I think that commenters here are misunderstanding the article linked in the parent post. The thesis, as I read it, is that the "new" hydrocarbons are not like the old ones, in that producing them will be incredibly expensive. And though the article doesn't say this, I think we can all understand the upshot: As extracting hydrocarbons gets more expensive and renewables get cheaper, the curves are bound to cross long before all the hydrocarbons have been dug up out of the ground. So in that sense we really never will run out of oil and gas, because there will come a time when nobody has the incentive to extract more.
Yeah, that was my first question: If not neonicitinoids, what will get sprayed instead? There's probably a good reason why we're not using that stuff now.
In the article, Wilson talked about how making it through Calculus ended up giving him all the math he needed to do his own work, and would suffice for much other important scientific work. I frankly thought that his target was not simply the population of smart but "merely OK at math" students who are being deterred from scientific fields, but the gatekeepers of the fields themselves, who would probably reject someone like Crick for his C grade in Calculus. He's not arguing for lower standards, but for more diversity in how we see scientific talent. If the litmus test for the "promising future scientist" were based almost entirely on the verbal SAT score, I can imagine that Crick would be railing against that. But as it stands, he simply thinks the pendulum is too far in the math direction, and this is doing a disservice to science. I find that quite reasonable!
I disagree. What we will get is very expensive CGI, lots of regurgitated stock scenes and non-existent sets (because a greenscreen background is not a set).
Yup, I think you pretty much nailed it on all points, but I would add this: Whatever is produced, the kids are guaranteed to love it. It turns out that children are kinda stupid and have terrible taste. I think the "adult" reaction to all this is to just leave the Star Wars franchise to the children, and not to expect it to entertain us adults. This is our attitude to everything else that Disney does, so why an exception out of Star Wars? Let the kids have their cartoons (let's face it, that's how the franchise will continue: cartoons with some live action greenscreen acting pasted in). We'll always have Whedon's Avengers, Game of Thrones and other such fairy tales that are enjoyable by adults. I don't think that Disney will be making any of them.
I wasn't trying to give advice about whose computer to buy, but making a statement about the value of Dell the company. I think they're cruising on the inertia of their past corporate deals, but apart from that, they're having to compete on price in a very low-margin market. That does not make for a good financial outlook.
If I were to advise on computer purchases, I'd say this: For desktops, buy the parts you want from Newegg and plug them together. That's a no brainer. For laptops, figure out the sort of specs you like and then look at the reviews of individual models. Every company seems to produce a few winners and many stinkers. But gone are the days when it makes sense to give buying advice that includes a computer builder brand name, unless you don't care about quality or performance per dollar.
Dell just makes computers out of the same Chinese parts that everyone else uses to make computers. They once had an appealing brand, which gave them an advantage over all the other people who were selling an indistinguishable product. But this is not the case anymore. The "we don't care about our exploding capacitors" fiasco has forever tied Dell to an image of a company that cuts corners on quality. Sure, they kept some deals with the corporate and education sector, but my employer is going through hardware upgrades and now we can choose a new Dell or a new iMac. I won't miss you, Dell!
If it's so fucking wonderful, why can't they sell Surface and Surface RT devices?
Maybe because so far, they're shitty devices? When a Surface kitchen table falls to $1500 and I can use it for roleplaying games and board games, then we can talk again.
If they are the fastest growing animal ever, it seems like the perfect candidate for efficient protein source farming. I mean, come on, what could possibly go wrong?
At this point, we've learned enough about the hardiness and versatility of microbes that I would frankly be surprised if we found a completely sterilized Mars. In the history of the planet, many rocks knocked loose from Earth have landed there, and we know many organisms that could have survived the whole trip. If absolutely nothing took root, I would consider that a mild surprise. With extremophiles being found at pretty much everywhere we looked, we should be ready to find terrestrial extremophiles living even on Mars. That's definitely worth a few articles and TV specials, but it wouldn't really change the way we see the universe. Much more exciting would be to find Martian life of a totally independent genesis. Somehow I find that deeply unlikely, given that life genesis seems to only have happened once even in a place as comfy as Earth.
