Our application logs all on-screen messages and errors in a database. When Jane from Accounting calls and says she got an error message, she doesn't need to read anything to me. All I need to know is her username and approximately what time she had the error.
I look up the error logs and find her message, along with a core dump of the application containing the entire contents of memory, every variable, every table, every column, every program in the stack, the job logs, everything. If necessary, I can use that information to reconstruct the database journals and see what records in what files were changed by that job and reconstruct the flow path of the job. It rarely comes to that, but I can.
The user still calls me (not all errors are fatal, and users can frequently fix the bad data they entered if that's the problem and move on). But when they do call, they don't need to read anything to me. They just need to tell me who they are and how long ago they had the problem. I can then focus on asking them about events that led up to the error.
If I'm interested, I can go and look at the errors our users are ignoring or working around. It allows me to see trends where some division may have changed a procedure and are now working around some control I have out there that is either not relevant or an indication that their new workaround will cause big problems later.
I've worked for companies that have had a large "Global Error Repository" where all systems collect this kind of data and send it all to a central collection point. Occasionally, that sort of data comes in really handy. "Yup, the inventory feed to the West Coast warehouse died because someone entered a -1 into the quantity for a location in the Northeast Warehouse system and worked around a warning error on it, better go change the control on that screen to make sure all the numbers are positive from a warning to a hard error!"
Sure you do, you just don't recognize it because you're familiar with the tool and are convinced that you know all the solutions that are available to you already.
If you use a hammer and something goes wrong, it will throw a message "BENT NAIL". As an experienced hammer user, you can isolate the root cause and fix it yourself. You still identify the problem ("hammer has rounded tip, replace hammer", as opposed to "incorrect nail type - replace nail and try again" or "your swing is off, adjust your grip and try again").
As an inexperienced user, you seek help in fixing the problem. You call the helpdesk (usually the closest experienced carpenter). They look up from their task briefly and explain that you tap the nail on the side to straighten it out (or pull the nail and replace it if the error is fatal) and try again. Congratulations - you've just learned your first workaround and made your first Level 1 support call. You tap the nail on the side to straighten it out, and hit it again, and it goes in. Or not.
If this happens repeatedly, you ask again. Your "helpdesk" realizes that the workaround isn't enough, and goes to Level 2. He looks at the hammer, the nails, the material you are hammering, and makes an analysis. Maybe it's rounded off from use, or was a cheap crappy hammer that was never properly ground. Maybe you aren't holding the hammer properly. Maybe the nails are too soft for the materials. They help you work through the problem. They may help make it go away permanently by helping you choose the proper nails for the job, fixing your swing, and getting you a good quality hammer. Then you can do your job only encountering "BENT NAIL" less frequently, and when you do you know how to get around it and finish the job. This may continue for a few iterations until you learn the common causes for the error, and how to resolve them.
This is the same level of expertise that most people approach computer errors. They don't know what causes the error, but the helpdesk is there to identify the cause of the problem, get them around it by escalating the call until someone knows how to get the user moving again, and help identify any faults in the software that may be causing it.
Which is why the application I work on displays enough information for an experienced user to have some idea of what is going on, and also logs that error message and a memory dump of every variable, open table, open program, and anything else we can gather and puts it all in a central error repository that all the programmers can get to easily. Along with a database where the programmers can put notes associated with each program or error message with suggestions as to causes and how to fix them with the users (which of course is also used to fix underlying problems when there's time).
A typical support ticket, from a user who reprinted a pick directive that someone else was already working on.
Experienced user: "Oh, Hi, John. You got a message 5 minutes ago saying the pick you wanted to do was already done? Well, hang on a second." (click, click, tappity tappity tap) "There we are, it says that Frank aready picked the item, you didn't reprint that pick directive by any chance did you? You did, because the original pick was damaged? Looks like Frank somehow got ahold of one or more of the sheets you thought you had thrown out or something. You and Frank need to go compare pick sheets and figure out who needs to pick what. Be sure and pull a report of pending picks for your area and eliminate stuff one of you has already done to save walking around."
Inexperienced user: "Oh, Hi, John. You got a message 5 minutes ago, but you don't know what it means? Well, hang on a second." (click, click, tappity tappity tap) "There we are, it looks like you were trying to pick something, right? OK, it says that someone else already picked the item, you didn't reprint that pick directive by any chance did you? You didn't? Hmm..." (looks at screen showing John HAD in fact done a pick reprint 15 minutes ago) "Ah, there we have it, must have been a printing error. Frank somehow got the same pick sheet you did and picked that item before you tried, so you and Frank need to have a chat about who is picking what. I'll send you a report of pending picks for your area and you and Frank can divvy it up."
