It seems more than a little illogical to state that sea levels rise higher in one Atlantic coast state than the others
Not illogical, only it takes some analysis to understand.
What happens is that the global warming is causing the ocean water to become less dense, both by dilution by melted ice and by thermal expansion from the increased temperature.
The surface of the ocean is approximately an ellipsoid whose exact shape depend on a number of factors. When the surface rises due to the increase in water volume this rise is slightly different from place to place. At the latitude of North Carolina this increase happens to be more than in other places.
If you had taken a quick look at the link you provided, you'd have seen this graph that shows how temperatures rise very quickly after an ice age and then slowly creep down over millennia.
If we are in an interglacial period, climate should be cooling, not warming.
Why buy today, when you can buy something cheaper tomorrow? or even cheaper the day after that?
Because you need it today. If you don't need it, why buy it at all?
Modern day Japan is a case study in the stagnation that arises from slowly falling prices: no one wants to spend because everything is cheaper tomorrow. No one wants to borrow because their debts increase (in real terms) even if the interest rate is 0%.
Modern day Japan is a case study on what happens when your goods are overpriced. No one wants to buy Japanese products because Chinese goods are cheaper.
Japan is an example of what happens when you rely on speculating on inflation. The bubble kept growing because investors assumed real estate prices could only go up. Today Japan is stagnated because they did not invest in productive enterprises.
Japanese companies kept building their new shiny offices all over the USA while China was building modern factories.
You take tungsten, slightly less dense than gold, and a lot cheaper, mix it with a small amount of a more dense but more expensive metal to get up to the right density, then mix and plate it with about 50% gold. Very difficult to detect if you do it right, and costs a little over half the price of real gold.
Look, Archimedes called and he wants his density method for counterfeit detection back. The method you describe may be sufficient to sell fake bullion to Ethiopia, where it seems that you don't even need to get the density right, but it will not fool any serious gold trader.
The problem is not density alone, hardness is fundamental, because practical methods to identify metals today are based on speed of sound in the metal.
Ultrasonic thickness measuring equipment is the best way to detect fake metals, it works in a principle similar to the traditional "ringing sound" method for detecting fakes. Gold coins and bullion have a precisely defined thickness, if you use an ultrasonic transducer to measure it and get a wrong result it's a fake. And, of course, the transition inside the bar from gold to tungsten is trivially detected when you have the proper equipment, which you surely have if you are trading in large amounts of gold.
In an "arms race" scenario, technology definitely works against the counterfeiters. It's much harder and more expensive to create a gold-coated tungsten bar than to detect it.
Do you think the creators of this film ever considered how bad a choice of name they did? A film for teens whose name itself causes it to be blocked by almost all net filters...
Good question. Maybe the desert was reflecting sunlight that the solar cells capture and convert to heat, the final result could be that the desert becomes warmer.
The conclusion is that you cannot expect to convert hundreds of thousands of megawatts from solar to electric power without significant side effects.
I don't think it would have a noticeable impact on the weather; if you can find some research that suggests it might I would be interested in seeing it
If there isn't research yet, then it's a necessary prerequisite before any large scale solar power development is done.
Imagine that 100 x 100 miles area being warmed by the sun. Warm air rises, cold air sinks. Now take away 30% of that heat, or whatever fraction of the total sun power is converted to electricity. The air over that whole are will be warmed that much less, it will have less tendency to rise. Don't you think winds will be affected by that?
That's the big problem I find with all proposals for so-called "green" energy. Advocacy groups gloss over any potential problem, they assume no problems could ever happen by default. For those people, "green" energy is innocent until proven guilty, while nuclear energy is guilty until proven innocent.
When people mention so-called "clean" energy they sweep under the rug any inconvenient fact.
Both solar and wind power are very diffuse, they need huge areas of land. They say, "oh, it's just desert" if you mention the fact that you need hundreds or thousands of times more area for a solar plant than for a nuclear plant of the same power capacity.
Mention how wind turbines kill birds and bats and they will say "oh, that was the Altamont pass, that's obsolete by now". They never mention how obsolete the Chernobyl plant was when it blew up.