Removing uranium from sea water is commercially feasible, and the earth's rivers bring uranium to the sea faster than we could ever use it, even if it accounted for 100% of humanity's energy. So yes, as long as the rivers of Earth keep running, there will be enough accessible uranium.
Um, it doesn't take a genius to see that you're not exactly making a great offer: "Our journal will publish your article into the public domain! Now fork out $3000 for the privilege!" I don't think board needed many reasons of conscience to resign. They were probably more like: "Hey, let's stop working for these idiots!"
I don't think that enforcement of a "no exchanges" law can be done by any single government. As long as there is somebody in the world willing to give you a tradable currency (Dollars, Euros, Pesos, Rubles, etc.) for Bitcoins, you'll be fine. Once you have the Rubles, you can exchange them for whatever currency suits you.
Somebody should really work on a system where the single occupant of a car could geek out on the internet with all their little gadgets, and still put nobody in danger. Especially Google would benefit from something like that. Oh wait, might this be why it's Google themselves who are working on driverless cars? And we all thought it was just a sideshow to their main business...
The problem isn't mining the bitcoins, it's cracking the crypto which encodes how many bitcoins you own. Cryptographic currencies are a bet premised on the expectation that cracking capacities won't increase very fast.
One problem with our congress is that they don't like each other and they don't have much incentive to get to know each other. If they were to never actually meet one another, that would only make things worse.
I would much rather have Congress work more like a game show, in which a congressional session lasts two months and takes place on a jungle island where the reps have to cooperate or die. When not in session, they could be in their home districts or whatever. For the same reason why juries can't produce just rulings if they're not sequestered together, Congress should be forced to hash out their business while sequestered. They could still have contact to their aids and research staff, but on the island, it would just be them, wild boars, and the occasional helicopter bringing food, beer and medicine.
A telecommuting congress is pretty much exactly the opposite of what would help.
Yes, this is why the music on my hard drive is in a lossless format. Well, this, and the fact that hard drive space is quickly becoming trivially cheap. I figured out the optimal encoding for my portable player, which is ogg vorbis at q=5.25 and a noisefloor of -15. If my preference should ever change, or I move on to a portable player that can't do vorbis, or if a later and greater encoder algo gets released, it's trivially easy to re-encode my music. I do it with the dBpoweramp Music Converter, a great piece of software. It gives me the perfect interface to the vorbis command line encoder, and any other command line encoder out there.
Cops were always allowed to shoot people, under some highly limited circumstances. That's one reason why they carry guns. Do you think they squeeze in a trial before they fire? Do you think they are only allowed to shoot foreigners?
I know that there are some differences between being shot by a cop and being shot by a drone, but to me, the difference basically amounts to: The latter will never happen to me, because there's far more oversight. Regarding the former... well, let's hope I'm not at the wrong place at the wrong time!
Thank you, I think that's exactly right. The "no hidden variables" issue was settled in the 80s, and this does nothing to overturn those results. The summary makes it sound like they weakly measured a hidden variable and strongly measured an orthogonal variable. They didn't. Quantum mechanics, including Heisenberg's own 1926 formulation of it, predicts these measurements. So let's not pretend that any theoretical results got overturned by experiment! Quantum mechanics is the same as it ever was.
I'm not saying that this is useless research, because it could eventually help us settle theoretical questions about the mechanisms of superconductivity. But with a critical temperature of 25K, it's not even a decent superconductor!
They stacked atoms in a very impressive way, but they don't actually say what their fancy new material can do. What's the critical temperature, guys? Why was that not the first question? How much current can it carry compared to other Type II superconductors? If it's an improvement by 3C, it's not a breakthrough. If it's 30C, you'll definitely have my attention.
Do you feel the same way about sports? Or do you not think that sports are "intended to be played"? I know people who do in fact feel that way about being spectators for every competitive activity: That they should do something better with their lives. But the argument you used doesn't single out video games.
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But at least we'll feel like we made a sacrifice for the sake of the bees, and that will make all this worth it!
