The dead sea is already such a big hole in the earth. So just let it stream in there
There are other alternatives. One is in the Death valley in California. Another is the Qattara depression in Egypt, where there have been proposals to generate electricity by letting the Mediterranean sea water flow in through turbines.
It's pretty damn freezing. Tell me when I can wear shorts and a muscle T in December and I'll believe in AGW.
I'm wearing shorts and the air conditioning is on at full blast. I live in Brazil.
Why does the tree-ring data end specifically in 1960 when the plotted temps dive downward?
Because there were better measurement methods available in 1960. You *could* keep using tree-ring data after 1960, but the result would be noisier. How do you think tree-ring data is calibrated? They compare tree-ring with thermometer data for the period after reliable thermometers were available.
Why, at the end of the tree ring series, are there only a few trees selected at all rather than the entire set?
To eliminate extraneous factors. There are other influences than temperature that affect tree rings and one must select the cases where we are reasonably sure that those other influences did not play a major part.
Why universally the raw data adjusted in precisely the same way. Earlier temperatures are adjusted downward, later temperatures are adjusted upwards.
Not universally, the data is adjusted case by case, depending on the particular circumstances. It's *you* who are looking just at those particular cases where earlier data was adjusted downwards.
Why is the Medieval Warming Period completely eliminated by AGW "proofs"? Are you suggesting that documented colonization of Greenland by the vikings during the MWP followed by the gradual destruction of the colony during the Little Ice Age... didn't happen?
Are you suggesting the documented colonization of Uganda by the British during the nineteenth century followed by gradual destruction of the colony in the second half of the twentieth century didn't happen? I have some news for you, the part of Greenland for which the country was named is still green today.
Curiously in most areas of science it is the proponents of a theory that are responsible for proving it. Only in AGW is the onus on the detractors.
AGW has been *amply* proved. I have seen a demonstration of this personally, I have a photo of myself at the end of a glacier in 1967, where today there's only bare rock. It's up to the AGW skeptics to prove the ice isn't melting.
NOT. Not when it means giving the goose-stepping morons of Climate Change the power to impose "limits on emissions" which means defacto control of the economy and the destruction of millions if not potentially a billion, jobs worldwide.
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I'll bite.
How would replacing the energy infrastructure with another more earth-friendly one destroy jobs? How many jobs would be created if there was a need to build more wind, sun, and nuclear power stations?
The only menace brought by limits on emissions would be to "globalized" jobs. The need to use less fossil fuels in transportation would create more demand for products that don't need to be shipped long distances, therefore creating an incentive to evenly distribute industries all over the world.
I hated that shit when learning assembler on the 360, but then again they never thought JCL and didn't have any books on it, which is probably why I hated it
Plants are the most efficient at collecting solar energy. Plants are the most efficient at storing energy as some form of hydrocarbon
I agree with you in that, but I don't think cyanobacteria are the only solution for biofuels.
Pond scum needs ponds, and ponds are filled with water. Granted, waste water can be used, these ponds can be part of a sewage treatment system.
I think a future biofuel system will be a more diverse system. We will need bacteria in ponds, but also other plants, such as cactuses or other that grow in semi-desert areas, for instance. Or what about the oceans? Imagine biofuel made from kelp, three quarters of the surface area of Earth are available for that.
People in Iran do not have gun and it is illegal to have it.
Then who shot Neda Soltan? The problem with illegal guns is that only honest people obey the law.
US did a coup in Iran 40-50 years ago and overthrow their national democratic government and returned the dictator "Shah" to power
It seems pretty naive to blame everything on the CIA. If the Iranian society were so extremely susceptible to foreign manipulation that they cannot get rid of the consequences of a coup that happened almost sixty years ago the situation would be entirely hopeless for Iran. It's time for Iranians to stand up and accept the responsibility for their own acts.
Besides, Mossadegh didn't have the support of the conservative clergy either, so if the CIA hadn't done it there would still be the possibility that the clerics would overthrow his government. It's easy to play "what if" with past events.
Looking from the outside, the current situation seems largely unchanged: Iran seems to be governed by a dictatorship that is supported by a small but significant part of the population, this hasn't changed since 1953. The only difference between the Shah and the current regime is that the Shah wasn't intent on destroying Israel.