The database also comes in really handy for identifying problems that the users experience often. "We had program XYZ raise error ABC 24 times yesterday, we need to identify what procedural breakdown is causing this, or what controls we can put in the program to prevent it."
I can finally stop reading the articles and the summaries, and apply this algorithm to the first post to understand the article instead. What a time saver!
No, it's all according to plan. This was simply Quexarotflmao resetting the celestial clock to compensate for 3 extra butterflies flapping their wings in Madagascar last year. The end of the b'ak'tun approaches apace. All is as it should be.
I'm neither a geophysicist nor a celestial mechanic, but I have the qualification of having read the summary. I hope that's sufficient qualification.
AFAICR the only way to change RPM with unchanged mass is to move mass towards or away from the axis of rotation, which earthquakes, being crustal events, cannot do...
From the summary:
Santa Maria Island off the coast near Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, may have been raised 2 meters (6 feet) as a result of the latest quake
Earthquakes are tectonic plate events, true, but that doesn't mean there isn't a vertical component. To oversimplify the concept so this isn't a 4000 word post, the tectonic plates in South America are colliding. When they bump, one of them slides up over the other. Tectonic plate movements in those circumstances can eventually create (and have created) whole mountain ranges.
In this specific case, it was limited to raising decent-sized island a few feet. But that has the effect of moving some land mass higher, which moves mass away from the axis of rotation.
It'll do what everything else does to the PS3, turn it into an expensive blue ring-shaped nightlight.
I never understood why this was called the "blue ring of death". It ensures you cannot play violent video games any more, which according to recent conclusive studies should reduce deaths.
I had that capability once in an island fortress, but I it was destroyed when I decided to torture a government agent rather than just shooting the sonofabitch.
Lesson learned: Next time I design a superfortress with world destruction capabilities, the big red button that says "PRESS HERE TO DESTROY COMPLEX" won't be hooked up to the actual self-destruct mechanism. I'll just make it out of metal and wire 4,000 volts to it.
Right, but it only takes a single pebble to start an avalanche.
Now, mind you, if a nuclear weapon ever did trigger an earthquake it would probably just be the trigger event, and the pressure would still have been there from the start. If anything, the nuclear weapon would cause the earthquake to happen sooner, thereby possibly reducing the severity of the eventual quake.
Wow, I just had a brilliant idea. California is worried about the Next Big Quake, and the solution to their problem is so simple - let's trigger whatever pressure is there now in a smaller quake.
Dust off and nuke the state from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
The summary and all the articles I've read identify this as a metastudy. The problem with metastudies is that you are standing on the backs of giants, and you don't know how rigorously your giants were built.
So far, all the articles I've read only mention how he and seven other researchers (at least two of them his students and one a former colleague) did a metastudy of 130 previous studies that involved 130,000 kids, and found a "not huge" effect that is nonetheless clear and irrefutable. Irrefutable enough that the conversation needs to stop right now and everyone needs to stop questioning it. And how this finding validates what he refers to as his life's work and something he's been trying to prove for a long time. But, of course, to get details, I have to buy a book he's authored.
So, without plunking down $40 on the book the article is advertising, is there somewhere I can read a summary of this metastudy? What he was looking for specifically as markers that supposedly prove the causation he said he has proven? What is it about these specific 130 studies that proves something that each one of the individual studies apparently could not?
Usually, metastudies are really good at correlation, and he may well have demonstrated that there is an identifiable correlation between kids who play video games and kids who engage in violent behavior. But that's useless in terms of convincing anyone that the video games changed that behavior. In other words, even telling me that every single child ever convicted of a violent crime was an avid video gamer tells me nothing about whether the video games were a contributing factor to their violent behavior. A kid with a propensity toward violence may well find violent games and media appealing.
I can see, and possibly even buy, the argument that exposing a kid to massive violence desensitizes them to it and lowers the barrier toward acting out things in a violent manner. I don't see how a metastudy is going to demonstrate "conclusive" proof of that theory. You need to study large groups of real kids, determine their propensity toward violence before playing violent video games, expose part of them to violent video games and media, part to benign video games and media, and do not expose others to games or media at all, and determine if the propensity for violence increases or decreases as a whole in each of your three segments.
He has made pretty extraordinary claims, claims that happen to prove what he calls his life's work, but in order to learn more you have to buy his book.
Suicidal squirrels, fortunately, only cut out small portions of the power grid. Usually one minor transformer. In return for your inconvenience at losing the power for a few hours until the power company can get out to replace it, you get a pre-cooked ready-to-eat meal.
