice even with IDC-9 without an EMR and practice management interface. These electronic tools are very expensive initially, a total pain to maintain (and an ongoing expense to maintain), and more often than not terribly designed and clunky for the physicians, nurses, lab, and office staff to use. IDC-10 is the icing on the cake -- with it it is absolutely impossible to try to continue to operate "by hand". The government is armtwisting medical practices towards the use of electronic medical records and practice management in various other ways -- notably by promising a time (soon) where in order to be reimbursed for various services e.g. medicare a practice will have to file electronically.
As has been pointed out, although there are various (completely inadequate) standards for EMRs in play out there, "compatibility" is a low bar to clear and everybody adds their own bells and whistles, making any sort of switch between EMRs a major data port and conversion problem. Training and service, often as not, involves phone banks in India and opaque accents. Many/most of the EMRs have for all practical purposes no serious internal security -- no encryption of connections, trivial authentication, and rely on vpns and control of the internal network for security. Of course HIPAA provides no useful security guidelines in the first place, so the more you can make security someone else's problem, the more profitable your EMR is. In general, scaling of EMRs is poor (with a few large scale hospital-based exceptions) and they are, of course, enormously Windows-centric because that too makes a lot of things somebody else's problems. Such as security, installation, cost, scalability...
It's really quite sad. EMRs "should" make medical practice much more efficient and facilitate a large portion of the enormous burden of documenting everything in real time for physicians, in addition to facilitating billing and insurance claims and the overall practice financials and access to e.g. labs and other auxiliary services. Most do, to some extent, accomplish these goals. But they fall far, far, short of what they could accomplish, especially with a truly portable EMR interface that wasn't locked to any particular operating system and that had a "real" security layer in place. Having real standards and a federal cross-platform cross-application certification process would make things even better -- one could actually disconnect the user interface from the back end data and let users (e.g. physicians) choose the interface that suits them best across all vendors on any common database back end.
De nada. It just bothers me to hear people disrespect the very energy sources that they use to type their disrespect into machines built with the cream of the world's resources to be transported by a network that has become the nervous system of the human species in a mere two or three decades (driven by still more energy), from their well-lit houses paid for by the jobs they get into their cars every morning and drive off to perform, especially when they are pronouncing upon cultures and events they are obviously clueless about. India has a history of famines (usually caused by a failure of the monsoon exacerbated by their high population density in those limited parts of the country that can support agriculture at all, the general lack of transportation, their general historical poverty) that kill millions of people! One happened while we lived there, in 1966 -- it killed 1.5 million people. Some ten to fifteen million Indian citizens died in the twentieth century (in various events) of starvation and famine.
After the green revolution, India became a food exporting nation, and although they are currently closer to the line than they have been for thirty or so years, they still are. To the extent that oil enabled this revolution, and brought not exactly wealth, but at least enough wealth that most Indian citizens can easily enough avoid mass starvation (probably even through the inevitable Next Drought), well, bully damn good for oil.
One thing that many Americans do not realize is that even though India is only 1/3 the size of the US and has around 3 times the population, only about 1/3 of India is inhabitable or inhabited. Large parts of India are desert (e.g. the Thar desert) or too far away from rivers and water sources to permit reliable cultivation, and they don't have a universal, energy-use-intensive system of trapping the monsoon rains and distributing them for widespread irrigation, not far away from the rivers. I remember driving hours through the countryside of India with the land around me being basically empty -- too dry/rocky/mountainous to be useful. There would be villages stuck here and there even into these spaces (supported by village "tanks" -- basically large wells that were probably dug a few thousand years ago in some cases) and a certain amount of goatherding or cattle herding in the scrub that grows in these dry, thorny areas, but it isn't at all like driving through the US midwest with hundreds of miles of waving wheat and corn, plenty of water, mild temperatures. The population of India is concentrated along waterways that swell to overflowing in the summer and then dwindle most of the rest of the year only to swell again. It has always been so.
Is "oil addiction" a bad thing, for us or for India or for China or for the world? Not compared to the alternative we'd face if oil disappeared tomorrow -- global collapse of civilizations, mass starvation, war, and much worse. Fortunately, we're nowhere near out of oil -- reports of the end of oil are greatly exaggerated. What we are seeing is a global increase in the demand for oil as economies that previously used only a little suddenly need much more to sustain their growth and increasing affluence. High demand simply means that oil will cost more as long as the rate of supply is limited politically or by those seeking high profits.
IMO this isn't a terrible thing -- it provides us with the impetus we need to make the capital investment in renewable and less limited resources that would in time replace oil's use as fuel. Oil is far too valuable for purposes other than fuel as it is -- we shouldn't be burning it because there are other better things to do with it. Yet, we do not see any sort of urgency in the movement to develop the alternatives that would eventually replace it.
A big part of this is global NIMBY -- I'm teaching physics at the Duke Marine Lab at the moment, on an island that showcases a (very expensive!) building t
You might try looking at the history of -- and the death/statistics of -- World Wars one and two. Or the US Civil war, for that matter. Or any of the many petty rebellions, wars, revolutions that happened over the rest of recorded history. I'm not claiming we were at "peace" -- I'm claiming that the state of war globally has rarely been so peaceful, especially compared to the bulk of the twentieth century. The cold war didn't prevent war, but it did act as a powerful deterrent to MAJOR war. We've been capable of practically wiping out the human race on a whim for fifty years now. We haven't done so, nor have any of the other players with the capability. I count that as a big plus.
I also am curious as to why you say that Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan aren't "American". Again, you might look at the actual participants and history. Americans died in all of them and continue to die today, although they die at a rate that is far, far, lower than the rate at which they died in single battles of WWI or WW II.
Perhaps you are just too young to actually remember and see the difference between the little wars and skirmishes we and others are constantly engaged in and the pure quill, where whole continents are at war with the highest of stakes, but those who do not study history are, alas, indeed doomed to repeat it.
None of this matters, of course, to those that are fighting in an actual war right now. It doesn't matter if it is a "border action" or a search for "weapons of mass destruction" or to "crush Al Queda" or to establish your tribe as the top tribe in the bush -- the people killed are just as dead and the survivors just as traumatized as they would be if it were a big global war. But it isn't a big global war, and to the extent that horror scales with numbers, that does indeed matter. Most peaceful years in history is still a pretty apt description of the last forty, especially given the capabilities for destruction and the vastly larger populations.
Bullock carts. Excrement (animal and human). Surely you jest. Sometimes -- usually provided by water wheels that would have been at home at the time of the Pharaohs driven by bullocks or perhaps a mule or camel.
Perhaps you are under some illusions concerning the way agriculture in India (and to a large extent, the other countries in southeast Asia) is set up. It wasn't about making their agriculture over into ours -- that was never even a vague possibility. It was about improving yields with better crop rotations and farming methods, better hybrids (that produced larger grains of rice, for example, while being more drought and pest tolerant). It was about teaching them how to build large granaries and transport their grain to them using whatever local means of transportation they had or could afford. It was about teaching them to build them so that they were rat proof, and then kill off the rats that attempted to demonstrate that they weren't.
And of course nothing was wasted. The rats I'm referring to are big bandicoot rats, about the size of a cat or small terrier. My father was more than once served up a tasty meal of rat curry, and had to grin and munch right on down in order to not offend his hosts who were so very proud of themselves for keeping the vermin out of their rice silos.
The India we lived in in the 60s and that my father worked in -- New Delhi (the capital city) had water that was turned on for around three hours a day, at which time it either filled the tanks on your roof or you did without. In dry years that would be one hour a day and we didn't flush our toilets but once a day. Electricity worked, mostly, except when it didn't -- an interruption hours long happened once every few months and we just kept candles everywhere to be ready. 60 to 80% of the inhabitants of New Delhi -- the capital city, mind you -- used bicycles for transport, or rode in horse-drawn or bicycle-drawn rickshaws, or took "cabs" we called putt-putts -- a motor tricycle with a driver in front and room for two people and a small amount of "luggage" in back. Wealthier people would take the latter or a real cab (made by Tata Industries, of course, and invariably driven by a Sikh, as they had the transportation monopoly) to the market. Animals roamed said market -- pariah dogs and cattle, mostly, but a lot of horses too (see "rickshaws") -- and everybody and everything excreted and urinated in the streets so one had to pick one's way along no matter where one was walking. Humans, of course, tended to use large open fields to excrete -- not so much in the city streets -- but I saw plenty of exceptions.
Now consider the farmer -- he's living in the country, farming (often as eldest son in a system of primogeniture thousands of years old) a plot of land a few acres in size that has been in his family back to when your ancestors and mine were living in skin tents and wooden huts, perhaps with a few kilometers of a small village. He may never have travelled further away from home than twenty or thirty miles in his entire life. His wealth is his family, his bullocks and other farm animals (if any), a plow blade his bullocks pull, one nice suit of clean white clothes that he can wear to festivals and possibly a pair of actual shoes. Electricity is nearly a myth to him -- his house is lighted at night (if at all) by oil lamps burning inexpensive cottonseed oil -- lamps made out of terra-cotta clay turned into a shallow bowl with a wick-holding lip pulled out on one side, made and sold by the thousand for a few annas (call it three or four cents) each, with the wick being a twist of the same cotton. Perhaps he grows cotton, or mustardseed, or (if he is near a river and down in the lowlands) rice, or in rarer cases for a higher/drier farm barley, sorghum (which makes molasses and a coarse brown sugar), or sure, even wheat or rye. His work clothes consist of a dhoti -- a white loincloth twisted around his waist -- and perhaps some sort of headcloth twisted around
With enough cheap energy you can economically desalinate the ocean and hydroponically grow as much food as you like disconnected from the usual limitations of dirt farming in an uncertain climate. It isn't that there aren't other scarcities -- it is that cheap energy is the key to making them not scarce.
