I moved to the States from Soviet Russia when I was young, went through the public school system, and learned Spanish in high school. I claim that if people, youngish children, to be specific, are taught/forced to learn a foreign language that's just close enough to English for the common rules of grammar to be recognizable, you will get better speakers and writers of English than if you rely purely on osmosis to provide the instruction.
Remember, most if not all children entering kindergarten in the US, (British) Canada, England, and that kangaroo country already speak and understand English, and continue to do so quite well until they are fluent readers at around age 8-9, when they can begin to be taught formal rules of grammar in writing. That's a lot of unlearning to do, and it's double hard when there are no other reference points or 'toy languages' to look at, to borrow from a term from CS instruction.
I learned English late, through natively, through osmosis, but I learned Spanish in a classroom, and for me at least, it was a bit easier to reason about abstract things like nouns and verbs and adverbs and indirect objects when I didn't understand the language natively and the meaning of the words wasn't jumping out and overwhelming my thinking.
There is such a thing as point-and-click FPGA development these days [ni.com]. That's an easy way to get the words 'FPGA Development' on your resume and be only slightly lying about it.
Fratboy schmratboy. There were a sufficient number of enginerds in the frats at undergrad that the stereotype failed. There were also a number of dumbasses in the engineering classes that had nothing to do with the frats.
Even Richard Feynman was in a frat (granted at MIT, but still).
Technical staff at most defense firms in the US (PhD in engineering/science required) start off in the high 5-figures straight out of school. Don't confuse academia with science. In the US, well over half the science funding happens in private industry, which gave us things like the transistor, the artificial heart, and a damn big portion of the internets.
1+1=2 everywhere, even in abstract algebra. If you claim that even that part of the smell test for your theory-that-if-taken-as-true-means-less-freedom-for-me-and-cushy-government-policy-making-seat-for-you is too hard for me to understand...well, the founding fathers wisely put the first and second amendments into the constitution to discourage this sort of behavior.
Peer-review journals cost money to publish in. The average arm-chair CITIZEN can't be expected to spend money to ask questions, especially about how his taxes are being spent. Enter the greatest force for democracy in recorded history: the internet, which gives everyone a soap box and puts teeth into the First Amendment, or its equivalent in any of the civilized democracies, or barring that, the free speech portion of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
You're missing the point, friend. Like the red square on a white canvas, it's art, not stupidity. These kids should be given the highest philological scholarship available at your institution, so that they may perfect their craft.
It's perfectly possible. It's called an air gap. If you still want centralized control of a remote substation, don't do it over the public internet. That's not as bad as it sounds in terms of costs, because if you're the power company, you already own a completely independent set of cables to said substation. Now the hacker has to get out of his mom's basement and climb a utility pole to hack you.
Still worried about the possibility of remote hacking from a guy who spent too much time climbing trees in his childhood? Again: airgap. The only bits that should flow between the data transciever in the substation and the actual critical hardware shouldn't flow directly. Observe below:
[Command/Control Center] -----dedicated line-----[Rx/Tx Computer]---Low BW Link----[Local Control Computer]----Hardware
The local control computer, which should be locked up in the substation with a big steel door on it should have internal software interlocks in it that reject bad input from the physically separate transceiver unit. By physically separate, I mean really physically separate, as in one wire per bit for commands and one analog channel for values. Possibly optical lines if we're paranoid about RFI. Now, in order to hack that one substation, the hacker has to physically break into it. At which point we're back to the vulnerability inherent in any distributed dumb system.
In our system, the state has to prove guilt. Granted, it sucks (majorly) to be falsely accused, but if you can call (correctly) call bullshit on them in court, a fair-minded jury of your peers can be convinced that the state hasn't proven its case. Baloney like this by the state is why our system is set up this way, so that the burden is never on the accused trying to refute pseudoscience, but on the accuser pushing it.
On every large piece of moving equipment I've ever seen, (radar dishes, telescopes, autonomous robots, etc), there's usually one (or more) BIG RED BUTTONS that, when pushed, disconnect electrical power from the system, short the drive motor leads, etc. Think long and hard about what fail-safe should actually mean for a car, but surely a good interlock can be designed to prevent these sorts of things.
Gotta disagree there. Bumpy roads create pressure noise in these types of systems, which means they need have high frequencies filtered out. By high frequencies I mean anything on the timescale of the largish fraction of a second it'll take you to shift your weight as you readjust for posture in the car. That's a LOT of lag.
You gotta get remember one fundamental fact of any realtime feedback or sensing system: noise in, noise out.