I think that commenters here are misunderstanding the article linked in the parent post. The thesis, as I read it, is that the "new" hydrocarbons are not like the old ones, in that producing them will be incredibly expensive. And though the article doesn't say this, I think we can all understand the upshot: As extracting hydrocarbons gets more expensive and renewables get cheaper, the curves are bound to cross long before all the hydrocarbons have been dug up out of the ground. So in that sense we really never will run out of oil and gas, because there will come a time when nobody has the incentive to extract more.
Yeah, that was my first question: If not neonicitinoids, what will get sprayed instead? There's probably a good reason why we're not using that stuff now.
Oops, Google shows me that I did indeed miss something. I think my nerd card has been suspended for at least 30 days. Thanks for the heads up!
In the article, Wilson talked about how making it through Calculus ended up giving him all the math he needed to do his own work, and would suffice for much other important scientific work. I frankly thought that his target was not simply the population of smart but "merely OK at math" students who are being deterred from scientific fields, but the gatekeepers of the fields themselves, who would probably reject someone like Crick for his C grade in Calculus. He's not arguing for lower standards, but for more diversity in how we see scientific talent. If the litmus test for the "promising future scientist" were based almost entirely on the verbal SAT score, I can imagine that Crick would be railing against that. But as it stands, he simply thinks the pendulum is too far in the math direction, and this is doing a disservice to science. I find that quite reasonable!
I disagree. What we will get is very expensive CGI, lots of regurgitated stock scenes and non-existent sets (because a greenscreen background is not a set).
Yup, I think you pretty much nailed it on all points, but I would add this: Whatever is produced, the kids are guaranteed to love it. It turns out that children are kinda stupid and have terrible taste. I think the "adult" reaction to all this is to just leave the Star Wars franchise to the children, and not to expect it to entertain us adults. This is our attitude to everything else that Disney does, so why an exception out of Star Wars? Let the kids have their cartoons (let's face it, that's how the franchise will continue: cartoons with some live action greenscreen acting pasted in). We'll always have Whedon's Avengers, Game of Thrones and other such fairy tales that are enjoyable by adults. I don't think that Disney will be making any of them.
I wasn't trying to give advice about whose computer to buy, but making a statement about the value of Dell the company. I think they're cruising on the inertia of their past corporate deals, but apart from that, they're having to compete on price in a very low-margin market. That does not make for a good financial outlook.
If I were to advise on computer purchases, I'd say this: For desktops, buy the parts you want from Newegg and plug them together. That's a no brainer. For laptops, figure out the sort of specs you like and then look at the reviews of individual models. Every company seems to produce a few winners and many stinkers. But gone are the days when it makes sense to give buying advice that includes a computer builder brand name, unless you don't care about quality or performance per dollar.
Dell just makes computers out of the same Chinese parts that everyone else uses to make computers. They once had an appealing brand, which gave them an advantage over all the other people who were selling an indistinguishable product. But this is not the case anymore. The "we don't care about our exploding capacitors" fiasco has forever tied Dell to an image of a company that cuts corners on quality. Sure, they kept some deals with the corporate and education sector, but my employer is going through hardware upgrades and now we can choose a new Dell or a new iMac. I won't miss you, Dell!
If it's so fucking wonderful, why can't they sell Surface and Surface RT devices?
Maybe because so far, they're shitty devices? When a Surface kitchen table falls to $1500 and I can use it for roleplaying games and board games, then we can talk again.
If they are the fastest growing animal ever, it seems like the perfect candidate for efficient protein source farming. I mean, come on, what could possibly go wrong?
At this point, we've learned enough about the hardiness and versatility of microbes that I would frankly be surprised if we found a completely sterilized Mars. In the history of the planet, many rocks knocked loose from Earth have landed there, and we know many organisms that could have survived the whole trip. If absolutely nothing took root, I would consider that a mild surprise. With extremophiles being found at pretty much everywhere we looked, we should be ready to find terrestrial extremophiles living even on Mars. That's definitely worth a few articles and TV specials, but it wouldn't really change the way we see the universe. Much more exciting would be to find Martian life of a totally independent genesis. Somehow I find that deeply unlikely, given that life genesis seems to only have happened once even in a place as comfy as Earth.