If we turned 5% of the Sahara desert into solar collector, we could turn the other 95% into one enormous farm and effectively terraform it so that it wasn't desert any more. The Sahara is quite large, has a year-round growing season and lots of sun -- as a farm supplied with unlimited water it could probable feed the entire world all by itself. Ditto the Australian Outback, ditto the US southwest, ditto much of central and western India (away from the major rivers, where farming is tied to the monsoon). Energy is water, energy is food, energy is recycling of garbage, energy is production, energy is transportation. Drop the cost of power to $0.01 per KW-hour, worldwide, define it at this price (effectively fixing a global currency not subject to manipulation) and stand back and watch the world explode (in a good way).
Evidence for this claim? My father worked to help make the green revolution happen in India and Southeast Asia, and he had absolutely nothing to do with oil (nor did the work done by e.g. Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, US AID, and so on have anything to do with oil). The bulk of the effort associated with the green revolution was the development of far better crop hybrids -- e.g. advanced rice hybrids developed in Louisiana -- with much higher yields and resistances, modern crop rotation methodologies, the development of a sustainable economic model from the farmer to the table, and much more. "Oil" played a (relatively minor) role in only two ways that I can think of or remember -- replacing bullock carts to some extent with e.g. trucks and rail for transporting crops to more distant locations, and as one of many sources of energy used to make fertilizers. The predominant fuels used by the farmers he worked with before, after, and during the revolution were dried cow dung and charcoal.
As a consequence of the green revolution and education and a very energetic population, fossil fuel consumption in India has steadily risen along with the gross domestic product as it has moved towards being a modern society, but oil had almost nothing to do with the revolution per se and has nothing at all to do with the "1-2 billion baseline". At least as far as I know (and I probably know a lot more than most people, having lived in India and watched the green revolution happen). If you have evidence to the contrary, feel free to enlighten me -- with references.
I personally think that unless some steps are taken to bring world population growth to zero fairly quickly that there are going to be some truly horrible wars in fifty to one hundred years.
You mean sort of like the truly horrible wars of the twentieth century, the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century, the... (iterate back to where human ancestors were mostly peaceable primates with 24 chromosomes instead of 23).
Why do you think that world population growth has anything to do with having truly horrible wars? We've done just fine killing one another when the world's population was far smaller, and if anything we are continuing some forty of the most peaceful years the world has ever known combined with the highest population the world has ever known.
Besides, there is only one "fundamental" scarcity -- energy. Bite the bullet, build massive solar energy facilities worldwide and/or invent sustainable thermonuclear fusion generators, make energy cheap and plentiful "forever", and we can address all the other scarcities. The catch will be to manage this before we kill one another off not because of scarcity or overpopulation per se, but because of human lust for political power, wealth, reproductive success, and control.
Not that I really disagree. If, for example, the Holocene cranks to its inevitable end starting tomorrow, the solar minimum that appears to be starting turns out to be a grand minimum, a couple of big volcano blow to give the next ice age a healthy head start, and we have a "Year without a summer" such as the one that occurred last in 1816, it would very likely kill a billion or more people. Midsummer frost in the world's breadbaskets would bring about starvation on a truly unprecedented scale, and the very northerly our southerly countries that have been temperate and prosperous during the Holocene would be the ones begging from or warring with their equatorial neighbors as the glaciers once again begin their slow descent across Siberia, Canada, China, and northern Europe.
The advent of thermonuclear fusion could have a very similar effect as it completely breaks the economies of all of the oil and coal producing countries and companies overnight.
See? We don't really have to wait! We could have a truly horrible war right now!
As does global warming alarmism, nuclear meltdown alarmism, alarmism over the horrors of oil pipelines across the pristine Alaskan wilderness, nuclear/bio/neurotoxic terrorism alarmism, economic alarmism, alarmism concerning the inevitable collapse of Christian Society should same-sex persons be permitted to marry, taxation alarmism, economic depression alarmism, and recently, alarmism concerning the rapture and following apocalypse and still more alarmism about how a coronal mass ejection that is apparently inevitable in 2013 will bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Why, without alarmism the daily news would be so boring that we might even get some work done and end global poverty, cure HIV, wake up and smack our foreheads with our hands and say "What was I thinking" regarding religion (a.k.a. "mythology that governs people's lives"), invent thermonuclear fusion engines the size of outboard motors that run for a decade on a thimbleful of fuel that is not mined from the moon, and establish world peace.
This is in and of itself an alarming prospect!
rgb
(P. S. -- in addition to selling papers, all this alarmism allows politicians to remain in power -- d'ya think?)
You can always sue anyone; the only question is whether or not you will win. The interesting question here is that if he patents his powers as Christ's powers, if he trademarks his business activities as Christ, if "Christ" (tm) becomes a protected business asset, then while the church can argue that all of this is in the public domain, it wouldn't be the first time courts have turned around and granted trademark, copyright, business secret, patent types of protections to corporate entities for things that are commonplace and public. In fact, it probably isn't even rare -- people patent mathematical formulae in the context of cryptography, people patent mobius strips in the context of drive belts that wear equally on both sides, people trademark common names as business names in specific contexts all of the time -- Elmo's diner, Apple computers, Ford motorcars. Such protections typically extend to all business-related activities in the field of reference -- one can found Ford Washing Machines or Ford Publications, but another Ford motors would be in violation (with courts required to decide on the overlap).
So if the patent office has lost its mind and grants him his patents, and he follows up by filing for certain trademarks to protect his legitimate business activities of performing patented miracles as Jesus Christ, he would certainly have an argument for suing churches for intruding on his business turf simply because their "business" has overlap and competes. Of course it would really help his arguments if he could, say, use his patented superpowers to restore sight to a blind man and make a beggar walk. He could then challenge the churches to prove that their so-far unsubstantiated claims to be able to do the same thing are valid, and when they fail to provide evidence that their many promises of delivering a service for their followers are true, the court might well issue an injunction to stop claiming that they can provide those services and require them to give up their use of a trademarked name in the context of a lying swindle promising to provide the same services as a real patented technology.
It could happen. On the day that hell freezes over, but heck, the Holocene has already overstayed its welcome and the next Ice Age could start any day now, so hell could indeed freeze over soon.
What is said in this post or the article that Scott Adams hasn't been saying, and portraying, for years? Or is it decades? His characters already display all of the dysfunctions suggested, and anybody that has worked in IT (especially in a corporate environment) recognizes the archetypes/stereotypes. Yes, Virginia, there are real nerd geek geniuses who just want to do their work and be left alone (because they love their work) and then there are the incompetents trying to hide in plain sight, the empire builders, the politicians, the pointy haired bosses, the probably bright but cynical and lazy, the eager young interns being disabused of their idealism.
University IT tends (I think) to be slightly better than this on average -- a more likely haven for the competent who want to be left alone -- but even there there are plenty of empire builders and highly placed incompetent buttheads. Legend has it that a very few companies such as Amazon and Google and maybe Red Hat have managed to minimize the "pointy haired boss effect" and get a large crew of iconoclastic nerd genius types to be productive in their innately self-actualized way, but a lot of this is just human nature, being expressed.
Ah, but just think of what a great alternative career choice this becomes to, say, becoming a proctologist. Or really any of a wide range of physicians. When it comes to probing Uranus for gas or even for solid shit that it might be useful to discover and remove, astronauts will just have to stand in line...
rgb
It's a FAQ there, but you really should be asking this on the beowulf list, after skimming the list archives for any of the eight and a half million answers (in gory detail) that have been posted there in response over the years. Slashdot has plenty of nerds and I'm sure a lot of cluster geeks (who are likely on the beowulf list) but the beowulf list is sort of distilled cluster geekery/wisdom.
rgb (Google "rgb duke beowulf" if you like -- I used to help answer this question once a month a few years ago on list, although I'm too busy and less active now.)
Now you're just teasing. After the distro wars, the editor wars, you want to start the compiler wars? Oh, wait, half of the respondents are replying with interpreted languages (demonstrating a pretty profound ignorance of 99% of scientific computing) so clearly the question was serious...;-)
Personally I vote for slackware for a distro, jove as an editor, and do languages other than C (and somewhat regrettably, fortran) exist? They do not. Maybe perl or one of them new-fangled interpreted languages to augment plain old bash/awk/sed for the occasional scripty sort of task. PVM and/or MPI for parallel program support. A nice fast network, plenty of ram tuned to the number of processors and cores that makes sense for your particular parallel/distributed application(s), storage similarly tuned, and there you go.
I was just kidding about the slackware, BTW, but honestly you can build a decent cluster for most purposes on top of any flavor of Linux, BSD, Solaris, and yeah, probably even MacOS. The primary differences are going to be what apps you have prebuilt and instantly deliverable in the distro's package management repos and scheme, and how easy they are to strip down to a decent, automatically installed cluster node image. Although I did use slackware for my very first linux clusters (after using SunOS and Irix and miscellaneous Unices for some years before). Any distro named after the church of the subgenius can't be all bad...:-)
One last serious note. Most of the replies above don't pay enough attention to the importance of automatable installation and update methodologies in the cluster distro. I'm a pretty big fan of kickstart and yum (since yum was developed by my colleagues and coworkers in the Duke physics department) as one can use the former and latter together to build very scalable cluster installations and fully automate a whole lot of critical aspects of management. While I do generally think well of Debian, I don't think it can really compete in this one arena, and it is a show-stoppingly important arena (although Debian is so huge that maybe somebody has finally made it as simple and transparent for mass-market installs). For that reason alone I think that any of the RH-derived, yum/kickstart supporting distros are very reasonable choices for a cluster, and that which flavor in particular one might choose depends mightily on the particular kind of cluster you are building and its purpose. I've built clusters on top of fedora with complete satisfaction -- cluster nodes run a stripped down linux anyway and the "rapidly varying" problem is more or less irrelevant to cluster stability as the packages you install aren't, actually, that rapidly varying.