The fact that this huge use of resources by solar and wind power plants is disregarded so cavalierly worries me a lot. What would be the impact on weather patterns if a sizable part of the desert was covered by solar collectors? Or if we collected a sizable amount of wind power? The sheer size of the systems needed to collect any significant amount of solar or wind power is something that should make us very careful.
One would think that people should be more coherent. If they were worried about the danger itself, the same people who go "OMG, it's NUCULAR! DANGER!" when anything happens at a nuclear power plant should be trying to find out everything bad that could happen as a result of using wind or solar power as well.
Just tax energy use more and energy use goes down. And don't forget to close the corporate loopholes.
Much more important is to close the personal loopholes, to avoid situations like in California, where "deregulation" meant keeping retail prices regulated at artificially low values.
Only problem is, the politicians who make those regulations are elected by the people who use that electricity. The simpler solution is doing exactly what they did: increase regulation and call it "deregulation", that way everyone is happy. Until they run out of electricity.
Honestly curious, why are you violating the law if someone passes you on the right?
You are blocking traffic
What are you expected to do?
Move to the right.
And: do you think it is true in every case?
Not in every jurisdiction, but there are many places where you can get a ticket for not using the rightmost available lane. Well, in theory at least, this seems to be one of the most ignored traffic rules.
As I understand it, copyright laws are only supposed to apply to the actual copying of data. Thus, if I copy a cassette tape, give it to you, and you play it, you aren't breaking the law unless you decide to copy the tape yourself.
So, if you rob a bank and give the money to your ho, she's not breaking the law when she spends it?
People don't violate traffic laws because they don't understand them, they violate traffic laws because they don't think they'll get caught
That's true for some laws, but not all of them. For instance, how many drivers understand the exceptions for speed limits when overtaking? How many drivers understand that, if someone passes you on the right side, you are the driver who is violating the law? The general assumption is that the driver who generally behaves like an asshole is always right, and the driver who shows more ability to control the car and more awareness of what's happening around him on the road is in violation.
A similar situation exists relating to copyright law. How many people understand correctly what "fair use" means?
The world doesn't seem to need speed anymore. And that'd pretty believable; What's the use of shaving a few hours off your London-New York trip when you might as well just have a video conference with the people there?
Yet the number of air travelers increase year by year. Personal travel IS important. In the USA, domestic flights carry from 1 million to 2 million passengers each day. And speed IS important. What's the point in sitting in an airplane? We would like to reach our destination as soon as possible, otherwise we would take a cruise ship, not an airplane.
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel, we will be limited to subsonic travel.
Not everyone rues the slowdown. "I think speed's overrated," says Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, which displays many of the record-holding craft.
Ask him again next time he takes a flight from D.C. to Hong Kong. On tourist class...
The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant?
What if it kills one species at a significantly higher rate than others? "Oh, don't worry, it only kills dodos and giant moas!".
I have seen articles mentioning a sudden decrease in insectivorous bat populations that seems to be caused by wind farms. (I know, TFA is about solar, not wind power, but it's all related to "alternative" energy).
For some reason, a few bat species are much more sensitive to wind turbines than other flying animals, and those species are important economically because they eat insects that attack crops. This means higher costs and more pesticide use in agriculture. This is just my guess, but bats hunt insects by echolocation, perhaps they are attracted to the swishing sound the blades make.
We should always be careful for the unintended consequences of any new technology. It's not because it's "green" that we should adopt in without detailed studies and careful analysis.
Slashdot Mirror
It seems more than a little illogical to state that sea levels rise higher in one Atlantic coast state than the others
Not illogical, only it takes some analysis to understand.
What happens is that the global warming is causing the ocean water to become less dense, both by dilution by melted ice and by thermal expansion from the increased temperature.
The surface of the ocean is approximately an ellipsoid whose exact shape depend on a number of factors. When the surface rises due to the increase in water volume this rise is slightly different from place to place. At the latitude of North Carolina this increase happens to be more than in other places.
If you had taken a quick look at the link you provided, you'd have seen this graph that shows how temperatures rise very quickly after an ice age and then slowly creep down over millennia.
If we are in an interglacial period, climate should be cooling, not warming.
The author of that propaganda piece is a known shill of whatever industry pays him.
Here's a video that he tried to take down unsuccessfully.
