This is ridiculous. We're the richest nation in the world, and it takes us over 7 days to evacuate 100,000 poor people from a disaster area?
We don't (or didn't) need high-tech toys to control the crowds. Simple, common-sense, things like on-going airdrops of food and water, combined with convoys of buses, and temporary shelters at schools, etc, would have prevented major losses of life in this fiasco.
Sure, news photos of helicopters rescuing people look cool, but helicopters are 100 times as expensive as simple, tried and true tech like small boats.
We had advanced warning (36+ hours) that this was going to happen. Where were FEMA, the NG, Homeland Security, etc?
I'm disgusted and depressed at the bureaucratic mess that allowed this situation to get so out of hand.
The original design was a cynical attempt to maintain funding in the absence of any current sexy NASA projects: Skylab was a joke, robotic Mars ideas were pie in the sky, etc.
Building a plane-like thing could be sold: we're only one step away from making space flight as easy as a 747 ride. Only problem was that it was complete fiction: at $10,000/lb, hauling two big wings, landing gear, reusable everything, and the associated supporting infrastructure made this dog unable to actually carry a payload. But what the heck: sell it as a reusable, then tack on enough external boosters to actually allow it to at least lift a few tons into LEO.
Also, play the Russian card: they'll have to compete with our cool tech and that will bankrupt them sooner. Russian did try at first, but then gave up and switched to sensible tech: big dumb boosters. Now Russia has more, cheaper lift capacity than we do.:(
Sadly, the space shuttle set American space exploration back twenty years.
It's more what he's doing than what he has discovered (which is nothing.)
For amateur rocket work, you spend about $1000 to burn $1 worth of propellant. Think about the logistics: site costs, setup costs, safety planning, data acquisition, etc.
Streamlining the process is where you make big wins: accept a 2% ISP loss, and test 10x more frequently. This is how you gain knowledge fast and avoid expensive dead-ends. A lot of this work is just learning skills -- build, launch, avoid dying, repeat.
More tech (GPS, computers, digital video) makes the process much easier: John is now doing 1970s era work after starting at a 1950's level a few years ago. There's a good chance that he will be able to reach earth-orbit level within a decade.
Hmmm... my group oversees a 20,000,000+ line code base. I see about 100 changes to the production servers each day. Many changes hit production after less than ten minutes of testing and review.
You'd be surprised what you can do with a seriously powerful language (think Lisp-like) and an infrastructure that has had 1000+ man-years of effort put into it.
It's actually even simpler than that: insects, because of their hard exoskeletons, usually moult (or shed their hard body) a couple of times throughout their lives: it's the only way they can grow.
Some insects (e.g. locusts and cockroaches) basically look more adult (bigger, better wings, etc) with each instar (period between moults.) This guys need to act like adults from the time they are hatched (although some species actually have the parents nurse until the offspring are developed enough.)
For insects laid on carrion, ripe fruit, edible plants, and other transient food sources, time is of the essence: hatch fast, be a sac with a mouth, eat all you can, then pupate and get to the complex, energy-expensive adult stage in one moult.
Note that simple cocoons are nothing more than hardened/dried outer skin - it's just a moult.
Not climate driven. They were nomadic, not farmers.
They invaded existing populated areas, they did not settle previously unpopulated areas. This happened repeatedly, and was uncorrelated with climatic change.
Or, alternatively, those that could left and those that couldn't stayed
Interesting theory. So the high-status peoples in the centers of culture decided to migrate to the wilderness, while the poor/incapable stayed? Hmm...
Maybe they got chased away by the lucky sods leaving, like a lost puppy trying to follow you home...
Ah, I'm living in a nice mudbrick house, but I'm drawn to the pioneers trying to establish a new village. I'm a magnetic puppy!
(Personally, I think that the only reason that any human being lives in the tropics is because all the good spots were already taken so some people have to put up with hot, sticky, disease and parasite ridden home-ranges.)
Wow, so you think people might actually seek out good spots to live if they don't currently have one to live in? Maybe the climate wasn't chasing people: the expanding population forced people to find new places to live! Maybe they preferred to live in non-hot, non-sticky, non-desease and parasite ridden home-ranges full of megafauna to eat.
This is the why many big species survived thousands of years. Isolated and inaccessible locations let many live until the human population was dense enough to make them worth hunting: A hunting party on foot has only a 60 mile or so range (2-3 days out and back.) Sure, you can be nomadic and remove that limitation, but that really hurts your population growth rate and those human groups with settlements outbreed you rapidly. Big fauna survived for a long time in places humans didn't want to live.