One advantage of it is that a few tools and libraries you want to be up to date, sometimes -- the GSL comes to mind -- and historically things like SL, Rocks, and RHEL/Centos have actually lagged so that the GSL and certain other tools are out of date by too much, to the point where useful stuff in the current builds isn't there (and is a pain to build yourself). In other words, there can be particular trade-offs in terms of things like device support, library support, and tool support that might affect specific people or clusters built for certain specific purposes, and this needs to be thought about before building on top of e.g. MacOSX (where a lot less prebuilt stuff is likely to be available) or the smaller distros (ditto) or distros that aren't aggressively enough maintained. Anything missing or out of date is more work for you.
But the standard litany in cluster design is: YMMV. Prototype. If you've got a few cluster nodes to play with, try popping Debian on them, and see how hard it is to install them en masse. Repeat for a few other distros and tools. See what has resources that easily support your target application(s). See which distros have the drivers for the devices and hardware you will be using without headaches or kernel builds on your part (if any). Then pick one not because somebody says "use this, it's the best" but rather because it actually wins against the others in ease of use and completeness for your cluster.
Because they build a chain of reasoning based on what is actually enormously well-known, mundane physics. We have only known about radioactive decay for just about one hundred years, but at this point we completely understand the process, understand how and why it represents a possible consistent clock, can validate the clock by looking back in time as we look at the light of stars given off in the remote past, and use it routinely to date things like the Earth itself, the fossil record, and the age of the solar system. There are over forty independent radioactive clocks used in radiometric dating, valid for overlapping ranges of dates from billions of years to thousands of years, and where they overlap they by and large agree.
We've known semiconductor physics for just about fifty years (a bit more, but only barely so). How can we feel secure that your computer, built on top of semiconductor physics, will actually work? Yet the physics that describes its operation -- being pure quantum physics involving things like crystal band structure, fermi surfaces, and so on is much more difficult than the physics of blackbody radiation, the fact that the intensity of light drops of like 1/r^2 with distance, and the relationships between power, temperature, and the size of a radiating object. How can we feel "secure" about Maxwell's Equations and the laws of thermodynamics? Because every minute of every day there are a few dozen powers of tens of confirmations of these equations visible to your naked eye, whether or not you know it. If the laws of thermodynamics were egregiously violated, if Maxwell's equations were not classically "true" in the classical limit, if quantum theory ceased to function reliably at the microscopic level, the existing structure of the Universe would catastrophically alter in ways you could hardly miss in the few nanoseconds before your brain chemistry (based on all of these things) ceased to function.
So if your question was intended -- as it seems to be -- to cast doubt on the entire chain of reasoning leading us to believe e.g. that our sun is between 4 and 5 billion years old, that the earth is just a bit younger, so gee -- perhaps the Universe is really only 6007 years old and the Bible is right after all, well, get a grip, you Anonymous Coward you! If it was a genuine question about how "these scientists" in general arrive at sound, reproducible conclusions that represent our best possible state of belief (so far) given the data and the entire network of evidence-supported, consistent beliefs known as "the laws of physics", "the laws of chemistry", etc, well, a good intro book on Astronomy would be happy to answer your questions and Enlighten you. I'd be happy to recommend one. Or you can easily answer your questions using the Internet -- wikipedia contains most of the answers if you start an astronomy wiki-romp and read a few articles on stars, the age of stars, and so on.
The answer to your question is basically that the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (itself constructed using physics and parallax of the nearer stars) gives us a sound yardstick for Universal distances, one we leverage using e.g. Cepheid variables. Looking back in time (speed of light and distance) and using our knowledge of the fusion process and gravitational process that produces the energy radiated by stars we can make sound inferences about their age, so that the various star types in the HS diagram are themselves also a clock of their relative ages. Given a preexisting clock of stellar ages. "synchronizing" a new clock based on rotational angular momentum of stars of one type or another is straightforward, if tedious.
Superb example of Bayesian reasoning and the application of maximum entropy! Bravo!
The real problem isn't Harold Whacko. The problem is cognitive dissonance. Even though he will be proven wrong -- again -- in a little over three and a half hours (or less -- I would guess that the Bible doesn't account for EDT) will his followers, the ones who have showered him with money, go "Gee, were we dumb! We actually believed this crazy loon!"? No, instead they will find a way of making the non-event into the event, or they will start rumors of some people disappearing, and pretty soon all of them will "know" somebody that was taken up, and then there will be an after the last minute second chance or the good news that Jesus decided not to end the Universe after all because of the faith of Harold's followers.
Leon Festinger observed all of this, documented it, and named it way back in the 60's, and it is what keeps religion alive in spite of the lack of evidence, in spite of the positive evidence that they are wrong, that their predictions are false, that their theistic scripture is a collection of lies and myths, that many of those that preach it are con artists who suck the blood of the gullible.
And here you demonstrate the real agenda! Whether or not oil has "peaked" (most unlikely, but say it has) or will run out has nothing to do with AGW! Yet, strangely enough, in any debate of the latter the former is nearly always invoked. Why is that, do you imagine? Also, what exactly does it have to do with the scientific assertion that the actual data unambiguously demonstrates that if we don't take immediate actions with trillion dollar price tags (and quite likely, a price tag in human life as well) we'll have a "doomsday scenario" in a mere fifty or sixty years?
You seek to tie the two together to strengthen your political desire to move the world's energy production mechanisms away from dependence on oil, I understand that. I, on the other hand, feel pretty comfortable agreeing that we should be moving past the use of oil as a fuel for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the climate, while thinking that the assertion that humans have had a major macro-scale impact on the climate are akin to the ant pumping on the elephant and going "suffer, bitch" in the old joke.
I think there is a lot to be learned from the old adage, "follow the money" in both cases. Look for cases of political alliances such as this one, tying the threat of major disaster (AGW) to the hatred of oil companies and a lingering feeling that cars are still huge polluters because they really were huge polluters fifty years ago and the determination to block things like oil pipelines or even the systematic search for oil in Alaska because if we actually found reserves that were (say) enormous and pushed "peak oil" out for a century or so, we'd cause the extinction of some species of arctic wildlife (and risk ecodisasters in their own right, and terrorist threats, and so on).
That's all simply lovely, but science is going to determine whether or not AGW is correct, and all of the other considerations including the funding and political machinations attending their conflation into one big story will, in the end, not have the slightest effect on nature, and ignore the other side of the cost-benefit problem being debated.
To put it another way, if (by chance) global temperatures do start to systematically descend as we can for the first time get actual data on how the sun's state affects climate in a long term downturn brought about by solar state, and it turns out that the AGW hypothesis is systematically incorrect, a trivial correction that we should never have worried about (and never would have worried about if it were not for Mann's hockey stick being made the cover of the IPCC report, because the proxy data to that point pretty much indicated "there's very probably nothing much to worry about") would you suddenly think that oil was great, need to drill more wells? No. But neither would you be so incredibly hot to create artificial controls limiting its drilling and use "because we might run out", or "because it might damage the ecology", not when those very controls increase the profits of the oil companies and create an easily exploited and entire artificial "carbon economy" run by (gasp) The Governments and Rich People. You might at least look at the price tag.
That's what AGW brings to the debate. You can now say "No matter what the price tag, AGW and flooding and ocean rising and melting of icecaps and damn, look at that, it will affect wi-fi connectivity all you geeks who somehow aren't hopping on the bandwagon, will cost much more," giving Carte Blanche to those that wish to profit from and control something for reasons that have nothing to do with AGW. It's like me saying "We need to make the CDC the largest government bureaucracy because there is a distinct possibility that the next emergent plague will kill more people than AGW" -- a small chance, an enormous consequence. "We need to make NASA ten times larger because of a mix of AGW (which it has made a partial living on for over a d
I'm sorry, I only manage both wired and wifi networks (and have done so in the case of wired back to vampire-tap thickwire Ethernet), so I have no idea what you are talking about. My University's wireless is measureably less reliable during a rainstorm? Oh my, whatever will we do?
As for torrents of mud or water, yes, I can see where being flooded would negatively affect wifi signals. In fact, I think we should write a whole series of articles to that affect! The People Must Be Told! Not only will their houses be underwater or buried in mud because of our profligate burning of Carbon, not only will they be baked in Saharan temperatures at the same time in withering droughts, but damn, the WiFi won't work either! And hell, since the actual internet goes over cables and fiber underground I guess there goes the Internet as well.
No, there isn't a hint of hysteria or irrelevance in this. The people must be told indeed!
I'll tell you what affects wireless -- the damn microwave oven. Every time it goes on, bang, there goes Netflix (over wifi to the wii), there goes my wife's ethernet connection (but not mine, go figure). That's a real, immediate, easily demonstrable effect with consequences right now, and yet it somehow doesn't get magazine articles saying things like "Nuked Food can Cost You WiFi Connection", or "Anthropogenic Popcorn Affects Wireless".
Mmmmmm, popcorn. Time for lunch -- oh no, the damn eth.a^3@.... (Network Connection Lost, Do You Want to Restart?)
Analyze it any way you like. My point was, in fact, the same as yours. If you try to fit a rising curve to the 30 year data and look at R^2, what do you think you get? Especially if you try to fit it to the rising CO_2 concentration, on a scale that doesn't amplify it so that it looks huge by plotting only the change across this timeframe. Especially if you include the uncertainties in the data -- even with satellites and vastly improved instrumentation there is a rather large uncertainty (and a certain amount of good-natured fudging) that has gone into forming the "consensus" global temperature. I'm not complaining -- it is by far the best, indeed the only really accurate record we have of global temperature in a moderately reliable timeseries -- but the fact remains that this record stretches square across two of the three highest solar cycles in the highest, longest solar grand maximum since the seventh milleneum BCE (some 9000 years ago). Expecting global temperatures to plummet instantly in response to cycle 23 (still high, but lower) and 24 (promising to be much, much lower) is unreasonable. In fact, "rapidly" changing the solar heat budget in the negative direction could easily create spikes in temperature because the Earth is a chaotic system. My point is that global warming enthusiasts often point to spiking global temperatures and say "Look, AGW!" even within this 30 year record. They inconveniently leave out the dips, or R^2. There is basically no convincing evidence of AGW over the last 30 years, where convincing specifically means that a fit to a rising trend, given the uncertainties in the data, can be statistically differentiated from no trend at all. And here yes, those nasty old points sub-mean out on the right hand end of the scale do have a rather large impact on R^2, don't they?