Why buy today, when you can buy something cheaper tomorrow? or even cheaper the day after that?
Because you need it today. If you don't need it, why buy it at all?
Modern day Japan is a case study in the stagnation that arises from slowly falling prices: no one wants to spend because everything is cheaper tomorrow. No one wants to borrow because their debts increase (in real terms) even if the interest rate is 0%.
Modern day Japan is a case study on what happens when your goods are overpriced. No one wants to buy Japanese products because Chinese goods are cheaper.
Japan is an example of what happens when you rely on speculating on inflation. The bubble kept growing because investors assumed real estate prices could only go up. Today Japan is stagnated because they did not invest in productive enterprises.
Japanese companies kept building their new shiny offices all over the USA while China was building modern factories.
You take tungsten, slightly less dense than gold, and a lot cheaper, mix it with a small amount of a more dense but more expensive metal to get up to the right density, then mix and plate it with about 50% gold. Very difficult to detect if you do it right, and costs a little over half the price of real gold.
Look, Archimedes called and he wants his density method for counterfeit detection back. The method you describe may be sufficient to sell fake bullion to Ethiopia, where it seems that you don't even need to get the density right, but it will not fool any serious gold trader.
The problem is not density alone, hardness is fundamental, because practical methods to identify metals today are based on speed of sound in the metal.
Ultrasonic thickness measuring equipment is the best way to detect fake metals, it works in a principle similar to the traditional "ringing sound" method for detecting fakes. Gold coins and bullion have a precisely defined thickness, if you use an ultrasonic transducer to measure it and get a wrong result it's a fake. And, of course, the transition inside the bar from gold to tungsten is trivially detected when you have the proper equipment, which you surely have if you are trading in large amounts of gold.
In an "arms race" scenario, technology definitely works against the counterfeiters. It's much harder and more expensive to create a gold-coated tungsten bar than to detect it.
Do you think the creators of this film ever considered how bad a choice of name they did? A film for teens whose name itself causes it to be blocked by almost all net filters...
What color is the desert?
Good question. Maybe the desert was reflecting sunlight that the solar cells capture and convert to heat, the final result could be that the desert becomes warmer.
The conclusion is that you cannot expect to convert hundreds of thousands of megawatts from solar to electric power without significant side effects.
I thought that a victimless crime was when you punch people in the dark, not when you poke them.
Why does anyone still use shell scripts anymore?
Because they are the simplest and quickest way to do a lot of things one needs to do when using a computer. Try this in python, ruby, or perl:
the disk is nearly full, find who is the hog
in bash:
du -x / | sort -n
Now do it in another language
This is /. so I would expect a story about a trojan unicorn (preferably one without a goatse link).
Are you proposing they feed stardust to the unicorn to see if it farts rainbows?
I don't think it would have a noticeable impact on the weather; if you can find some research that suggests it might I would be interested in seeing it
If there isn't research yet, then it's a necessary prerequisite before any large scale solar power development is done.
Imagine that 100 x 100 miles area being warmed by the sun. Warm air rises, cold air sinks. Now take away 30% of that heat, or whatever fraction of the total sun power is converted to electricity. The air over that whole are will be warmed that much less, it will have less tendency to rise. Don't you think winds will be affected by that?
That's the big problem I find with all proposals for so-called "green" energy. Advocacy groups gloss over any potential problem, they assume no problems could ever happen by default. For those people, "green" energy is innocent until proven guilty, while nuclear energy is guilty until proven innocent.
If you look at the rules he proposes you'll see that half of them are about restricting access and creating profit venues for the publishers.
Ted Nelson's view is a web where you have to pay for each page you visit. We have seen too much of this lately
When people mention so-called "clean" energy they sweep under the rug any inconvenient fact.
Both solar and wind power are very diffuse, they need huge areas of land. They say, "oh, it's just desert" if you mention the fact that you need hundreds or thousands of times more area for a solar plant than for a nuclear plant of the same power capacity.
Mention how wind turbines kill birds and bats and they will say "oh, that was the Altamont pass, that's obsolete by now". They never mention how obsolete the Chernobyl plant was when it blew up.