Europeans and US gave them weapons etc (including chemicals for illegal chemical warfare)
Not true, at the time of the Iran-Iraq war, Iran had American weapons, Iraq had Soviet weapons.
He named it so because it - "it" being the point contact transistor and devices descended from it, such as the modern BJT - had transfer resistance, the dual of the vacuum tube (or FET) which is defined in terms of its transfer conductance. Understand?
I am an electronic engineer and am perfectly aware of the origin of the word "transistor".
I also happen to know that resistance and conductance are equivalent terms, resistance being the inverse of conductance. You can model vacuum tubes or transistors, both unipolar and bipolar, by either conductance or resistance.
However, if you want to be pedantic about the word "resistance", you should study the behavior of both bipolar transistors and FETs under saturation. Under non-saturated conditions the current in the output side of the circuit depends on the excitation in the input, this excitation being a current in the BJT and a voltage in a FET.
Under saturation the device conducts as much current as the circuit allows, normally this current is limited by an external load resistance. In these conditions a BJT behaves as a resistor whose value does not depend on the excitation current. A FET, OTOH, has a channel resistance that varies with the voltage being applied on the gate. For depletion junction FETs this resistance is almost inversely proportional to the gate voltage and this feature has been used in analogic circuits.
Conclusion: for true gramer nazis, only FETs should be called "transfer resistors".
So don't put any big money on ever having one-atom transistors in any practical device.
I'm old enough to remember when people said no dynamic memory chip could ever be made with more than 64 kilobits capacity. The capacitor charge would be flipped by radiation hitting the chip.
Probably this is the origin of the "640 kbytes should be enough for anybody" meme, since, with 64 kbit chips, it would be difficult to pack more than the 80 chips needed for 640 kbytes in a desktop computer.
And the mistake begins where a FET(sic) is called a transistor at all.
Then how would you call a Field Effect Transistor?
They have merely got as close as possible to a valve
No. A valve uses charge carriers (electrons) floating in a vacuum. A transistor uses either electrons or holes in a semiconducting solid as charge carriers. A semi-conducting solid is not as close as possible to a vacuum.
I am the one slashdotter that reads TFA (the full article) before posting. I even did a search for tryptophan. Nope, it's not there. Maybe the submitter forgot a link, but tryptophan is never mentioned in the sciencenews.org article.
You never, ever, ever drop anything like used aluminium cans into the feed that is headed for melt shop as any bit of liquid still in the can will cause a rather powerful explosion
It's also a known rule that you use sand, never water, to extinguish a fire where molten aluminum is present.
However, the biggest danger from dropping aluminum cans in the melt is from the steam expansion, not from burning aluminum. Having *any* humidity at all where molten metal runs, any metal, not just aluminum, will produce large quantities of steam, which will expand explosively throwing molten metal all around.
I know this from personal experience, when I was about twelve years old I was burned while melting lead to make fishing weights. I dropped the mold in water to cool it and the next time I poured metal in it I got a spray of molten lead right in my face. Lucky me, none of it hit my eyes.
You don't earn money programming with your choice of a programming language, you earn money with a programming language that your employers choose for the jobs that are available in your area
You could try writing code so awesome the managers would have no alternative than let you choose your tools. I did this recently, there was a customer management system that needed some data from engineering. I wrote a "stop gap" thingy in Python in two months, with the understanding that this would be replaced by a "proper" system in.NET as soon as possible.
When budget time came in, the bill for converting my small Python script to VB.NET was $200k. Now it's official: Python has been accepted by the upper management as a valid cost-cutting tool to replace.NET wherever possible.
The only way I could see to make something like that happen however would be massive regulation of manufacturing to prevent the production of garbage
Can you name a single country where massive regulation of manufacturing ever worked as intended? Not even Stalin could get rid of the corruption that massive regulation causes.
I agree that it's much better to produce longer lasting products, but the reason why industry produces "garbage" isn't because they want to sell the same products to you again. Some analysts have become enamored by this "planned obsolescence" concept, but I don't think it's the reasoning the industry uses.
In a free society the industry will produce what the people demand. Unfortunately the market for sturdier products is *very* small. People will rather have luxury than quality.
Look at the current state of the economy: people have been spending left and right, going to the limit on their credit, to buy things they don't need. In that general context, how much support do you think a proposal to spend more carefully, paying more for simpler products that last longer, would get?