You seem to think that everything should track on a year by year basis, but that's plain silly. The Earth has an enormous heat capacity, storing energy in the ocean. It is filled with complex feedback loops (many of which are literally loops -- heat transport loops -- that carry heat around the globe in both the oceans and the atmosphere). We cannot even predict the local climate let alone the global one, with current models -- the predictivity of the models a decade out or two decades out is virtually nil. The models themselves are ultimately nonlinear fits to a complex function with more than enough parameters to get good local agreement while still meaning absolutely nothing about their actual correctness. Finally, the most important parameter(s) of those models, the climate's sensitivity to greenhouse forcing, is quite literally being pulled out of someone's (Hansen's) ass -- the long term data (and a certain amount of common sense) suggest that the forcing is small to negative, with CO_2 generally following global temperatures rather than the other way around. There is no real evidence for amplification, especially not amplification at the high end of OMG the oceans will rise to the foothills of the Appalachians and all the polar bears will die in the next twenty years. That's pure hysteria.
There a number of reasons to be highly skeptical of the AGW cabal. For one, there is such a thing as an AGW cabal, that was targeting CO_2 (and oil) long before there was any evidence or models at all that suggested that it was a problem. It is at this point perfectly clear that the AGW cabal have tampered with data, cherrypicked data, and cooked up fits designed to minimize or eliminate "problems" for the theory, like the medieval optimum and little ice age. How do we know? They have (inadvertently) told us, in outed email messages from climategate and in comments in e.g. Mann's original code. Everybody knows that Mann's infamous hockey stick graph is wrong at this point but -- guess what -- it is still nearly ubiquitous and is constantly referenced whenever the media want to sell news. Disaster is sensational and sells papers or advertising or whatever. The truth is that at best we do not really know if CO_2 is a major influence on climate (as opposed to a minor one responsible for only a fraction of the total warming, one with negative sensitivity rather than strong positive). Claiming that we do know this, and that the world should take enormously expensive steps that create artificial markets and strongly affect things like global poverty as a consequence, is arguably the most irresponsible piece of "science" ever, and one that -- if the solar model turns out to be correct -- will come back by costing every scientist in every field credibility in the eyes and minds of the public. AGW hasn't been advanced like a scientific hypothesis for possible falsification; it has been advanced like a political and social crusade, one symptom of which is the pure crap about WiFi range being reduced due to AGW. What, WiFi doesn't work in India or Saharan Africa (places that are way, way, hotter on average than England)? Bullshit. But there is no piece of bullshit too extreme to be trumpeted to the sky as evidence of AGW or touted as a consequence of the coming disaster!
Rather than look just at sunspot numbers on Wikimedia or skeptic websites, why not visit a website that is devoted to a systematic review of solar literature and which says very nearly nothing at all about warming, anthropogenic or otherwise? Why not look at the actual long term data for yourself instead of looking at data that has been presented by the (IMO) highly suspect participants in the AGW cabal? There is plenty of data out there to look at, and it stretches (in e.g. ice cores and radioactive signatures) back for far longer than the proxies Mann cooked up (and that continue to be prepared to order today). For example:
Yes, global warming is real. No, it isn't bad enough to justify anything other than slight caution.
It's worth noting that the twentieth century was one of the four most active centuries in the history of the holocene for Mr. Sun, too. In fact, solar cycles 21 and 22 were grand maxima, and 23 was still quite large.
Solar cycle 24, OTOH, looks like it could be the lowest one in over a century, although it has pepped up a bit in the last two months. At the moment, the global temperature anomaly is 0.1C BELOW the thirty year running mean (and has been for a couple of months now). So yes, global warming is real, but it is entirely possible that its cause is, and has been in the past, the Sun. Not CO_2.
And real or not -- asserting that it will affect Wi-Fi range simply shows that either somebody dumped lysergic acid into their beer or that there are, quite literally, no limits to the sensationalist lies that people will tell to try to convince people that this particular piece of the sky is falling. Especially when what they should be fearing is the end of the Holocene, or just a simple Maunder minimum. Warm weather is good. Plants grow. People eat. A year without a summer, such as 1816 (Dalton minimum heterodynes with volcanic activity) could kill a hundred million people in a year.
Now, that is. For close to 100 years it was automatic excommunication. The problem ultimately was that the Catholic Church had this annoying habit of educating its membership well in its school system. Even the more intelligent of the Jesuits (taught to think black was white if that's what Catholic core doctrine stated) had a hard time with the cognitive dissonance introduced by ever more evidence for an ancient earth and evolution, including a great deal of it introduced by one of their own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre. Lemaitre was there fighting to show that the Universe had a finite temporal beginning (in competition with e.g. Hoyle's steady state model). The latter would have left no room for a "created" Universe at all.
When your own man is fighting to show that the Universe is billions of years old because that is better (for your silly mythology) than the alternative, it is difficult to hold on to the rest of the silly mythology that is contradicted by his hypothesis. The CC has simply backed off of the mythology at each point when it has been contradicted post Galileo, usually after a fight but less so in recent decades, trying to isolate a magical core that will survive (and allow them to survive) in a Universe without magic or visible creation. Even now, they are stung by the Galileo incident and restrict their pronouncements to "matters of opinion" that cannot be contradicted/falsified by things like evidence.
The Evangelicals and Baptists, OTOH, don't give a rat's ass about evidence. They only care about brainwashing the kids as young as possible so they can continue to believe black is white for the rest of their lives, in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
I have my HP 35C upstairs on my desk -- needing batteries, unfortunately. But on my trusty laptop I have a lovely tty curses-based program called "hpc" (written by a friend of mine twenty or so years ago) that is pretty much a perfect emulator, and which does RPN in command line form, as in " hpc 4 pi 3 / 5 3 ^ * " to find the volume of a sphere of radius 5. One of the first things I reinstall on any new linux box I own. I sometimes think about giving it a GUI interface, but honestly, the CLI is so useful that there just isn't much point to it...
But, I don't believe that Helium mining will ever be anything more than a byproduct of other minimg and manufacturing on the Moon. In that, I agree with you.
Right. It would probably be cheaper to just build solar cells there girdling the middle and microwave it back to earth. Potentially even better than sharks with laser beams or mass drivers for Dr. Evil, though...
Yeah, I agree that mass drivers barely make sense -- on the moon (the number on earth end up being pretty absurd whenever I assign this particular problem to my students:-). Quadratic lengthening of the track, that sort of thing, plus a bonus to punch through the atmosphere. MAYBE useful to lift naked mass into orbit but not people.
I actually was referring to the problems with ionic drives onboard a ship and electricity more than stationary magnetic rail guns, although we're still a decade or two away from being able to engineer a 15 km long one even on the earth. There you have the ability to make your reaction mass go very fast, but you have a terrible power to momentum ratio so getting power densities to where you can achieve liftoff is virtually impossible. Great for adjusting satellite positions, though.
I'm still looking for a way of putting (say) 1 kg of mass into orbit for my son's science fair project on a budget of a couple hundred dollars. He had high hopes of an ionic drive made out of a cannibalized microwave oven and duct tape, but aside from the problem of getting a really long extension cord, I just couldn't make it work out.
The biggest unsolved problems beyond actually getting fusion to work and produce net positive energy in the first place. To make rabbit stew, first catch the rabbit. Then we can all worry about how to cook the wily rabbit, and whether we can manage it in a cheap pot or it requires an expensive and elaborate pressure cooker, we can give making stew a shot.
In spades for He3-He3 fusion (which is much more difficult than D-T or D-D or hydrogen-anything as far as temperature, pressure, and confinement are concerned) -- in that case it would be nice to know we're not trying to catch a pink unicorn. True, pink unicorn might theoretically be the ideal stew meat, make itself right on your plate -- if only you could catch a pink unicorn!
Noting well that the rabbit and unicorn to be caught are not the fuel, they are making the fuel in question work. There's plenty of fuel in both cases, egregiously cheaply readily availably immediately so in the case of D. Even with the pink unicorn in hand, though, you'd have to seriously consider the economics of that particular solution. If pink unicorns ate only moon rock, it isn't clear that slaughtering themselves and making themselves into stew right on your plate would be worth the cost of raising pink unicorns, given plentiful rabbits. Only if making rabbit stew turned out to be very expensive would it likely be worth it, and frankly, I do not believe that this will be the case.
I'd go futher. If somebody were to invent/discover the near-mythical cold D-D fusion tomorrow at (say) 10x break even then there will be power plants built using it within two years. The neutron problem sounds much more like an engineering issue that a fundamental barrier, once high-yield fusion is achieved. Also, D-D fusion has a fair number of advantages of its own, not the least of which are its abundance and the symmetry of the reactants in the fusion mix. He3 achieves the symmetry and may well be in principle even more advantageous, but He3-He3 isn't called a third generation nuclear fuel for nothing. Noting that we are still in generation 0.
Once again, going to the moon now to mine 3rd gen nuclear fuel is senseless and enormously expensive. Why not spend the money actually getting to generation 1?
Slashdot Mirror
Having gone through an entire long term consulting gig assessing EMRs (electronic medical record packages) and installing and helping to run and EMR for a largish medical practice, I've seen firsthand a bit of the mess that is IT in medical practice. IDC-9 and IDC-10 are just the tip of a very big iceberg. It is already (for all practical purposes) impossible to run a medical practice even with IDC-9 without an EMR and practice management interface. These electronic tools are very expensive initially, a total pain to maintain (and an ongoing expense to maintain), and more often than not terribly designed and clunky for the physicians, nurses, lab, and office staff to use. IDC-10 is the icing on the cake -- with it it is absolutely impossible to try to continue to operate "by hand". The government is armtwisting medical practices towards the use of electronic medical records and practice management in various other ways -- notably by promising a time (soon) where in order to be reimbursed for various services e.g. medicare a practice will have to file electronically.