Nice theory, except 'chased' means you leave location A and go to location B. Humans didn't do that: they stayed in location A and expanded to location B.
Interestingly, the bulk of the megafauna is in Africa, where humans started out. These big animals were exposed early to the nasty stone throwing proto-humans, and had time to learn to avoid us. Most other megafauna met the bow and arrow/spear wielding humans, and the contact tended to be fatal.
The world has changed, and the Times' response is 180 degrees wrong.
The Times has traditionally had two important features: it's the newspaper of record (i.e. you can cite its past issues as basically true,) and good op-ed pieces.
So, the Times thinks to itself and decides to charge for its strengths (their old news already costs money, and now they want to charge for the op-ed stuff.) The result is predictable: the Times is losing its newpaper of record status because you can't check old articles on the web, and now it's losing its pundit status because you can't read their (ever more shrill) op-ed authors.
A truly brilliant strategy for becoming unimportant!
The common sense approach would have defended these positions by a) providing the modern equivalent of microfiche for all old articles, thus maintaining their status of paper of record, and b) charging for current (1 day or week news.) c) Give the op-ed page away for free - it encourages readers to actually subscribe to the current news (because the pundits reference current events.)
Straw leads to really flexible housing (especially when in a non-loadbearing post and beam structure.) Adding small windows, arches, and doors takes nothing more than a chainsaw and some replastering. Much easier than typical 2x4 frame construction.
That said, empty conduits are a great idea - run them low (on top of the first layer of bales) so they don't get in the way of windows (Christopher Alexander -- low windows are good.) Think about insulation -- straw bale construction has good fire-resistance because the straw is in a low-oxygen environment protected by the stucco/plaster layer. Ensure your conduits don't break this and let heat/air come in contact with the straw.
P.S. Good luck on your building, I've always wanted to build a straw-bale home.
You're suggesting that we collect and move gigatons of material across tens to hundreds of millions of miles. It's not pretty math when you finish adding things up.
USA consumption of oil = 20M bbl/day = 2.5 tonnes/day. Assuming 90% is refined to fuel with a 75% carbon content, and then burned producing a CO/CO2 mix, we wind up with 1.8 gigatonnes per year from the USA alone, around 7 gigatonnes world-wide.
Hey, the article is not talking about your lifestyle choices, it's talking about scientists' ability to publish the facts as they see them without getting pressured to lie!
Um, we're talking about a wave 150 feet high, moving at 100+ mph, and somewhere around 25 miles from front to back. Long Island dissipates a little of the energy, but Long Island Sound and the Atlantic still ensure a big, fast wave hits Manhattan. Recall that waves bend around obstacles: when the wave takes 15+ minutes to pass, line of sight is somewhat unimportant. Offices and apartment buildings are still scraped clean off the island: millions die.
Given a housing project, the best you can hope for is a kind of Arcology. It still sucks, though, and seems doomed to become a Ballard-like Super Cannes or Highrise.
I wasn't suggesting creating nasty, plasticly "communicity centers," but rather creating useful public spaces where communities tend to form: a corner bar stabilizes a community far better than a "senior citizens' center."
Wasn't the resolution to this disconnect the "Projects"
Basically, yes. Believing that people really just need a door to lock and place to sleep lead to the rational (but wrong) conclusion that projects would be an efficient solution.
People need a roof over their heads, but even the lockable door is questionable: most people in my NYC apartment don't lock their doors.
Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs have both written about what makes a successful residence, and monolithic blocks of cookie-cutter apartments isn't it. You need a graduation of public to private areas, places for people to gather both as individuals and groups, 24-hour activity in some places, a mix of commericial and residential at all levels, inviting outdoor areas, good public transit, etc.
It's virtual impossible to "fix" a giant low-income apartment building, but here are a few things you could do:
1) Convert 1 apartment per floor into a convenience store. Have long hours, and staff it as much as possible with people from the building. You want people to meet their neighbors, and small stores are a good way to do it. An active store = more foot traffic = less crime.
2) Add day-care centers (1 per 10 floors or so.) A mother with a child can't get a job unless there is someplace to leave her kid now and then.
3) Add a small health clinic. This is cheaper than the hospital's ER.
4) Break up the homogeneity: make a few two-storey rooms. Make these micro-community centers that show movies, host lectures, religious services, birthday parties, etc.
There are hundred more things you could do, but all are concerned with moving from a concrete box full of little locked apartments to a community where people know each other.