The steering wheel in my Chevy is about 18 inches in diameter and goes two full turns in each direction to turn the front wheels through about +-/40 degrees. Driving on the highway, it's very rare to make motions more than about 1 inches in either direction. That's a max error of 1in/[(4*18*3in)/80deg] = approx 0.5 deg.
You could imagine a speed-sensitive joystick doing that for you, giving you that range over the full max range of the joystick to give you about the same precision as you get with your hand making small motions on the steering wheel.
The problem is that when you're on city streets, going between 0-30mph, you need to make both precise small corrections that correspond to fractions of an inch on a steering wheel, but occasionally at the same speeds, you need to make larger fast motions to avoid potholes, people in parked cars opening their doors, little children running out into the street, or idiots on cell phones not watching where they're going and drifting into your lane. There's no gain control algorithm that'll let you have both fine and (fast) coarse control algorithm if its only input is vehicle speed, and the joystick has a fixed range of motion.
Outside of very constrained environments like factory floors and airport tarmacs, I don't think there's really a place for joystick-only control, just because the same dynamic range that you have in a multi-turn wheel just isn't there.
Detecting speed over distance is different from detecting distance over distance. The distance involved doesn't really matter if you're looking for wavelength shift and comparing it at different times to detect wobble.
Still very neat.
So you propose to extend to our enemies the same rights we defend for our citizens? Convince me how that won't lead anywhere bad, and then you get to call me names.
To quote a great legislator, "What planet are you on?". In 1920's Germany, people were disappearing, lynch mobs were running amok, and race riots were the norm. I'd like for you to point to ONE instance of and organized a) Lynch mob, b) Race riot, c) disappearing campaign in the last ten years. Keep in mind that military action on foreign soil doesn't count, detaining suspected enemy agents at the border doesn't count, and killing guys with AK-47s pointed in our direction doesn't count as xenophobia or religious zealotry. People who spent their whole lives living in the comfort and security of a well-established western superpower have no concept of what the world is like outside of that hard-won security. It's so alien that people can actually want to kill us that it doesn't even register, and all you see is the military response, assume that it's directed at people who share your values, and get all upset, when you don't have the facts straight in your head. If you accept the premise that military action is a valid response to external violence, then you will see that the "nationalism" (if that's even a bad thing) in the US post 9/11 has been rather mild in magnitude compared to some of the evil that has and is being perpetrated on the world in the last several centuries. If you don't accept that military action is a valid response to internal violence, then you're a pacifist, and there's no arguing with you because yours is the philosophy of suicide by proxy.
Well, the waste generated from nuke plants stays in the fuel rods, which have a very high density. I believe the 50 tons of real nasty stuff could fit on the back of *one* truck per year.
No matter how you slice it, the thorium in the coal, even if it stays in the unburned ash, is still greater in mass and volume than the waste thorium in the fuel rods, by an order of magnitude. It's just more dilute in the coal/ash/wind, so you don't get as high a dose per unit volume as you do with a concentrated fuel rod.
There's also the issue of all the sulfur and nitrogen that gets spit out from burning rocks dug up from the ground, but that's another conversation.
Assuming one heavy waste atom per neutron converted to energy, and for the sake of argument let's say these atoms have an atomic weight of about 300:
1 neutron x c^2 = 1.67e-27 kg x 9e16 = 1.5 e-10 J/atom =
1.5 e-10 / (300*1.67e-27 kg) = 3e14 J / kg pure waste
Now, granted the efficiency with which we can extract pure waste from the rest of the spent fuel rod knocks down by a few orders of magnitude that figure. I don't know that number, but let's call it a thousand. So we have 3e14 J / metric ton waste. That's 3e5 GJ/metric ton.
For reference, total electricity produced per year in the US (source: DOE, http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html) is about 1.5e19 J / year = 1.5e10 GJ / year. If we're going to use all nukes, that would amount to 50,000 metric tons per year of the contaminated stuff, assuming 1 kg pure waste pollutes 1 metric ton of spent fuel.
Now, for coal: 1/2 of our electric output is coal right now. That's 0.75e19 J/year of coal. Coal uses a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction, so the mass of hydrocarbons is far greater than the number quoted above. For simplicity (and since I never took organic chem in college), let's approximate it by saying it's all clean-burning methane gas. ie CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H2O. The internets tell me (at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/energy/Companion/E06.1.pdf.xpdf) that this reaction yields 55 GJ/ metric ton methane.
Dividing through,
7.5e18J/year / 5.5e10 J/ton = 1.4e8 ton methane burned per year. Coal has higher energy content, but I'm going to make the unfounded guess that the inefficiency of the generator will balance out my assumption of using methane.(Corrections from chemists are welcomed.)