You'd have to have a large number of kamikaze tree rats being zapped in a very carefully though-out pattern in order to take out a single major transformer, and several major transformers to have a grid-wide problem.
I drive a manual transmission car that possesses a simple key. Should my accelerator go apeshit on me (whether this was a stuck floor mat or a software problem in the accelerator), I have several options to stop the engine from pouring speed into the chassis. Among others, I can push down the clutch pedal (resulting in the engine possibly revving itself to death, but with me able to bring the car to a controlled, if very noisy and probably engine-fatal, stop), and I can turn the key to the Accessory position (which will disable my power steering and the power assist on the brakes, but I can also let up on the clutch to use the engine as a brake and give me back some hydraulic assist). Turning the key into the OFF position locks the steering wheel, which is bad mojo, but at least if I overreact on that one I can get the car slowed down before I hit whatever is in front of me.
The Lexus involved in the much-discussed incident had safety features galore, and was driven by an experienced driver. However, some of the safety features certainly contributed to the accident. Setting aside the likelihood of noticing that a floor mat was stuck under the go pedal and having the time and clarity of thought to reach down and pull it out while the car is accelerating wildly into traffic... an experienced driver knows that in a battle between engine and brakes, the engine will win, so it's utterly vital to get the engine out of play early on.
I've had this happen, and in my case it was a poorly-wired cruise control (aftermarket, that was installed by an idiot apparently). So my first instinct was to tap the brakes, which disengaged the cruise and all was well, I pulled over and physically disconnected the cruise control from the throttle. Obviously, that wasn't the problem here, so the driver probably moved on to another logical step.
In my case, that would be taking the car out of gear. Safety feature #1 comes into play. The car was an automatic, and the interlock prevented the transmission and/or engine from being damaged. It ignored NEUTRAL and REVERSE settings while at speed and under heavy acceleration. If the driver had been able to idle the engine, NEUTRAL would have worked. But he couldn't, and the interlock (a safety feature) worked against him. So on to the next attempt...
I'd continue by turning off the key, which will cause sudden deceleration, a certain amount of loss of control, but will get the engine out of play. However, in this case the starter mechanism was a button that you'd normally push to turn the engine off at idle, but to keep some idiot from pushing the button at speed and shutting down the car, the car ignored all but a 3-second push to the button when the car was in operation. Unless you had (trivial but necessary) specialized training in how that button worked, you might not think about doing that.
I suppose if it was one of those "key must be present" cars with the fancy starter button, he could have thrown the keyfob out the window and hoped the engine would shut itself down once the keyfob was out of range, but I expect another safety feature would have prevented that from happening.:)
So, there are at least two cases where safety features built into the controls of the car made the car paradoxically less safe, at least under these specific circumstances.
Continuing with that conjecture, how long would it be before city folk started a mass exodus from the city, into the country where resources are somewhat less scarce but nowhere near plentiful enough to sustain an incoming population that large?
Maine, my home state, has about 1.3 million people. If half the people from the urban area surrounding Boston came north due to resource shortages, our population would triple. Unless all of them are rugged survivalists, they are going to want clean water and food somehow, and chances are we'll be as out of power as they are.
This is why preparedness is just as vital in the city, and I would argue even more so. Our population is too great to be sustained directly from the land. We, as a society, have become dependent on energy-intensive factory farming and water treatment just to sustain our population density overall. If people have to leave the cities temporarily to find water, where are they going to find it? How are they going to get it without fouling it?
Seriously, you wonder why survival nutters always arm themselves so well? It usually has little to do with an invasion of foreigners. In the event of the [insert disaster here] apocalypse they are always expecting, they fully expect to have to defend their resources from people who have not prepared.
In "Caves of Steel", Asimov talks of urbanization in terms of resource dependence. He conjectures the buildup of cities to the point where mere hours of interruption of any single service can cause death on a significant scale. We're nowhere near there yet, but I wonder how many people truly grasp just how utterly dependent the residents of a large city are on a continuous flow of goods and services, and how devastating an interruption to that flow would be.
New Orleans has a population of 1.2 million and a density of 2,500 people per square mile. The remaining unaffected population of the United States took days to get resources down to the population, most of whom had been evacuated to areas unaffected by the storm, and continued helping out for months. Supplies were trucked in from unaffected cities, of which there were plenty nearby.
New York City has a population of over 8 million with a population density of 27,000 people per square mile.
How many days would elapse between a meltdown of the power system across a small portion of the Eastern seaboard and the first death in New York? How fast would that death toll escalate?