People do not want better products that last longer, they want the latest and shiniest useless throwaway stuff they can get.
I think they do have the right to insist that you get another diagnosis from another doctor, and I think they do have the right to send the name of the doctor who performed the original diagnosis and the evidence to some kind of medical fraud tribunal
I agree with that, provided:
1) the medical fraud tribunal is impartial
2) if found guilty, the doctor is punished with enough severity to effectively disencourage other doctors from doing the same.
Those are the two items that are missing in most countries medical systems today. Medical fraud is investigated by commissions formed by doctors alone, who have no incentive to punish other doctors. Even in the cases where doctors are found guilty, all they get is a wrist slap.
The inevitable outcome? Medical malpractice suits, where layperson juries award millions in compensation to victims. Side effects are either enormously expensive private insurance (USA) or a heavy burden to taxpayers (other countries).
Unfortunately, I see no way out. I can't think of any incentive system that would preserve the best interest of patients while, at the same time, preventing patient-doctor complicity in defrauding insurance companies. This is especially true in psychiatric cases where the assessment whether a patient is depressed or not depends mostly on the opinion of the doctor that's treating the patient.
The kernel is exactly what we used to call an "Operating System", before people started putting Window Managers on top
How true! Instead of trying to confuse things and try to hitchhike a ride on Linux success, people who try to prepend a GNU/ on everything should study history and learn where this "operating system" definition started.
There was a time when every computer was dedicated to running a single program at a time, it often took hours to switch from one program to the other. In many computers configuring hardware to run different tasks involved plugging patch cords into sockets.
An "operating system" was the software that let the computer hardware be shared among different users with less hassle. In that context, the equivalent of what was initially called an operating system would be a set of device drivers and a task scheduler, exactly what Linux alone does.
Of course, language evolves and what was called an "operating system" in the 1960s would not be the same thing today. But that should be for the people to decide, the GNU/ trolls are very obnoxious in trying to force an usage that the general public never came up with spontaneously.
Because I was driving a motorcycle, I was able to react far more quickly than in a car. If I had been in a car
I call BS on this one. Every biker I know says a car handles quicker under emergencies than a bike. You can find demonstrations of this fact on the internet.
Take, for instance, the Imola circuit, where both Formula 1 and motorcycle races have been held. Fastest lap on four wheels: Fernando Alonso in 2006 at 1:24.569. Fastest lap on two wheels: Michel Fabrizio in 2009 at 1:47.736. There are several other circuits that have both car and bike races, compare lap times on any of those and you will see that bikes are *much* worse on the curves.
I intend to outlive old age. By the time I reach my natural span, improvements in medicine will let me survive the next decades until a definitive cure for aging is found.
I was in the hospital not too long ago, cost $70K to fix a broken foot because a car hit my motorcycle.
Good to know it costs that much to repair a broken foot. Note to myself: never ride a vehicle where the most fragile parts of my body are on the outside. Better choose transportation systems that provide a protective cocoon, plus safety belts, airbags, etc.
Seriously, there should be much higher taxes on motorcycles, the cost to the community caused by motorcycle accident victims is disproportional to their contribution.
Slashdot Mirror
There are other alternatives. One is in the Death valley in California. Another is the Qattara depression in Egypt, where there have been proposals to generate electricity by letting the Mediterranean sea water flow in through turbines.
I'm wearing shorts and the air conditioning is on at full blast. I live in Brazil.
Because there were better measurement methods available in 1960. You *could* keep using tree-ring data after 1960, but the result would be noisier.
How do you think tree-ring data is calibrated? They compare tree-ring with thermometer data for the period after reliable thermometers were available.
To eliminate extraneous factors. There are other influences than temperature that affect tree rings and one must select the cases where we are reasonably sure that those other influences did not play a major part.
Not universally, the data is adjusted case by case, depending on the particular circumstances. It's *you* who are looking just at those particular cases where earlier data was adjusted downwards.
Are you suggesting the documented colonization of Uganda by the British during the nineteenth century followed by gradual destruction of the colony in the second half of the twentieth century didn't happen?
I have some news for you, the part of Greenland for which the country was named is still green today.
AGW has been *amply* proved. I have seen a demonstration of this personally, I have a photo of myself at the end of a glacier in 1967, where today there's only bare rock. It's up to the AGW skeptics to prove the ice isn't melting.