To review, we can spew out 1.4e8 ton of carbon (roughly), or 5e4 ton of dilute (factor of 1000) radioactive waste. So now the question is, how much radiation in that 1.4e8 tons of carbon. (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4991532/radioactive-elements) tells me this is on the order of 10 ppm for thorium. So that's about 1.4e3 tons/year of pure thorium vs 5e1 tons/year of pure radioactive waste.
Again, corrections to false assumptions and math mistakes are most welcome from people who actually know what they're talking about more than I do (I'm an EE/software guy from 9-5).
Makes you wonder about the true cost of putting in a fixed set of outer doors on subway platforms (new stations in London, new airport trains in the US, ie DFW). The train has to stop at a known location, so there's no linearizing of the crowd that could happen.
Surely we as a civilized nation can understand that certain people, whether through disease or deviousness, are simply too dangerous to remain free. Why, we even have a mechanism in our Constitution for an (ideally) fair process whereby we may determine that individuals are incapable of enjoying their God-given freedom responsibly, and deprive them of those freedoms by sticking them in jail, where at the very least they can't do any harm to the rest of us.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: if we as a society are of the belief that a convicted sex offender is too dangerous to be out of jail, we should keep him in jail unless and until he demonstrates satisfactorily and beyond a reasonable doubt that he is no longer dangerous.
I'm not saying guilty-until-proven-innocent; the burden of proof is always on the state to prove danger, but once that burden is satisfied, the only option a responsible government can take is to keep him locked up.
No half-measures. No keep-out-zones. Either he's not dangerous, in which case he should be free, or he is dangerous, and he should never have been let out.
I have the perfect solution. Switch from commie units to normal units and you'll more than double the benefit, going from 98 to 230 for absolutely ni cost. Be sure to write your MP to point out the benefit.
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I moved to the States from Soviet Russia when I was young, went through the public school system, and learned Spanish in high school. I claim that if people, youngish children, to be specific, are taught/forced to learn a foreign language that's just close enough to English for the common rules of grammar to be recognizable, you will get better speakers and writers of English than if you rely purely on osmosis to provide the instruction.
Remember, most if not all children entering kindergarten in the US, (British) Canada, England, and that kangaroo country already speak and understand English, and continue to do so quite well until they are fluent readers at around age 8-9, when they can begin to be taught formal rules of grammar in writing. That's a lot of unlearning to do, and it's double hard when there are no other reference points or 'toy languages' to look at, to borrow from a term from CS instruction.
I learned English late, through natively, through osmosis, but I learned Spanish in a classroom, and for me at least, it was a bit easier to reason about abstract things like nouns and verbs and adverbs and indirect objects when I didn't understand the language natively and the meaning of the words wasn't jumping out and overwhelming my thinking.
Boo freakin' hoo. If I can fill my gas tank in the freezing cold in liberal taxachussets, you can fill your up in the rain.
There is such a thing as point-and-click FPGA development these days [ni.com]. That's an easy way to get the words 'FPGA Development' on your resume and be only slightly lying about it.
Fratboy schmratboy. There were a sufficient number of enginerds in the frats at undergrad that the stereotype failed. There were also a number of dumbasses in the engineering classes that had nothing to do with the frats. Even Richard Feynman was in a frat (granted at MIT, but still).
Technical staff at most defense firms in the US (PhD in engineering/science required) start off in the high 5-figures straight out of school. Don't confuse academia with science. In the US, well over half the science funding happens in private industry, which gave us things like the transistor, the artificial heart, and a damn big portion of the internets.
There used to be a C compiler for the mindstorms bricks. A few years ago (2004) it went by the name of NQC (not-quite-C).
1+1=2 everywhere, even in abstract algebra. If you claim that even that part of the smell test for your theory-that-if-taken-as-true-means-less-freedom-for-me-and-cushy-government-policy-making-seat-for-you is too hard for me to understand...well, the founding fathers wisely put the first and second amendments into the constitution to discourage this sort of behavior.
Peer-review journals cost money to publish in. The average arm-chair CITIZEN can't be expected to spend money to ask questions, especially about how his taxes are being spent. Enter the greatest force for democracy in recorded history: the internet, which gives everyone a soap box and puts teeth into the First Amendment, or its equivalent in any of the civilized democracies, or barring that, the free speech portion of the UN Declaration of Human Rights.
This is a case of freedom. Period.
That's just what Kang and Kodos want us to do...