Deer are tougher to kill than humans, or so I'm led to belive. (I don't know anyone with personal experience)
Pretty much all mammals have the same per kilogram tough-to-killness. A well-placed shot with enough energy per kilgram of body makes them dead fast. Humans and deer hit badly tend to remain mobile for hours to days across a wide range of ammo (wars provide a lot of statistics for this.)
That said, while I suppose a bullet that could kill a deer without going through a armor vest, but it would be a long, cruel, painful death for the deer, and likely would spoil a lot of the meat.
Um, bullet proof vests are designed to stop bullets, deer are not. So, many bullets are designed explicitly to go through armour (e.g. using special penetrators and low-friction jackets.) These don't change lethality on deer, but do change the ability to kill people.
As the OP pointed out, a strict reading of various proposed laws could be construed to ban almost all ammo, (though most of the bullet proof vests I've seen in the last year seemed to be IIIA worn by officers with either assault rifles or full automatic rifles,) but this strict reading has never been enforced.
I'm a strong proponent of gun ownership, but refused to donate to the NRA last year because they conflate two issues: sportsmanship and the right to own any weapon you damn well want. I support both, but dislike the way they fearmonger to the big first group to help the second cause. When I wanted a license to play with big weapons I talked to the ATF and got it, I didn't fearmonger to sportsman saying my right to own a 1000+ mile range rocket was equivalent to their right to own a.30-06.
"Including that dastardly.30-.30 Winchester, the round typically chambered in grandpa's old lever-action rifle and used to take more deer than pretty much any other round in the world."
A nice rant, but it's a.30-30, not a.30-.30. Any real sportsman would know this. Oh, and it's highly unlikely that standard.30-30 would penetrate a modern bullet-proof vest.
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This is ridiculous. We're the richest nation in the world, and it takes us over 7 days to evacuate 100,000 poor people from a disaster area?
We don't (or didn't) need high-tech toys to control the crowds. Simple, common-sense, things like on-going airdrops of food and water, combined with convoys of buses, and temporary shelters at schools, etc, would have prevented major losses of life in this fiasco.
Sure, news photos of helicopters rescuing people look cool, but helicopters are 100 times as expensive as simple, tried and true tech like small boats.
We had advanced warning (36+ hours) that this was going to happen. Where were FEMA, the NG, Homeland Security, etc?
I'm disgusted and depressed at the bureaucratic mess that allowed this situation to get so out of hand.
The original design was a cynical attempt to maintain funding in the absence of any current sexy NASA projects: Skylab was a joke, robotic Mars ideas were pie in the sky, etc.
:(
Building a plane-like thing could be sold: we're only one step away from making space flight as easy as a 747 ride. Only problem was that it was complete fiction: at $10,000/lb, hauling two big wings, landing gear, reusable everything, and the associated supporting infrastructure made this dog unable to actually carry a payload. But what the heck: sell it as a reusable, then tack on enough external boosters to actually allow it to at least lift a few tons into LEO.
Also, play the Russian card: they'll have to compete with our cool tech and that will bankrupt them sooner. Russian did try at first, but then gave up and switched to sensible tech: big dumb boosters. Now Russia has more, cheaper lift capacity than we do.
Sadly, the space shuttle set American space exploration back twenty years.
It's more what he's doing than what he has discovered (which is nothing.)
For amateur rocket work, you spend about $1000 to burn $1 worth of propellant. Think about the logistics: site costs, setup costs, safety planning, data acquisition, etc.
Streamlining the process is where you make big wins: accept a 2% ISP loss, and test 10x more frequently. This is how you gain knowledge fast and avoid expensive dead-ends. A lot of this work is just learning skills -- build, launch, avoid dying, repeat.
More tech (GPS, computers, digital video) makes the process much easier: John is now doing 1970s era work after starting at a 1950's level a few years ago. There's a good chance that he will be able to reach earth-orbit level within a decade.
Hmmm... my group oversees a 20,000,000+ line code base. I see about 100 changes to the production servers each day. Many changes hit production after less than ten minutes of testing and review.
You'd be surprised what you can do with a seriously powerful language (think Lisp-like) and an infrastructure that has had 1000+ man-years of effort put into it.
It's actually even simpler than that: insects, because of their hard exoskeletons, usually moult (or shed their hard body) a couple of times throughout their lives: it's the only way they can grow.
Some insects (e.g. locusts and cockroaches) basically look more adult (bigger, better wings, etc) with each instar (period between moults.) This guys need to act like adults from the time they are hatched (although some species actually have the parents nurse until the offspring are developed enough.)
For insects laid on carrion, ripe fruit, edible plants, and other transient food sources, time is of the essence: hatch fast, be a sac with a mouth, eat all you can, then pupate and get to the complex, energy-expensive adult stage in one moult.