BZZZT, wrong! UV is used to polymerize the plastic material used on your teeth.
If your common knowledge about chemistry and dentistry is wrong, then how can you be so sure about your knowledge of climatology?
I know I shouldn't feed the trolls, but I'll bite.
How would replacing the energy infrastructure with another more earth-friendly one destroy jobs? How many jobs would be created if there was a need to build more wind, sun, and nuclear power stations?
The only menace brought by limits on emissions would be to "globalized" jobs. The need to use less fossil fuels in transportation would create more demand for products that don't need to be shipped long distances, therefore creating an incentive to evenly distribute industries all over the world.
I have all the information I could ever need, right on my desktop
Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter
I agree with you in that, but I don't think cyanobacteria are the only solution for biofuels.
Pond scum needs ponds, and ponds are filled with water. Granted, waste water can be used, these ponds can be part of a sewage treatment system.
I think a future biofuel system will be a more diverse system. We will need bacteria in ponds, but also other plants, such as cactuses or other that grow in semi-desert areas, for instance. Or what about the oceans? Imagine biofuel made from kelp, three quarters of the surface area of Earth are available for that.
Yes, I know. In "intellectual property" matters this requires considerable support, indeed.
Depends on what you mean. Cooperate, without a diaeresis, means to apply a cooper to something. There are problems that only a barrel maker can solve.
No, I'd expect people would buy vinyl records and scan them
Then who shot Neda Soltan? The problem with illegal guns is that only honest people obey the law.
It seems pretty naive to blame everything on the CIA. If the Iranian society were so extremely susceptible to foreign manipulation that they cannot get rid of the consequences of a coup that happened almost sixty years ago the situation would be entirely hopeless for Iran. It's time for Iranians to stand up and accept the responsibility for their own acts.
Besides, Mossadegh didn't have the support of the conservative clergy either, so if the CIA hadn't done it there would still be the possibility that the clerics would overthrow his government. It's easy to play "what if" with past events.
Looking from the outside, the current situation seems largely unchanged: Iran seems to be governed by a dictatorship that is supported by a small but significant part of the population, this hasn't changed since 1953. The only difference between the Shah and the current regime is that the Shah wasn't intent on destroying Israel.
Not true, at the time of the Iran-Iraq war, Iran had American weapons, Iraq had Soviet weapons.
I am an electronic engineer and am perfectly aware of the origin of the word "transistor".
I also happen to know that resistance and conductance are equivalent terms, resistance being the inverse of conductance. You can model vacuum tubes or transistors, both unipolar and bipolar, by either conductance or resistance.
However, if you want to be pedantic about the word "resistance", you should study the behavior of both bipolar transistors and FETs under saturation. Under non-saturated conditions the current in the output side of the circuit depends on the excitation in the input, this excitation being a current in the BJT and a voltage in a FET.
Under saturation the device conducts as much current as the circuit allows, normally this current is limited by an external load resistance. In these conditions a BJT behaves as a resistor whose value does not depend on the excitation current. A FET, OTOH, has a channel resistance that varies with the voltage being applied on the gate. For depletion junction FETs this resistance is almost inversely proportional to the gate voltage and this feature has been used in analogic circuits.
Conclusion: for true gramer nazis, only FETs should be called "transfer resistors".
I'm old enough to remember when people said no dynamic memory chip could ever be made with more than 64 kilobits capacity. The capacitor charge would be flipped by radiation hitting the chip.
Probably this is the origin of the "640 kbytes should be enough for anybody" meme, since, with 64 kbit chips, it would be difficult to pack more than the 80 chips needed for 640 kbytes in a desktop computer.
Then how would you call a Field Effect Transistor?
No. A valve uses charge carriers (electrons) floating in a vacuum. A transistor uses either electrons or holes in a semiconducting solid as charge carriers. A semi-conducting solid is not as close as possible to a vacuum.
Well, at least this seems to set an ultimate limit to Moore's law, since it's not very easy to go to less than one atom per transistor.
I am the one slashdotter that reads TFA (the full article) before posting. I even did a search for tryptophan. Nope, it's not there. Maybe the submitter forgot a link, but tryptophan is never mentioned in the sciencenews.org article.
It's also a known rule that you use sand, never water, to extinguish a fire where molten aluminum is present.