As has been pointed out, although there are various (completely inadequate) standards for EMRs in play out there, "compatibility" is a low bar to clear and everybody adds their own bells and whistles, making any sort of switch between EMRs a major data port and conversion problem. Training and service, often as not, involves phone banks in India and opaque accents. Many/most of the EMRs have for all practical purposes no serious internal security -- no encryption of connections, trivial authentication, and rely on vpns and control of the internal network for security. Of course HIPAA provides no useful security guidelines in the first place, so the more you can make security someone else's problem, the more profitable your EMR is. In general, scaling of EMRs is poor (with a few large scale hospital-based exceptions) and they are, of course, enormously Windows-centric because that too makes a lot of things somebody else's problems. Such as security, installation, cost, scalability...
It's really quite sad. EMRs "should" make medical practice much more efficient and facilitate a large portion of the enormous burden of documenting everything in real time for physicians, in addition to facilitating billing and insurance claims and the overall practice financials and access to e.g. labs and other auxiliary services. Most do, to some extent, accomplish these goals. But they fall far, far, short of what they could accomplish, especially with a truly portable EMR interface that wasn't locked to any particular operating system and that had a "real" security layer in place. Having real standards and a federal cross-platform cross-application certification process would make things even better -- one could actually disconnect the user interface from the back end data and let users (e.g. physicians) choose the interface that suits them best across all vendors on any common database back end.
Too bad this will absolutely never happen...
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De nada. It just bothers me to hear people disrespect the very energy sources that they use to type their disrespect into machines built with the cream of the world's resources to be transported by a network that has become the nervous system of the human species in a mere two or three decades (driven by still more energy), from their well-lit houses paid for by the jobs they get into their cars every morning and drive off to perform, especially when they are pronouncing upon cultures and events they are obviously clueless about. India has a history of famines (usually caused by a failure of the monsoon exacerbated by their high population density in those limited parts of the country that can support agriculture at all, the general lack of transportation, their general historical poverty) that kill millions of people! One happened while we lived there, in 1966 -- it killed 1.5 million people. Some ten to fifteen million Indian citizens died in the twentieth century (in various events) of starvation and famine.
After the green revolution, India became a food exporting nation, and although they are currently closer to the line than they have been for thirty or so years, they still are. To the extent that oil enabled this revolution, and brought not exactly wealth, but at least enough wealth that most Indian citizens can easily enough avoid mass starvation (probably even through the inevitable Next Drought), well, bully damn good for oil.
One thing that many Americans do not realize is that even though India is only 1/3 the size of the US and has around 3 times the population, only about 1/3 of India is inhabitable or inhabited. Large parts of India are desert (e.g. the Thar desert) or too far away from rivers and water sources to permit reliable cultivation, and they don't have a universal, energy-use-intensive system of trapping the monsoon rains and distributing them for widespread irrigation, not far away from the rivers. I remember driving hours through the countryside of India with the land around me being basically empty -- too dry/rocky/mountainous to be useful. There would be villages stuck here and there even into these spaces (supported by village "tanks" -- basically large wells that were probably dug a few thousand years ago in some cases) and a certain amount of goatherding or cattle herding in the scrub that grows in these dry, thorny areas, but it isn't at all like driving through the US midwest with hundreds of miles of waving wheat and corn, plenty of water, mild temperatures. The population of India is concentrated along waterways that swell to overflowing in the summer and then dwindle most of the rest of the year only to swell again. It has always been so.
Is "oil addiction" a bad thing, for us or for India or for China or for the world? Not compared to the alternative we'd face if oil disappeared tomorrow -- global collapse of civilizations, mass starvation, war, and much worse. Fortunately, we're nowhere near out of oil -- reports of the end of oil are greatly exaggerated. What we are seeing is a global increase in the demand for oil as economies that previously used only a little suddenly need much more to sustain their growth and increasing affluence. High demand simply means that oil will cost more as long as the rate of supply is limited politically or by those seeking high profits.
IMO this isn't a terrible thing -- it provides us with the impetus we need to make the capital investment in renewable and less limited resources that would in time replace oil's use as fuel. Oil is far too valuable for purposes other than fuel as it is -- we shouldn't be burning it because there are other better things to do with it. Yet, we do not see any sort of urgency in the movement to develop the alternatives that would eventually replace it.
A big part of this is global NIMBY -- I'm teaching physics at the Duke Marine Lab at the moment, on an island that showcases a (very expensive!) building t
You might try looking at the history of -- and the death/statistics of -- World Wars one and two. Or the US Civil war, for that matter. Or any of the many petty rebellions, wars, revolutions that happened over the rest of recorded history. I'm not claiming we were at "peace" -- I'm claiming that the state of war globally has rarely been so peaceful, especially compared to the bulk of the twentieth century. The cold war didn't prevent war, but it did act as a powerful deterrent to MAJOR war. We've been capable of practically wiping out the human race on a whim for fifty years now. We haven't done so, nor have any of the other players with the capability. I count that as a big plus.
I also am curious as to why you say that Korea, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan aren't "American". Again, you might look at the actual participants and history. Americans died in all of them and continue to die today, although they die at a rate that is far, far, lower than the rate at which they died in single battles of WWI or WW II.
Perhaps you are just too young to actually remember and see the difference between the little wars and skirmishes we and others are constantly engaged in and the pure quill, where whole continents are at war with the highest of stakes, but those who do not study history are, alas, indeed doomed to repeat it.
None of this matters, of course, to those that are fighting in an actual war right now. It doesn't matter if it is a "border action" or a search for "weapons of mass destruction" or to "crush Al Queda" or to establish your tribe as the top tribe in the bush -- the people killed are just as dead and the survivors just as traumatized as they would be if it were a big global war. But it isn't a big global war, and to the extent that horror scales with numbers, that does indeed matter. Most peaceful years in history is still a pretty apt description of the last forty, especially given the capabilities for destruction and the vastly larger populations.
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Bullock carts. Excrement (animal and human). Surely you jest. Sometimes -- usually provided by water wheels that would have been at home at the time of the Pharaohs driven by bullocks or perhaps a mule or camel.
Perhaps you are under some illusions concerning the way agriculture in India (and to a large extent, the other countries in southeast Asia) is set up. It wasn't about making their agriculture over into ours -- that was never even a vague possibility. It was about improving yields with better crop rotations and farming methods, better hybrids (that produced larger grains of rice, for example, while being more drought and pest tolerant). It was about teaching them how to build large granaries and transport their grain to them using whatever local means of transportation they had or could afford. It was about teaching them to build them so that they were rat proof, and then kill off the rats that attempted to demonstrate that they weren't.
And of course nothing was wasted. The rats I'm referring to are big bandicoot rats, about the size of a cat or small terrier. My father was more than once served up a tasty meal of rat curry, and had to grin and munch right on down in order to not offend his hosts who were so very proud of themselves for keeping the vermin out of their rice silos.
The India we lived in in the 60s and that my father worked in -- New Delhi (the capital city) had water that was turned on for around three hours a day, at which time it either filled the tanks on your roof or you did without. In dry years that would be one hour a day and we didn't flush our toilets but once a day. Electricity worked, mostly, except when it didn't -- an interruption hours long happened once every few months and we just kept candles everywhere to be ready. 60 to 80% of the inhabitants of New Delhi -- the capital city, mind you -- used bicycles for transport, or rode in horse-drawn or bicycle-drawn rickshaws, or took "cabs" we called putt-putts -- a motor tricycle with a driver in front and room for two people and a small amount of "luggage" in back. Wealthier people would take the latter or a real cab (made by Tata Industries, of course, and invariably driven by a Sikh, as they had the transportation monopoly) to the market. Animals roamed said market -- pariah dogs and cattle, mostly, but a lot of horses too (see "rickshaws") -- and everybody and everything excreted and urinated in the streets so one had to pick one's way along no matter where one was walking. Humans, of course, tended to use large open fields to excrete -- not so much in the city streets -- but I saw plenty of exceptions.
Now consider the farmer -- he's living in the country, farming (often as eldest son in a system of primogeniture thousands of years old) a plot of land a few acres in size that has been in his family back to when your ancestors and mine were living in skin tents and wooden huts, perhaps with a few kilometers of a small village. He may never have travelled further away from home than twenty or thirty miles in his entire life. His wealth is his family, his bullocks and other farm animals (if any), a plow blade his bullocks pull, one nice suit of clean white clothes that he can wear to festivals and possibly a pair of actual shoes. Electricity is nearly a myth to him -- his house is lighted at night (if at all) by oil lamps burning inexpensive cottonseed oil -- lamps made out of terra-cotta clay turned into a shallow bowl with a wick-holding lip pulled out on one side, made and sold by the thousand for a few annas (call it three or four cents) each, with the wick being a twist of the same cotton. Perhaps he grows cotton, or mustardseed, or (if he is near a river and down in the lowlands) rice, or in rarer cases for a higher/drier farm barley, sorghum (which makes molasses and a coarse brown sugar), or sure, even wheat or rye. His work clothes consist of a dhoti -- a white loincloth twisted around his waist -- and perhaps some sort of headcloth twisted around
With enough cheap energy you can economically desalinate the ocean and hydroponically grow as much food as you like disconnected from the usual limitations of dirt farming in an uncertain climate. It isn't that there aren't other scarcities -- it is that cheap energy is the key to making them not scarce.