First off, military equipment is generally heavily shielded and almost always locally powered. The military might be bringing a lot of its resources to bear helping out US citizens, but that means you'll have a lot of armed and trained soldiers handy if/when someone did something like that. And we'll have lots of carriers near shore helping with recovery efforts, so there'll be no lack of hardware to use. Any conventional invasion is going to be met with more resistance, not less.
Second, how many countries have the capability to engage a war against a large superpower on their own soil? One with a heavily armed local populace?
Assuming they succeed, what do they think they will gain? Resources? We sell them cheaply already. Factories? Closed down. Control over the population? Good luck with that. Did you miss the "armed population" bit? Combine armaments with an already extant xenophobia, you're going to have a mess on your hands. Look what the US did to our own citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor.
And nothing stops the nukes from being ready. We can reach out and touch every spot on the planet. We're the only nation that has ever demonstrated a willingness to actually use 'em. Coincidentally, against the aforementioned nation that tried attacking us on our soil. If enough military resources have to be diverted from saving citizens from the disaster to repelling an invasion, we'll just cut off the enemies supply lines. At the source. With big boom. BIG boom.
Satellites would probably come online shortly after the storm passed, depending on the severity of the storm. A high X-Class solar flare could cause damage to a satellite, we just haven't experienced one of those since 1921 and satellites were not much of a concern then.:)
The power grid would probably be down for the count. The geomagetic storm would cause transformers to overload and burn out, which would overload other transformers nearby exacerbating the effects of the storm. You'd potentially end up with simultaneous cascade failures across many of the independent grids, and significant damage to the linkage between the grids. The Northeast power outage was caused by a minor overload in a single transmission line, and the system didn't suffer from a lot of damage, it just took a while to restart the entire grid due to its complexity. We haven't really improved things since then, so losing a good number of transformers means we'd have to replace a lot of them, THEN deal with restarting each grid. Parts of each grid might stay up as isolated pockets, and parts would come up slowly, but full restoration of power within each grid could take months. Restoration of the interlinks between grids could take even longer, so areas like Southern California could go back to browouts for an extended period.
Heck, we can go a week or two until full restoration during major snowstorms here in New England. And that's an isolated series of small power outages where the underlying grid is stable.
Yes and no. You can limit damage that way, but there will still be damage.
And if American companies didn't have the stomach to put circuit breakers in their transformers, what makes you think we'll have the stomach to turn off the US power grid for a day at a time each time a major X-Class geomagnetic storm is expected? We don't even do a really great job at evacuating people from a single city when a hurricane is about to strike.
Why does any disaster have to be Katrina, especially when there is no comparison to the scope or nature of Katrina.
Because they are comparing the effects, not the scope or nature. Katrina caused a lack of food and water for an urban population. The cause will be different, but the same lack will be present.
I find the dialogue to be western centric and kind of out of touch
It's a study by the American government on the effects of a geomagnetic storm hitting the United States on the American electric grid. How would do you expect it NOT to be American-centric? America doesn't run the electric grid in your country, and your electric grid is probably different from ours. If you want relevant data for your grid, you'll need to do it with relevant local data. Have your government ask for a copy of this study. I'm sure the Americans will gladly offer it up if your country is friendly and asks nicely. Then your country can use it as the basis for your own analysis and study. Then it can be as [insert your country name here]-centric as you need it to be.
Honestly, the challenges are going to be different, so the study has to be done bearing in mind the specific geographic challenges.
Oh noes! My data is not available to me!!
Electricity will be gone, which means for a significant portion of the population of America potable water will be gone. Large cities everywhere are utterly dependent on electricity for basic services due to extreme population density, and in some cities the body count clock starts ticking within a few days of power loss. The higher the population density, the more interdependent people are.
What about places where lack of electricity is all it takes to cripple a water purification system or a hospital?
As in New York City? Boston? Los Angeles?
Honestly, this study is relatively useless outside America and maybe Europe. And some areas in Europe might have even been smart and put circuit breakers in their transformers. America sure as hell didn't, and that means our entire mains grid is now at risk due to geomagnetic interference. Those transformers have to be replaced one by one, and there is one of them for each and every house in my area. Plus there are some HUGE ones at power substations that supply entire towns. The power company keeps a supply of all their various types of transformers them because they do burn out and go BOOM, but they might have 5-10% of what they'd need if every one of them toasts out across the entire grid. It'll take time to make the rest.