Note that simple cocoons are nothing more than hardened/dried outer skin - it's just a moult.
very pretty.
Some cost, but cleaner than my solution:
int differs = a ^ b;
return ( differs & c ) | (~differs & a );
So, how is this different from a "Star Chamber"?
Um, it's not a government body?
Boring stuff like they can be charged with crimes, you can sue the group, etc.
Not climate driven. They were nomadic, not farmers.
They invaded existing populated areas, they did not settle previously unpopulated areas. This happened repeatedly, and was uncorrelated with climatic change.
You have nothing, give it up.
No, more like, the weather is getting crappy, crops are failing.. you get the picture?
Yes, but the is a long-term effect (e.g. we relocate our seat of power to a new city,) not a short-term driver of human population movement.
Face it, unless you have any counterexamples, population growth drives new settlement. Climate change never has.
Or, alternatively, those that could left and those that couldn't stayed
Interesting theory. So the high-status peoples in the centers of culture decided to migrate to the wilderness, while the poor/incapable stayed? Hmm...
Maybe they got chased away by the lucky sods leaving, like a lost puppy trying to follow you home...
Ah, I'm living in a nice mudbrick house, but I'm drawn to the pioneers trying to establish a new village. I'm a magnetic puppy!
(Personally, I think that the only reason that any human being lives in the tropics is because all the good spots were already taken so some people have to put up with hot, sticky, disease and parasite ridden home-ranges.)
Wow, so you think people might actually seek out good spots to live if they don't currently have one to live in? Maybe the climate wasn't chasing people: the expanding population forced people to find new places to live! Maybe they preferred to live in non-hot, non-sticky, non-desease and parasite ridden home-ranges full of megafauna to eat.
Mod parent up.
This is the why many big species survived thousands of years. Isolated and inaccessible locations let many live until the human population was dense enough to make them worth hunting: A hunting party on foot has only a 60 mile or so range (2-3 days out and back.) Sure, you can be nomadic and remove that limitation, but that really hurts your population growth rate and those human groups with settlements outbreed you rapidly. Big fauna survived for a long time in places humans didn't want to live.
Nice theory, except 'chased' means you leave location A and go to location B. Humans didn't do that: they stayed in location A and expanded to location B.
Interestingly, the bulk of the megafauna is in Africa, where humans started out. These big animals were exposed early to the nasty stone throwing proto-humans, and had time to learn to avoid us. Most other megafauna met the bow and arrow/spear wielding humans, and the contact tended to be fatal.
The world has changed, and the Times' response is 180 degrees wrong.
The Times has traditionally had two important features: it's the newspaper of record (i.e. you can cite its past issues as basically true,) and good op-ed pieces.
So, the Times thinks to itself and decides to charge for its strengths (their old news already costs money, and now they want to charge for the op-ed stuff.) The result is predictable: the Times is losing its newpaper of record status because you can't check old articles on the web, and now it's losing its pundit status because you can't read their (ever more shrill) op-ed authors.
A truly brilliant strategy for becoming unimportant!
The common sense approach would have defended these positions by a) providing the modern equivalent of microfiche for all old articles, thus maintaining their status of paper of record, and b) charging for current (1 day or week news.) c) Give the op-ed page away for free - it encourages readers to actually subscribe to the current news (because the pundits reference current events.)
Straw leads to really flexible housing (especially when in a non-loadbearing post and beam structure.) Adding small windows, arches, and doors takes nothing more than a chainsaw and some replastering. Much easier than typical 2x4 frame construction.
That said, empty conduits are a great idea - run them low (on top of the first layer of bales) so they don't get in the way of windows (Christopher Alexander -- low windows are good.) Think about insulation -- straw bale construction has good fire-resistance because the straw is in a low-oxygen environment protected by the stucco/plaster layer. Ensure your conduits don't break this and let heat/air come in contact with the straw.
P.S. Good luck on your building, I've always wanted to build a straw-bale home.
You're suggesting that we collect and move gigatons of material across tens to hundreds of millions of miles. It's not pretty math when you finish adding things up.
USA consumption of oil = 20M bbl/day = 2.5 tonnes/day. Assuming 90% is refined to fuel with a 75% carbon content, and then burned producing a CO/CO2 mix, we wind up with 1.8 gigatonnes per year from the USA alone, around 7 gigatonnes world-wide.
Certainly better than the author's bad ideas. E.g.
The genetic code for the mass suicide of the lemming could be introduced to the most dangerous species of mosquito
What mass suicide? That idea is based on a stupid Disney film. What genetic code? Lemmings aren't programmed to all die simultaneously.