If we turned 5% of the Sahara desert into solar collector, we could turn the other 95% into one enormous farm and effectively terraform it so that it wasn't desert any more. The Sahara is quite large, has a year-round growing season and lots of sun -- as a farm supplied with unlimited water it could probable feed the entire world all by itself. Ditto the Australian Outback, ditto the US southwest, ditto much of central and western India (away from the major rivers, where farming is tied to the monsoon). Energy is water, energy is food, energy is recycling of garbage, energy is production, energy is transportation. Drop the cost of power to $0.01 per KW-hour, worldwide, define it at this price (effectively fixing a global currency not subject to manipulation) and stand back and watch the world explode (in a good way).
rgb
Evidence for this claim? My father worked to help make the green revolution happen in India and Southeast Asia, and he had absolutely nothing to do with oil (nor did the work done by e.g. Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller foundation, US AID, and so on have anything to do with oil). The bulk of the effort associated with the green revolution was the development of far better crop hybrids -- e.g. advanced rice hybrids developed in Louisiana -- with much higher yields and resistances, modern crop rotation methodologies, the development of a sustainable economic model from the farmer to the table, and much more. "Oil" played a (relatively minor) role in only two ways that I can think of or remember -- replacing bullock carts to some extent with e.g. trucks and rail for transporting crops to more distant locations, and as one of many sources of energy used to make fertilizers. The predominant fuels used by the farmers he worked with before, after, and during the revolution were dried cow dung and charcoal.
As a consequence of the green revolution and education and a very energetic population, fossil fuel consumption in India has steadily risen along with the gross domestic product as it has moved towards being a modern society, but oil had almost nothing to do with the revolution per se and has nothing at all to do with the "1-2 billion baseline". At least as far as I know (and I probably know a lot more than most people, having lived in India and watched the green revolution happen). If you have evidence to the contrary, feel free to enlighten me -- with references.
rgb
I personally think that unless some steps are taken to bring world population growth to zero fairly quickly that there are going to be some truly horrible wars in fifty to one hundred years.
You mean sort of like the truly horrible wars of the twentieth century, the nineteenth century, the eighteenth century, the seventeenth century, the... (iterate back to where human ancestors were mostly peaceable primates with 24 chromosomes instead of 23).
Why do you think that world population growth has anything to do with having truly horrible wars? We've done just fine killing one another when the world's population was far smaller, and if anything we are continuing some forty of the most peaceful years the world has ever known combined with the highest population the world has ever known.
Besides, there is only one "fundamental" scarcity -- energy. Bite the bullet, build massive solar energy facilities worldwide and/or invent sustainable thermonuclear fusion generators, make energy cheap and plentiful "forever", and we can address all the other scarcities. The catch will be to manage this before we kill one another off not because of scarcity or overpopulation per se, but because of human lust for political power, wealth, reproductive success, and control.
Not that I really disagree. If, for example, the Holocene cranks to its inevitable end starting tomorrow, the solar minimum that appears to be starting turns out to be a grand minimum, a couple of big volcano blow to give the next ice age a healthy head start, and we have a "Year without a summer" such as the one that occurred last in 1816, it would very likely kill a billion or more people. Midsummer frost in the world's breadbaskets would bring about starvation on a truly unprecedented scale, and the very northerly our southerly countries that have been temperate and prosperous during the Holocene would be the ones begging from or warring with their equatorial neighbors as the glaciers once again begin their slow descent across Siberia, Canada, China, and northern Europe.
The advent of thermonuclear fusion could have a very similar effect as it completely breaks the economies of all of the oil and coal producing countries and companies overnight.
See? We don't really have to wait! We could have a truly horrible war right now!
rgb
As does global warming alarmism, nuclear meltdown alarmism, alarmism over the horrors of oil pipelines across the pristine Alaskan wilderness, nuclear/bio/neurotoxic terrorism alarmism, economic alarmism, alarmism concerning the inevitable collapse of Christian Society should same-sex persons be permitted to marry, taxation alarmism, economic depression alarmism, and recently, alarmism concerning the rapture and following apocalypse and still more alarmism about how a coronal mass ejection that is apparently inevitable in 2013 will bring about the collapse of civilization as we know it.
Why, without alarmism the daily news would be so boring that we might even get some work done and end global poverty, cure HIV, wake up and smack our foreheads with our hands and say "What was I thinking" regarding religion (a.k.a. "mythology that governs people's lives"), invent thermonuclear fusion engines the size of outboard motors that run for a decade on a thimbleful of fuel that is not mined from the moon, and establish world peace.
This is in and of itself an alarming prospect!
rgb
(P. S. -- in addition to selling papers, all this alarmism allows politicians to remain in power -- d'ya think?)
Oh, for a mod point. Kudos for maximum humor expressed in really obscure number theory, Anonymous Coward!
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You can always sue anyone; the only question is whether or not you will win. The interesting question here is that if he patents his powers as Christ's powers, if he trademarks his business activities as Christ, if "Christ" (tm) becomes a protected business asset, then while the church can argue that all of this is in the public domain, it wouldn't be the first time courts have turned around and granted trademark, copyright, business secret, patent types of protections to corporate entities for things that are commonplace and public. In fact, it probably isn't even rare -- people patent mathematical formulae in the context of cryptography, people patent mobius strips in the context of drive belts that wear equally on both sides, people trademark common names as business names in specific contexts all of the time -- Elmo's diner, Apple computers, Ford motorcars. Such protections typically extend to all business-related activities in the field of reference -- one can found Ford Washing Machines or Ford Publications, but another Ford motors would be in violation (with courts required to decide on the overlap).
So if the patent office has lost its mind and grants him his patents, and he follows up by filing for certain trademarks to protect his legitimate business activities of performing patented miracles as Jesus Christ, he would certainly have an argument for suing churches for intruding on his business turf simply because their "business" has overlap and competes. Of course it would really help his arguments if he could, say, use his patented superpowers to restore sight to a blind man and make a beggar walk. He could then challenge the churches to prove that their so-far unsubstantiated claims to be able to do the same thing are valid, and when they fail to provide evidence that their many promises of delivering a service for their followers are true, the court might well issue an injunction to stop claiming that they can provide those services and require them to give up their use of a trademarked name in the context of a lying swindle promising to provide the same services as a real patented technology.
It could happen. On the day that hell freezes over, but heck, the Holocene has already overstayed its welcome and the next Ice Age could start any day now, so hell could indeed freeze over soon.
rgb
What is said in this post or the article that Scott Adams hasn't been saying, and portraying, for years? Or is it decades? His characters already display all of the dysfunctions suggested, and anybody that has worked in IT (especially in a corporate environment) recognizes the archetypes/stereotypes. Yes, Virginia, there are real nerd geek geniuses who just want to do their work and be left alone (because they love their work) and then there are the incompetents trying to hide in plain sight, the empire builders, the politicians, the pointy haired bosses, the probably bright but cynical and lazy, the eager young interns being disabused of their idealism.
University IT tends (I think) to be slightly better than this on average -- a more likely haven for the competent who want to be left alone -- but even there there are plenty of empire builders and highly placed incompetent buttheads. Legend has it that a very few companies such as Amazon and Google and maybe Red Hat have managed to minimize the "pointy haired boss effect" and get a large crew of iconoclastic nerd genius types to be productive in their innately self-actualized way, but a lot of this is just human nature, being expressed.
rgb
Ah, but just think of what a great alternative career choice this becomes to, say, becoming a proctologist. Or really any of a wide range of physicians. When it comes to probing Uranus for gas or even for solid shit that it might be useful to discover and remove, astronauts will just have to stand in line... rgb
It's a FAQ there, but you really should be asking this on the beowulf list, after skimming the list archives for any of the eight and a half million answers (in gory detail) that have been posted there in response over the years. Slashdot has plenty of nerds and I'm sure a lot of cluster geeks (who are likely on the beowulf list) but the beowulf list is sort of distilled cluster geekery/wisdom.
http://www.beowulf.org/mailman/listinfo/beowulf
rgb (Google "rgb duke beowulf" if you like -- I used to help answer this question once a month a few years ago on list, although I'm too busy and less active now.)
Now you're just teasing. After the distro wars, the editor wars, you want to start the compiler wars? Oh, wait, half of the respondents are replying with interpreted languages (demonstrating a pretty profound ignorance of 99% of scientific computing) so clearly the question was serious...;-)
Personally I vote for slackware for a distro, jove as an editor, and do languages other than C (and somewhat regrettably, fortran) exist? They do not. Maybe perl or one of them new-fangled interpreted languages to augment plain old bash/awk/sed for the occasional scripty sort of task. PVM and/or MPI for parallel program support. A nice fast network, plenty of ram tuned to the number of processors and cores that makes sense for your particular parallel/distributed application(s), storage similarly tuned, and there you go.
I was just kidding about the slackware, BTW, but honestly you can build a decent cluster for most purposes on top of any flavor of Linux, BSD, Solaris, and yeah, probably even MacOS. The primary differences are going to be what apps you have prebuilt and instantly deliverable in the distro's package management repos and scheme, and how easy they are to strip down to a decent, automatically installed cluster node image. Although I did use slackware for my very first linux clusters (after using SunOS and Irix and miscellaneous Unices for some years before). Any distro named after the church of the subgenius can't be all bad...:-)
One last serious note. Most of the replies above don't pay enough attention to the importance of automatable installation and update methodologies in the cluster distro. I'm a pretty big fan of kickstart and yum (since yum was developed by my colleagues and coworkers in the Duke physics department) as one can use the former and latter together to build very scalable cluster installations and fully automate a whole lot of critical aspects of management. While I do generally think well of Debian, I don't think it can really compete in this one arena, and it is a show-stoppingly important arena (although Debian is so huge that maybe somebody has finally made it as simple and transparent for mass-market installs). For that reason alone I think that any of the RH-derived, yum/kickstart supporting distros are very reasonable choices for a cluster, and that which flavor in particular one might choose depends mightily on the particular kind of cluster you are building and its purpose. I've built clusters on top of fedora with complete satisfaction -- cluster nodes run a stripped down linux anyway and the "rapidly varying" problem is more or less irrelevant to cluster stability as the packages you install aren't, actually, that rapidly varying.