However, the biggest danger from dropping aluminum cans in the melt is from the steam expansion, not from burning aluminum. Having *any* humidity at all where molten metal runs, any metal, not just aluminum, will produce large quantities of steam, which will expand explosively throwing molten metal all around.
I know this from personal experience, when I was about twelve years old I was burned while melting lead to make fishing weights. I dropped the mold in water to cool it and the next time I poured metal in it I got a spray of molten lead right in my face. Lucky me, none of it hit my eyes.
This is pretty close to that, exploding a suspension of a flammable dust in air.
You could try writing code so awesome the managers would have no alternative than let you choose your tools. I did this recently, there was a customer management system that needed some data from engineering. I wrote a "stop gap" thingy in Python in two months, with the understanding that this would be replaced by a "proper" system in .NET as soon as possible.
When budget time came in, the bill for converting my small Python script to VB.NET was $200k. Now it's official: Python has been accepted by the upper management as a valid cost-cutting tool to replace .NET wherever possible.
Can you name a single country where massive regulation of manufacturing ever worked as intended? Not even Stalin could get rid of the corruption that massive regulation causes.
I agree that it's much better to produce longer lasting products, but the reason why industry produces "garbage" isn't because they want to sell the same products to you again. Some analysts have become enamored by this "planned obsolescence" concept, but I don't think it's the reasoning the industry uses.
In a free society the industry will produce what the people demand. Unfortunately the market for sturdier products is *very* small. People will rather have luxury than quality.
Look at the current state of the economy: people have been spending left and right, going to the limit on their credit, to buy things they don't need. In that general context, how much support do you think a proposal to spend more carefully, paying more for simpler products that last longer, would get?
People do not want better products that last longer, they want the latest and shiniest useless throwaway stuff they can get.
I agree with that, provided:
1) the medical fraud tribunal is impartial
2) if found guilty, the doctor is punished with enough severity to effectively disencourage other doctors from doing the same.
Those are the two items that are missing in most countries medical systems today. Medical fraud is investigated by commissions formed by doctors alone, who have no incentive to punish other doctors. Even in the cases where doctors are found guilty, all they get is a wrist slap.
The inevitable outcome? Medical malpractice suits, where layperson juries award millions in compensation to victims. Side effects are either enormously expensive private insurance (USA) or a heavy burden to taxpayers (other countries).
Unfortunately, I see no way out. I can't think of any incentive system that would preserve the best interest of patients while, at the same time, preventing patient-doctor complicity in defrauding insurance companies. This is especially true in psychiatric cases where the assessment whether a patient is depressed or not depends mostly on the opinion of the doctor that's treating the patient.
How true! Instead of trying to confuse things and try to hitchhike a ride on Linux success, people who try to prepend a GNU/ on everything should study history and learn where this "operating system" definition started.
There was a time when every computer was dedicated to running a single program at a time, it often took hours to switch from one program to the other. In many computers configuring hardware to run different tasks involved plugging patch cords into sockets.
An "operating system" was the software that let the computer hardware be shared among different users with less hassle. In that context, the equivalent of what was initially called an operating system would be a set of device drivers and a task scheduler, exactly what Linux alone does.
Of course, language evolves and what was called an "operating system" in the 1960s would not be the same thing today. But that should be for the people to decide, the GNU/ trolls are very obnoxious in trying to force an usage that the general public never came up with spontaneously.
I call BS on this one. Every biker I know says a car handles quicker under emergencies than a bike. You can find demonstrations of this fact on the internet.
Take, for instance, the Imola circuit, where both Formula 1 and motorcycle races have been held. Fastest lap on four wheels: Fernando Alonso in 2006 at 1:24.569. Fastest lap on two wheels: Michel Fabrizio in 2009 at 1:47.736. There are several other circuits that have both car and bike races, compare lap times on any of those and you will see that bikes are *much* worse on the curves.
You don't really have a bike, do you?
I intend to outlive old age. By the time I reach my natural span, improvements in medicine will let me survive the next decades until a definitive cure for aging is found.
Good to know it costs that much to repair a broken foot. Note to myself: never ride a vehicle where the most fragile parts of my body are on the outside. Better choose transportation systems that provide a protective cocoon, plus safety belts, airbags, etc.
Seriously, there should be much higher taxes on motorcycles, the cost to the community caused by motorcycle accident victims is disproportional to their contribution.