He has some interesting ideas, but not much science. I think people would be willing to pay a bit more for not dying.
Hey, the article is not talking about your lifestyle choices, it's talking about scientists' ability to publish the facts as they see them without getting pressured to lie!
Um, we're talking about a wave 150 feet high, moving at 100+ mph, and somewhere around 25 miles from front to back. Long Island dissipates a little of the energy, but Long Island Sound and the Atlantic still ensure a big, fast wave hits Manhattan. Recall that waves bend around obstacles: when the wave takes 15+ minutes to pass, line of sight is somewhat unimportant. Offices and apartment buildings are still scraped clean off the island: millions die.
Given a housing project, the best you can hope for is a kind of Arcology. It still sucks, though, and seems doomed to become a Ballard-like Super Cannes or Highrise.
I wasn't suggesting creating nasty, plasticly "communicity centers," but rather creating useful public spaces where communities tend to form: a corner bar stabilizes a community far better than a "senior citizens' center."
Wasn't the resolution to this disconnect the "Projects"
Basically, yes. Believing that people really just need a door to lock and place to sleep lead to the rational (but wrong) conclusion that projects would be an efficient solution.
People need a roof over their heads, but even the lockable door is questionable: most people in my NYC apartment don't lock their doors.
Christopher Alexander and Jane Jacobs have both written about what makes a successful residence, and monolithic blocks of cookie-cutter apartments isn't it. You need a graduation of public to private areas, places for people to gather both as individuals and groups, 24-hour activity in some places, a mix of commericial and residential at all levels, inviting outdoor areas, good public transit, etc.
It's virtual impossible to "fix" a giant low-income apartment building, but here are a few things you could do:
1) Convert 1 apartment per floor into a convenience store. Have long hours, and staff it as much as possible with people from the building. You want people to meet their neighbors, and small stores are a good way to do it. An active store = more foot traffic = less crime.
2) Add day-care centers (1 per 10 floors or so.) A mother with a child can't get a job unless there is someplace to leave her kid now and then.
3) Add a small health clinic. This is cheaper than the hospital's ER.
4) Break up the homogeneity: make a few two-storey rooms. Make these micro-community centers that show movies, host lectures, religious services, birthday parties, etc.
There are hundred more things you could do, but all are concerned with moving from a concrete box full of little locked apartments to a community where people know each other.
it's just as remarkable to look at why Rome didn't develop modern technology as why Britain and the Americas did.
They very nearly did... One of the famous inventors (Archimedes?) came close to inventing a steam engine.
WTF? Archimedes was a Greek. The Romans killed him.
Interest rates go up, since cash itself is more likely to increase in value than an investment
I'm sure you meant to say: interest rates go DOWN, since cash itself is more likely to increase in value.
Deer are tougher to kill than humans, or so I'm led to belive. (I don't know anyone with personal experience)
.30-06.
Pretty much all mammals have the same per kilogram tough-to-killness. A well-placed shot with enough energy per kilgram of body makes them dead fast. Humans and deer hit badly tend to remain mobile for hours to days across a wide range of ammo (wars provide a lot of statistics for this.)
That said, while I suppose a bullet that could kill a deer without going through a armor vest, but it would be a long, cruel, painful death for the deer, and likely would spoil a lot of the meat.
Um, bullet proof vests are designed to stop bullets, deer are not. So, many bullets are designed explicitly to go through armour (e.g. using special penetrators and low-friction jackets.) These don't change lethality on deer, but do change the ability to kill people.
As the OP pointed out, a strict reading of various proposed laws could be construed to ban almost all ammo, (though most of the bullet proof vests I've seen in the last year seemed to be IIIA worn by officers with either assault rifles or full automatic rifles,) but this strict reading has never been enforced.
I'm a strong proponent of gun ownership, but refused to donate to the NRA last year because they conflate two issues: sportsmanship and the right to own any weapon you damn well want. I support both, but dislike the way they fearmonger to the big first group to help the second cause. When I wanted a license to play with big weapons I talked to the ATF and got it, I didn't fearmonger to sportsman saying my right to own a 1000+ mile range rocket was equivalent to their right to own a
"Including that dastardly .30-.30 Winchester, the round typically chambered in grandpa's old lever-action rifle and used to take more deer than pretty much any other round in the world."
.30-30, not a .30-.30. Any real sportsman would know this. Oh, and it's highly unlikely that standard .30-30 would penetrate a modern bullet-proof vest.
A nice rant, but it's a