One advantage of it is that a few tools and libraries you want to be up to date, sometimes -- the GSL comes to mind -- and historically things like SL, Rocks, and RHEL/Centos have actually lagged so that the GSL and certain other tools are out of date by too much, to the point where useful stuff in the current builds isn't there (and is a pain to build yourself). In other words, there can be particular trade-offs in terms of things like device support, library support, and tool support that might affect specific people or clusters built for certain specific purposes, and this needs to be thought about before building on top of e.g. MacOSX (where a lot less prebuilt stuff is likely to be available) or the smaller distros (ditto) or distros that aren't aggressively enough maintained. Anything missing or out of date is more work for you.
But the standard litany in cluster design is: YMMV. Prototype. If you've got a few cluster nodes to play with, try popping Debian on them, and see how hard it is to install them en masse. Repeat for a few other distros and tools. See what has resources that easily support your target application(s). See which distros have the drivers for the devices and hardware you will be using without headaches or kernel builds on your part (if any). Then pick one not because somebody says "use this, it's the best" but rather because it actually wins against the others in ease of use and completeness for your cluster.
rgb
Because they build a chain of reasoning based on what is actually enormously well-known, mundane physics. We have only known about radioactive decay for just about one hundred years, but at this point we completely understand the process, understand how and why it represents a possible consistent clock, can validate the clock by looking back in time as we look at the light of stars given off in the remote past, and use it routinely to date things like the Earth itself, the fossil record, and the age of the solar system. There are over forty independent radioactive clocks used in radiometric dating, valid for overlapping ranges of dates from billions of years to thousands of years, and where they overlap they by and large agree.
We've known semiconductor physics for just about fifty years (a bit more, but only barely so). How can we feel secure that your computer, built on top of semiconductor physics, will actually work? Yet the physics that describes its operation -- being pure quantum physics involving things like crystal band structure, fermi surfaces, and so on is much more difficult than the physics of blackbody radiation, the fact that the intensity of light drops of like 1/r^2 with distance, and the relationships between power, temperature, and the size of a radiating object. How can we feel "secure" about Maxwell's Equations and the laws of thermodynamics? Because every minute of every day there are a few dozen powers of tens of confirmations of these equations visible to your naked eye, whether or not you know it. If the laws of thermodynamics were egregiously violated, if Maxwell's equations were not classically "true" in the classical limit, if quantum theory ceased to function reliably at the microscopic level, the existing structure of the Universe would catastrophically alter in ways you could hardly miss in the few nanoseconds before your brain chemistry (based on all of these things) ceased to function.
So if your question was intended -- as it seems to be -- to cast doubt on the entire chain of reasoning leading us to believe e.g. that our sun is between 4 and 5 billion years old, that the earth is just a bit younger, so gee -- perhaps the Universe is really only 6007 years old and the Bible is right after all, well, get a grip, you Anonymous Coward you! If it was a genuine question about how "these scientists" in general arrive at sound, reproducible conclusions that represent our best possible state of belief (so far) given the data and the entire network of evidence-supported, consistent beliefs known as "the laws of physics", "the laws of chemistry", etc, well, a good intro book on Astronomy would be happy to answer your questions and Enlighten you. I'd be happy to recommend one. Or you can easily answer your questions using the Internet -- wikipedia contains most of the answers if you start an astronomy wiki-romp and read a few articles on stars, the age of stars, and so on.
The answer to your question is basically that the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (itself constructed using physics and parallax of the nearer stars) gives us a sound yardstick for Universal distances, one we leverage using e.g. Cepheid variables. Looking back in time (speed of light and distance) and using our knowledge of the fusion process and gravitational process that produces the energy radiated by stars we can make sound inferences about their age, so that the various star types in the HS diagram are themselves also a clock of their relative ages. Given a preexisting clock of stellar ages. "synchronizing" a new clock based on rotational angular momentum of stars of one type or another is straightforward, if tedious.
rgb
Superb example of Bayesian reasoning and the application of maximum entropy! Bravo!
The real problem isn't Harold Whacko. The problem is cognitive dissonance. Even though he will be proven wrong -- again -- in a little over three and a half hours (or less -- I would guess that the Bible doesn't account for EDT) will his followers, the ones who have showered him with money, go "Gee, were we dumb! We actually believed this crazy loon!"? No, instead they will find a way of making the non-event into the event, or they will start rumors of some people disappearing, and pretty soon all of them will "know" somebody that was taken up, and then there will be an after the last minute second chance or the good news that Jesus decided not to end the Universe after all because of the faith of Harold's followers.
Leon Festinger observed all of this, documented it, and named it way back in the 60's, and it is what keeps religion alive in spite of the lack of evidence, in spite of the positive evidence that they are wrong, that their predictions are false, that their theistic scripture is a collection of lies and myths, that many of those that preach it are con artists who suck the blood of the gullible.
rgb
And here you demonstrate the real agenda! Whether or not oil has "peaked" (most unlikely, but say it has) or will run out has nothing to do with AGW! Yet, strangely enough, in any debate of the latter the former is nearly always invoked. Why is that, do you imagine? Also, what exactly does it have to do with the scientific assertion that the actual data unambiguously demonstrates that if we don't take immediate actions with trillion dollar price tags (and quite likely, a price tag in human life as well) we'll have a "doomsday scenario" in a mere fifty or sixty years?
You seek to tie the two together to strengthen your political desire to move the world's energy production mechanisms away from dependence on oil, I understand that. I, on the other hand, feel pretty comfortable agreeing that we should be moving past the use of oil as a fuel for a lot of reasons that have nothing to do with the climate, while thinking that the assertion that humans have had a major macro-scale impact on the climate are akin to the ant pumping on the elephant and going "suffer, bitch" in the old joke.
I think there is a lot to be learned from the old adage, "follow the money" in both cases. Look for cases of political alliances such as this one, tying the threat of major disaster (AGW) to the hatred of oil companies and a lingering feeling that cars are still huge polluters because they really were huge polluters fifty years ago and the determination to block things like oil pipelines or even the systematic search for oil in Alaska because if we actually found reserves that were (say) enormous and pushed "peak oil" out for a century or so, we'd cause the extinction of some species of arctic wildlife (and risk ecodisasters in their own right, and terrorist threats, and so on).
That's all simply lovely, but science is going to determine whether or not AGW is correct, and all of the other considerations including the funding and political machinations attending their conflation into one big story will, in the end, not have the slightest effect on nature, and ignore the other side of the cost-benefit problem being debated.
To put it another way, if (by chance) global temperatures do start to systematically descend as we can for the first time get actual data on how the sun's state affects climate in a long term downturn brought about by solar state, and it turns out that the AGW hypothesis is systematically incorrect, a trivial correction that we should never have worried about (and never would have worried about if it were not for Mann's hockey stick being made the cover of the IPCC report, because the proxy data to that point pretty much indicated "there's very probably nothing much to worry about") would you suddenly think that oil was great, need to drill more wells? No. But neither would you be so incredibly hot to create artificial controls limiting its drilling and use "because we might run out", or "because it might damage the ecology", not when those very controls increase the profits of the oil companies and create an easily exploited and entire artificial "carbon economy" run by (gasp) The Governments and Rich People. You might at least look at the price tag.
That's what AGW brings to the debate. You can now say "No matter what the price tag, AGW and flooding and ocean rising and melting of icecaps and damn, look at that, it will affect wi-fi connectivity all you geeks who somehow aren't hopping on the bandwagon, will cost much more," giving Carte Blanche to those that wish to profit from and control something for reasons that have nothing to do with AGW. It's like me saying "We need to make the CDC the largest government bureaucracy because there is a distinct possibility that the next emergent plague will kill more people than AGW" -- a small chance, an enormous consequence. "We need to make NASA ten times larger because of a mix of AGW (which it has made a partial living on for over a d
I'm sorry, I only manage both wired and wifi networks (and have done so in the case of wired back to vampire-tap thickwire Ethernet), so I have no idea what you are talking about. My University's wireless is measureably less reliable during a rainstorm? Oh my, whatever will we do?
.... (Network Connection Lost, Do You Want to Restart?)
As for torrents of mud or water, yes, I can see where being flooded would negatively affect wifi signals. In fact, I think we should write a whole series of articles to that affect! The People Must Be Told! Not only will their houses be underwater or buried in mud because of our profligate burning of Carbon, not only will they be baked in Saharan temperatures at the same time in withering droughts, but damn, the WiFi won't work either! And hell, since the actual internet goes over cables and fiber underground I guess there goes the Internet as well.
No, there isn't a hint of hysteria or irrelevance in this. The people must be told indeed!
I'll tell you what affects wireless -- the damn microwave oven. Every time it goes on, bang, there goes Netflix (over wifi to the wii), there goes my wife's ethernet connection (but not mine, go figure). That's a real, immediate, easily demonstrable effect with consequences right now, and yet it somehow doesn't get magazine articles saying things like "Nuked Food can Cost You WiFi Connection", or "Anthropogenic Popcorn Affects Wireless".