Removing uranium from sea water is commercially feasible, and the earth's rivers bring uranium to the sea faster than we could ever use it, even if it accounted for 100% of humanity's energy. So yes, as long as the rivers of Earth keep running, there will be enough accessible uranium.
Um, it doesn't take a genius to see that you're not exactly making a great offer: "Our journal will publish your article into the public domain! Now fork out $3000 for the privilege!" I don't think board needed many reasons of conscience to resign. They were probably more like: "Hey, let's stop working for these idiots!"
I don't think that enforcement of a "no exchanges" law can be done by any single government. As long as there is somebody in the world willing to give you a tradable currency (Dollars, Euros, Pesos, Rubles, etc.) for Bitcoins, you'll be fine. Once you have the Rubles, you can exchange them for whatever currency suits you.
Somebody should really work on a system where the single occupant of a car could geek out on the internet with all their little gadgets, and still put nobody in danger. Especially Google would benefit from something like that. Oh wait, might this be why it's Google themselves who are working on driverless cars? And we all thought it was just a sideshow to their main business...
The problem isn't mining the bitcoins, it's cracking the crypto which encodes how many bitcoins you own. Cryptographic currencies are a bet premised on the expectation that cracking capacities won't increase very fast.
One problem with our congress is that they don't like each other and they don't have much incentive to get to know each other. If they were to never actually meet one another, that would only make things worse.
I would much rather have Congress work more like a game show, in which a congressional session lasts two months and takes place on a jungle island where the reps have to cooperate or die. When not in session, they could be in their home districts or whatever. For the same reason why juries can't produce just rulings if they're not sequestered together, Congress should be forced to hash out their business while sequestered. They could still have contact to their aids and research staff, but on the island, it would just be them, wild boars, and the occasional helicopter bringing food, beer and medicine.
A telecommuting congress is pretty much exactly the opposite of what would help.
Yes, this is why the music on my hard drive is in a lossless format. Well, this, and the fact that hard drive space is quickly becoming trivially cheap. I figured out the optimal encoding for my portable player, which is ogg vorbis at q=5.25 and a noisefloor of -15. If my preference should ever change, or I move on to a portable player that can't do vorbis, or if a later and greater encoder algo gets released, it's trivially easy to re-encode my music. I do it with the dBpoweramp Music Converter, a great piece of software. It gives me the perfect interface to the vorbis command line encoder, and any other command line encoder out there.
I know that there are some differences between being shot by a cop and being shot by a drone, but to me, the difference basically amounts to: The latter will never happen to me, because there's far more oversight. Regarding the former... well, let's hope I'm not at the wrong place at the wrong time!
They're just driving people to bittorrent, where people cracked the games and allow single-player offline play.
Thank you, I think that's exactly right. The "no hidden variables" issue was settled in the 80s, and this does nothing to overturn those results. The summary makes it sound like they weakly measured a hidden variable and strongly measured an orthogonal variable. They didn't. Quantum mechanics, including Heisenberg's own 1926 formulation of it, predicts these measurements. So let's not pretend that any theoretical results got overturned by experiment! Quantum mechanics is the same as it ever was.
I'm not saying that this is useless research, because it could eventually help us settle theoretical questions about the mechanisms of superconductivity. But with a critical temperature of 25K, it's not even a decent superconductor!
They stacked atoms in a very impressive way, but they don't actually say what their fancy new material can do. What's the critical temperature, guys? Why was that not the first question? How much current can it carry compared to other Type II superconductors? If it's an improvement by 3C, it's not a breakthrough. If it's 30C, you'll definitely have my attention.
Do you feel the same way about sports? Or do you not think that sports are "intended to be played"? I know people who do in fact feel that way about being spectators for every competitive activity: That they should do something better with their lives. But the argument you used doesn't single out video games.