The fact that this huge use of resources by solar and wind power plants is disregarded so cavalierly worries me a lot. What would be the impact on weather patterns if a sizable part of the desert was covered by solar collectors? Or if we collected a sizable amount of wind power? The sheer size of the systems needed to collect any significant amount of solar or wind power is something that should make us very careful.
One would think that people should be more coherent. If they were worried about the danger itself, the same people who go "OMG, it's NUCULAR! DANGER!" when anything happens at a nuclear power plant should be trying to find out everything bad that could happen as a result of using wind or solar power as well.
If the solar panel produces maximum power for an average of eight hours per day
then you need a tracking system. A fixed solar panel only produces maximum power once per year.
Just tax energy use more and energy use goes down. And don't forget to close the corporate loopholes.
Much more important is to close the personal loopholes, to avoid situations like in California, where "deregulation" meant keeping retail prices regulated at artificially low values.
Only problem is, the politicians who make those regulations are elected by the people who use that electricity. The simpler solution is doing exactly what they did: increase regulation and call it "deregulation", that way everyone is happy. Until they run out of electricity.
Honestly curious, why are you violating the law if someone passes you on the right?
You are blocking traffic
What are you expected to do?
Move to the right.
And: do you think it is true in every case?
Not in every jurisdiction, but there are many places where you can get a ticket for not using the rightmost available lane. Well, in theory at least, this seems to be one of the most ignored traffic rules.
If 90% of the public pirates, then the investment put into creating books, music, software, etc will also be forced to decline
if 99% of a million people who saw your work pirate it and only 1% buy, you are still better off than if only a thousand people saw it.
As I understand it, copyright laws are only supposed to apply to the actual copying of data. Thus, if I copy a cassette tape, give it to you, and you play it, you aren't breaking the law unless you decide to copy the tape yourself.
So, if you rob a bank and give the money to your ho, she's not breaking the law when she spends it?
Since when is 95,000 feet of altitude in "space?"
Considering how uncrowded it's up there, "space" seems like a very good name for it.
People don't violate traffic laws because they don't understand them, they violate traffic laws because they don't think they'll get caught
That's true for some laws, but not all of them. For instance, how many drivers understand the exceptions for speed limits when overtaking? How many drivers understand that, if someone passes you on the right side, you are the driver who is violating the law? The general assumption is that the driver who generally behaves like an asshole is always right, and the driver who shows more ability to control the car and more awareness of what's happening around him on the road is in violation.
A similar situation exists relating to copyright law. How many people understand correctly what "fair use" means?
It will be much worse when she finds the rings you have do not fit her finger
The world doesn't seem to need speed anymore. And that'd pretty believable; What's the use of shaving a few hours off your London-New York trip when you might as well just have a video conference with the people there?
Yet the number of air travelers increase year by year. Personal travel IS important. In the USA, domestic flights carry from 1 million to 2 million passengers each day. And speed IS important. What's the point in sitting in an airplane? We would like to reach our destination as soon as possible, otherwise we would take a cruise ship, not an airplane.
Unfortunately, physics is implacable, its laws are not subject to negotiation. Until we find ways to (1) move faster than sound without creating a sonic boom and (2) move faster than sound without spending much more fuel, we will be limited to subsonic travel.
TFA says:
Not everyone rues the slowdown. "I think speed's overrated," says Bob van der Linden, chairman of the aeronautics department at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum in Washington, which displays many of the record-holding craft.
Ask him again next time he takes a flight from D.C. to Hong Kong. On tourist class...
Makes sense, they didn't want to start with a variable map.
The question to ask is whether this would impact birds more or less than ecosystem-wide acid rain from a coal plant?
What if it kills one species at a significantly higher rate than others? "Oh, don't worry, it only kills dodos and giant moas!".
I have seen articles mentioning a sudden decrease in insectivorous bat populations that seems to be caused by wind farms. (I know, TFA is about solar, not wind power, but it's all related to "alternative" energy).
For some reason, a few bat species are much more sensitive to wind turbines than other flying animals, and those species are important economically because they eat insects that attack crops. This means higher costs and more pesticide use in agriculture. This is just my guess, but bats hunt insects by echolocation, perhaps they are attracted to the swishing sound the blades make.
We should always be careful for the unintended consequences of any new technology. It's not because it's "green" that we should adopt in without detailed studies and careful analysis.