Mmmmmm, popcorn. Time for lunch -- oh no, the damn eth.a^3@
rgb
Analyze it any way you like. My point was, in fact, the same as yours. If you try to fit a rising curve to the 30 year data and look at R^2, what do you think you get? Especially if you try to fit it to the rising CO_2 concentration, on a scale that doesn't amplify it so that it looks huge by plotting only the change across this timeframe. Especially if you include the uncertainties in the data -- even with satellites and vastly improved instrumentation there is a rather large uncertainty (and a certain amount of good-natured fudging) that has gone into forming the "consensus" global temperature. I'm not complaining -- it is by far the best, indeed the only really accurate record we have of global temperature in a moderately reliable timeseries -- but the fact remains that this record stretches square across two of the three highest solar cycles in the highest, longest solar grand maximum since the seventh milleneum BCE (some 9000 years ago). Expecting global temperatures to plummet instantly in response to cycle 23 (still high, but lower) and 24 (promising to be much, much lower) is unreasonable. In fact, "rapidly" changing the solar heat budget in the negative direction could easily create spikes in temperature because the Earth is a chaotic system. My point is that global warming enthusiasts often point to spiking global temperatures and say "Look, AGW!" even within this 30 year record. They inconveniently leave out the dips, or R^2. There is basically no convincing evidence of AGW over the last 30 years, where convincing specifically means that a fit to a rising trend, given the uncertainties in the data, can be statistically differentiated from no trend at all. And here yes, those nasty old points sub-mean out on the right hand end of the scale do have a rather large impact on R^2, don't they?
rgb
You seem to think that everything should track on a year by year basis, but that's plain silly. The Earth has an enormous heat capacity, storing energy in the ocean. It is filled with complex feedback loops (many of which are literally loops -- heat transport loops -- that carry heat around the globe in both the oceans and the atmosphere). We cannot even predict the local climate let alone the global one, with current models -- the predictivity of the models a decade out or two decades out is virtually nil. The models themselves are ultimately nonlinear fits to a complex function with more than enough parameters to get good local agreement while still meaning absolutely nothing about their actual correctness. Finally, the most important parameter(s) of those models, the climate's sensitivity to greenhouse forcing, is quite literally being pulled out of someone's (Hansen's) ass -- the long term data (and a certain amount of common sense) suggest that the forcing is small to negative, with CO_2 generally following global temperatures rather than the other way around. There is no real evidence for amplification, especially not amplification at the high end of OMG the oceans will rise to the foothills of the Appalachians and all the polar bears will die in the next twenty years. That's pure hysteria.
There a number of reasons to be highly skeptical of the AGW cabal. For one, there is such a thing as an AGW cabal, that was targeting CO_2 (and oil) long before there was any evidence or models at all that suggested that it was a problem. It is at this point perfectly clear that the AGW cabal have tampered with data, cherrypicked data, and cooked up fits designed to minimize or eliminate "problems" for the theory, like the medieval optimum and little ice age. How do we know? They have (inadvertently) told us, in outed email messages from climategate and in comments in e.g. Mann's original code. Everybody knows that Mann's infamous hockey stick graph is wrong at this point but -- guess what -- it is still nearly ubiquitous and is constantly referenced whenever the media want to sell news. Disaster is sensational and sells papers or advertising or whatever. The truth is that at best we do not really know if CO_2 is a major influence on climate (as opposed to a minor one responsible for only a fraction of the total warming, one with negative sensitivity rather than strong positive). Claiming that we do know this, and that the world should take enormously expensive steps that create artificial markets and strongly affect things like global poverty as a consequence, is arguably the most irresponsible piece of "science" ever, and one that -- if the solar model turns out to be correct -- will come back by costing every scientist in every field credibility in the eyes and minds of the public. AGW hasn't been advanced like a scientific hypothesis for possible falsification; it has been advanced like a political and social crusade, one symptom of which is the pure crap about WiFi range being reduced due to AGW. What, WiFi doesn't work in India or Saharan Africa (places that are way, way, hotter on average than England)? Bullshit. But there is no piece of bullshit too extreme to be trumpeted to the sky as evidence of AGW or touted as a consequence of the coming disaster!
Rather than look just at sunspot numbers on Wikimedia or skeptic websites, why not visit a website that is devoted to a systematic review of solar literature and which says very nearly nothing at all about warming, anthropogenic or otherwise? Why not look at the actual long term data for yourself instead of looking at data that has been presented by the (IMO) highly suspect participants in the AGW cabal? There is plenty of data out there to look at, and it stretches (in e.g. ice cores and radioactive signatures) back for far longer than the proxies Mann cooked up (and that continue to be prepared to order today). For example:
Yes, global warming is real. No, it isn't bad enough to justify anything other than slight caution.
It's worth noting that the twentieth century was one of the four most active centuries in the history of the holocene for Mr. Sun, too. In fact, solar cycles 21 and 22 were grand maxima, and 23 was still quite large.
Solar cycle 24, OTOH, looks like it could be the lowest one in over a century, although it has pepped up a bit in the last two months. At the moment, the global temperature anomaly is 0.1C BELOW the thirty year running mean (and has been for a couple of months now). So yes, global warming is real, but it is entirely possible that its cause is, and has been in the past, the Sun. Not CO_2.
And real or not -- asserting that it will affect Wi-Fi range simply shows that either somebody dumped lysergic acid into their beer or that there are, quite literally, no limits to the sensationalist lies that people will tell to try to convince people that this particular piece of the sky is falling. Especially when what they should be fearing is the end of the Holocene, or just a simple Maunder minimum. Warm weather is good. Plants grow. People eat. A year without a summer, such as 1816 (Dalton minimum heterodynes with volcanic activity) could kill a hundred million people in a year.
rgb
Now, that is. For close to 100 years it was automatic excommunication. The problem ultimately was that the Catholic Church had this annoying habit of educating its membership well in its school system. Even the more intelligent of the Jesuits (taught to think black was white if that's what Catholic core doctrine stated) had a hard time with the cognitive dissonance introduced by ever more evidence for an ancient earth and evolution, including a great deal of it introduced by one of their own: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georges_Lema%C3%AEtre. Lemaitre was there fighting to show that the Universe had a finite temporal beginning (in competition with e.g. Hoyle's steady state model). The latter would have left no room for a "created" Universe at all.
When your own man is fighting to show that the Universe is billions of years old because that is better (for your silly mythology) than the alternative, it is difficult to hold on to the rest of the silly mythology that is contradicted by his hypothesis. The CC has simply backed off of the mythology at each point when it has been contradicted post Galileo, usually after a fight but less so in recent decades, trying to isolate a magical core that will survive (and allow them to survive) in a Universe without magic or visible creation. Even now, they are stung by the Galileo incident and restrict their pronouncements to "matters of opinion" that cannot be contradicted/falsified by things like evidence.
The Evangelicals and Baptists, OTOH, don't give a rat's ass about evidence. They only care about brainwashing the kids as young as possible so they can continue to believe black is white for the rest of their lives, in the face of all evidence to the contrary.
rgb
I have my HP 35C upstairs on my desk -- needing batteries, unfortunately. But on my trusty laptop I have a lovely tty curses-based program called "hpc" (written by a friend of mine twenty or so years ago) that is pretty much a perfect emulator, and which does RPN in command line form, as in " hpc 4 pi 3 / 5 3 ^ * " to find the volume of a sphere of radius 5. One of the first things I reinstall on any new linux box I own. I sometimes think about giving it a GUI interface, but honestly, the CLI is so useful that there just isn't much point to it...
rgb
But, I don't believe that Helium mining will ever be anything more than a byproduct of other minimg and manufacturing on the Moon. In that, I agree with you.
Right. It would probably be cheaper to just build solar cells there girdling the middle and microwave it back to earth. Potentially even better than sharks with laser beams or mass drivers for Dr. Evil, though...
Yeah, I agree that mass drivers barely make sense -- on the moon (the number on earth end up being pretty absurd whenever I assign this particular problem to my students:-). Quadratic lengthening of the track, that sort of thing, plus a bonus to punch through the atmosphere. MAYBE useful to lift naked mass into orbit but not people.
I actually was referring to the problems with ionic drives onboard a ship and electricity more than stationary magnetic rail guns, although we're still a decade or two away from being able to engineer a 15 km long one even on the earth. There you have the ability to make your reaction mass go very fast, but you have a terrible power to momentum ratio so getting power densities to where you can achieve liftoff is virtually impossible. Great for adjusting satellite positions, though.
I'm still looking for a way of putting (say) 1 kg of mass into orbit for my son's science fair project on a budget of a couple hundred dollars. He had high hopes of an ionic drive made out of a cannibalized microwave oven and duct tape, but aside from the problem of getting a really long extension cord, I just couldn't make it work out.
Ideas appreciated.
rgb
The biggest unsolved problems beyond actually getting fusion to work and produce net positive energy in the first place. To make rabbit stew, first catch the rabbit. Then we can all worry about how to cook the wily rabbit, and whether we can manage it in a cheap pot or it requires an expensive and elaborate pressure cooker, we can give making stew a shot.
In spades for He3-He3 fusion (which is much more difficult than D-T or D-D or hydrogen-anything as far as temperature, pressure, and confinement are concerned) -- in that case it would be nice to know we're not trying to catch a pink unicorn. True, pink unicorn might theoretically be the ideal stew meat, make itself right on your plate -- if only you could catch a pink unicorn!
Noting well that the rabbit and unicorn to be caught are not the fuel, they are making the fuel in question work. There's plenty of fuel in both cases, egregiously cheaply readily availably immediately so in the case of D. Even with the pink unicorn in hand, though, you'd have to seriously consider the economics of that particular solution. If pink unicorns ate only moon rock, it isn't clear that slaughtering themselves and making themselves into stew right on your plate would be worth the cost of raising pink unicorns, given plentiful rabbits. Only if making rabbit stew turned out to be very expensive would it likely be worth it, and frankly, I do not believe that this will be the case.
I'd go futher. If somebody were to invent/discover the near-mythical cold D-D fusion tomorrow at (say) 10x break even then there will be power plants built using it within two years. The neutron problem sounds much more like an engineering issue that a fundamental barrier, once high-yield fusion is achieved. Also, D-D fusion has a fair number of advantages of its own, not the least of which are its abundance and the symmetry of the reactants in the fusion mix. He3 achieves the symmetry and may well be in principle even more advantageous, but He3-He3 isn't called a third generation nuclear fuel for nothing. Noting that we are still in generation 0.
Once again, going to the moon now to mine 3rd gen nuclear fuel is senseless and enormously expensive. Why not spend the money actually getting to generation 1?
rgb