You're missing the point, friend. Like the red square on a white canvas, it's art, not stupidity. These kids should be given the highest philological scholarship available at your institution, so that they may perfect their craft.
It's perfectly possible. It's called an air gap. If you still want centralized control of a remote substation, don't do it over the public internet. That's not as bad as it sounds in terms of costs, because if you're the power company, you already own a completely independent set of cables to said substation. Now the hacker has to get out of his mom's basement and climb a utility pole to hack you.
Still worried about the possibility of remote hacking from a guy who spent too much time climbing trees in his childhood? Again: airgap. The only bits that should flow between the data transciever in the substation and the actual critical hardware shouldn't flow directly. Observe below:
[Command/Control Center] -----dedicated line-----[Rx/Tx Computer]---Low BW Link----[Local Control Computer]----Hardware
The local control computer, which should be locked up in the substation with a big steel door on it should have internal software interlocks in it that reject bad input from the physically separate transceiver unit. By physically separate, I mean really physically separate, as in one wire per bit for commands and one analog channel for values. Possibly optical lines if we're paranoid about RFI. Now, in order to hack that one substation, the hacker has to physically break into it. At which point we're back to the vulnerability inherent in any distributed dumb system.
I take cash or check.
In our system, the state has to prove guilt. Granted, it sucks (majorly) to be falsely accused, but if you can call (correctly) call bullshit on them in court, a fair-minded jury of your peers can be convinced that the state hasn't proven its case. Baloney like this by the state is why our system is set up this way, so that the burden is never on the accused trying to refute pseudoscience, but on the accuser pushing it.
On every large piece of moving equipment I've ever seen, (radar dishes, telescopes, autonomous robots, etc), there's usually one (or more) BIG RED BUTTONS that, when pushed, disconnect electrical power from the system, short the drive motor leads, etc. Think long and hard about what fail-safe should actually mean for a car, but surely a good interlock can be designed to prevent these sorts of things.
Gotta disagree there. Bumpy roads create pressure noise in these types of systems, which means they need have high frequencies filtered out. By high frequencies I mean anything on the timescale of the largish fraction of a second it'll take you to shift your weight as you readjust for posture in the car. That's a LOT of lag.
You gotta get remember one fundamental fact of any realtime feedback or sensing system: noise in, noise out.
The steering wheel in my Chevy is about 18 inches in diameter and goes two full turns in each direction to turn the front wheels through about +-/40 degrees. Driving on the highway, it's very rare to make motions more than about 1 inches in either direction. That's a max error of 1in/[(4*18*3in)/80deg] = approx 0.5 deg. You could imagine a speed-sensitive joystick doing that for you, giving you that range over the full max range of the joystick to give you about the same precision as you get with your hand making small motions on the steering wheel.
The problem is that when you're on city streets, going between 0-30mph, you need to make both precise small corrections that correspond to fractions of an inch on a steering wheel, but occasionally at the same speeds, you need to make larger fast motions to avoid potholes, people in parked cars opening their doors, little children running out into the street, or idiots on cell phones not watching where they're going and drifting into your lane. There's no gain control algorithm that'll let you have both fine and (fast) coarse control algorithm if its only input is vehicle speed, and the joystick has a fixed range of motion.
Outside of very constrained environments like factory floors and airport tarmacs, I don't think there's really a place for joystick-only control, just because the same dynamic range that you have in a multi-turn wheel just isn't there.
Detecting speed over distance is different from detecting distance over distance. The distance involved doesn't really matter if you're looking for wavelength shift and comparing it at different times to detect wobble.
Still very neat.
So you propose to extend to our enemies the same rights we defend for our citizens? Convince me how that won't lead anywhere bad, and then you get to call me names.
To quote a great legislator, "What planet are you on?". In 1920's Germany, people were disappearing, lynch mobs were running amok, and race riots were the norm. I'd like for you to point to ONE instance of and organized a) Lynch mob, b) Race riot, c) disappearing campaign in the last ten years. Keep in mind that military action on foreign soil doesn't count, detaining suspected enemy agents at the border doesn't count, and killing guys with AK-47s pointed in our direction doesn't count as xenophobia or religious zealotry. People who spent their whole lives living in the comfort and security of a well-established western superpower have no concept of what the world is like outside of that hard-won security. It's so alien that people can actually want to kill us that it doesn't even register, and all you see is the military response, assume that it's directed at people who share your values, and get all upset, when you don't have the facts straight in your head. If you accept the premise that military action is a valid response to external violence, then you will see that the "nationalism" (if that's even a bad thing) in the US post 9/11 has been rather mild in magnitude compared to some of the evil that has and is being perpetrated on the world in the last several centuries. If you don't accept that military action is a valid response to internal violence, then you're a pacifist, and there's no arguing with you because yours is the philosophy of suicide by proxy.
Well, the waste generated from nuke plants stays in the fuel rods, which have a very high density. I believe the 50 tons of real nasty stuff could fit on the back of *one* truck per year.
No matter how you slice it, the thorium in the coal, even if it stays in the unburned ash, is still greater in mass and volume than the waste thorium in the fuel rods, by an order of magnitude. It's just more dilute in the coal/ash/wind, so you don't get as high a dose per unit volume as you do with a concentrated fuel rod.
There's also the issue of all the sulfur and nitrogen that gets spit out from burning rocks dug up from the ground, but that's another conversation.
Well, since you asked...
Assuming one heavy waste atom per neutron converted to energy, and for the sake of argument let's say these atoms have an atomic weight of about 300:
1 neutron x c^2 = 1.67e-27 kg x 9e16 = 1.5 e-10 J/atom =
1.5 e-10 / (300*1.67e-27 kg) = 3e14 J / kg pure waste
Now, granted the efficiency with which we can extract pure waste from the rest of the spent fuel rod knocks down by a few orders of magnitude that figure. I don't know that number, but let's call it a thousand. So we have 3e14 J / metric ton waste. That's 3e5 GJ/metric ton.
For reference, total electricity produced per year in the US (source: DOE, http://www.eia.doe.gov/cneaf/electricity/epa/epat1p1.html) is about 1.5e19 J / year = 1.5e10 GJ / year. If we're going to use all nukes, that would amount to 50,000 metric tons per year of the contaminated stuff, assuming 1 kg pure waste pollutes 1 metric ton of spent fuel.
Now, for coal:
1/2 of our electric output is coal right now. That's 0.75e19 J/year of coal. Coal uses a chemical reaction, not a nuclear reaction, so the mass of hydrocarbons is far greater than the number quoted above. For simplicity (and since I never took organic chem in college), let's approximate it by saying it's all clean-burning methane gas. ie CH4 + 2O2 = CO2 + 2H2O. The internets tell me (at http://www.physics.ohio-state.edu/~wilkins/energy/Companion/E06.1.pdf.xpdf) that this reaction yields 55 GJ/ metric ton methane.
Dividing through,
7.5e18J/year / 5.5e10 J/ton = 1.4e8 ton methane burned per year. Coal has higher energy content, but I'm going to make the unfounded guess that the inefficiency of the generator will balance out my assumption of using methane.(Corrections from chemists are welcomed.)
To review, we can spew out 1.4e8 ton of carbon (roughly), or 5e4 ton of dilute (factor of 1000) radioactive waste. So now the question is, how much radiation in that 1.4e8 tons of carbon. (http://www.docstoc.com/docs/4991532/radioactive-elements) tells me this is on the order of 10 ppm for thorium. So that's about 1.4e3 tons/year of pure thorium vs 5e1 tons/year of pure radioactive waste.
Again, corrections to false assumptions and math mistakes are most welcome from people who actually know what they're talking about more than I do (I'm an EE/software guy from 9-5).
And of course fascist and communist economies are prosperous and wealthy. Why look at Cuba and North Korea.
Makes you wonder about the true cost of putting in a fixed set of outer doors on subway platforms (new stations in London, new airport trains in the US, ie DFW). The train has to stop at a known location, so there's no linearizing of the crowd that could happen.
Surely we as a civilized nation can understand that certain people, whether through disease or deviousness, are simply too dangerous to remain free. Why, we even have a mechanism in our Constitution for an (ideally) fair process whereby we may determine that individuals are incapable of enjoying their God-given freedom responsibly, and deprive them of those freedoms by sticking them in jail, where at the very least they can't do any harm to the rest of us. I've said it before and I'll say it again: if we as a society are of the belief that a convicted sex offender is too dangerous to be out of jail, we should keep him in jail unless and until he demonstrates satisfactorily and beyond a reasonable doubt that he is no longer dangerous. I'm not saying guilty-until-proven-innocent; the burden of proof is always on the state to prove danger, but once that burden is satisfied, the only option a responsible government can take is to keep him locked up. No half-measures. No keep-out-zones. Either he's not dangerous, in which case he should be free, or he is dangerous, and he should never have been let out.
I have the perfect solution. Switch from commie units to normal units and you'll more than double the benefit, going from 98 to 230 for absolutely ni cost. Be sure to write your MP to point out the benefit.
Certainly not defeatism.