Subsaharan Africa doesn't have as sophisticated a power grid, power tends to be generated more locally, so a water purification system in Africa is probably not going to suffer from any ill effect due to the collapse of a power grid. Not to mention most rural areas haven't built up the dependence on electricity. Their response will be markedly different than, say, New York City, or Boston. Especially in the winter when people will freeze to death in a few days if they aren't prepared. You can't leave the high-rise and start a fire, and if you can the other 4,999,999 people around you will all have the same need, and you'll run out of fuel in a couple of days, even if you treat the library and Central Park as fuel sources.
Slashdot Mirror
I think you miss the point.
Our application logs all on-screen messages and errors in a database. When Jane from Accounting calls and says she got an error message, she doesn't need to read anything to me. All I need to know is her username and approximately what time she had the error.
I look up the error logs and find her message, along with a core dump of the application containing the entire contents of memory, every variable, every table, every column, every program in the stack, the job logs, everything. If necessary, I can use that information to reconstruct the database journals and see what records in what files were changed by that job and reconstruct the flow path of the job. It rarely comes to that, but I can.
The user still calls me (not all errors are fatal, and users can frequently fix the bad data they entered if that's the problem and move on). But when they do call, they don't need to read anything to me. They just need to tell me who they are and how long ago they had the problem. I can then focus on asking them about events that led up to the error.
If I'm interested, I can go and look at the errors our users are ignoring or working around. It allows me to see trends where some division may have changed a procedure and are now working around some control I have out there that is either not relevant or an indication that their new workaround will cause big problems later.
I've worked for companies that have had a large "Global Error Repository" where all systems collect this kind of data and send it all to a central collection point. Occasionally, that sort of data comes in really handy. "Yup, the inventory feed to the West Coast warehouse died because someone entered a -1 into the quantity for a location in the Northeast Warehouse system and worked around a warning error on it, better go change the control on that screen to make sure all the numbers are positive from a warning to a hard error!"
Sure you do, you just don't recognize it because you're familiar with the tool and are convinced that you know all the solutions that are available to you already.
If you use a hammer and something goes wrong, it will throw a message "BENT NAIL". As an experienced hammer user, you can isolate the root cause and fix it yourself. You still identify the problem ("hammer has rounded tip, replace hammer", as opposed to "incorrect nail type - replace nail and try again" or "your swing is off, adjust your grip and try again").
As an inexperienced user, you seek help in fixing the problem. You call the helpdesk (usually the closest experienced carpenter). They look up from their task briefly and explain that you tap the nail on the side to straighten it out (or pull the nail and replace it if the error is fatal) and try again. Congratulations - you've just learned your first workaround and made your first Level 1 support call. You tap the nail on the side to straighten it out, and hit it again, and it goes in. Or not.
If this happens repeatedly, you ask again. Your "helpdesk" realizes that the workaround isn't enough, and goes to Level 2. He looks at the hammer, the nails, the material you are hammering, and makes an analysis. Maybe it's rounded off from use, or was a cheap crappy hammer that was never properly ground. Maybe you aren't holding the hammer properly. Maybe the nails are too soft for the materials. They help you work through the problem. They may help make it go away permanently by helping you choose the proper nails for the job, fixing your swing, and getting you a good quality hammer. Then you can do your job only encountering "BENT NAIL" less frequently, and when you do you know how to get around it and finish the job. This may continue for a few iterations until you learn the common causes for the error, and how to resolve them.
This is the same level of expertise that most people approach computer errors. They don't know what causes the error, but the helpdesk is there to identify the cause of the problem, get them around it by escalating the call until someone knows how to get the user moving again, and help identify any faults in the software that may be causing it.
Which is why the application I work on displays enough information for an experienced user to have some idea of what is going on, and also logs that error message and a memory dump of every variable, open table, open program, and anything else we can gather and puts it all in a central error repository that all the programmers can get to easily. Along with a database where the programmers can put notes associated with each program or error message with suggestions as to causes and how to fix them with the users (which of course is also used to fix underlying problems when there's time).
A typical support ticket, from a user who reprinted a pick directive that someone else was already working on.
Experienced user: "Oh, Hi, John. You got a message 5 minutes ago saying the pick you wanted to do was already done? Well, hang on a second." (click, click, tappity tappity tap) "There we are, it says that Frank aready picked the item, you didn't reprint that pick directive by any chance did you? You did, because the original pick was damaged? Looks like Frank somehow got ahold of one or more of the sheets you thought you had thrown out or something. You and Frank need to go compare pick sheets and figure out who needs to pick what. Be sure and pull a report of pending picks for your area and eliminate stuff one of you has already done to save walking around."
Inexperienced user: "Oh, Hi, John. You got a message 5 minutes ago, but you don't know what it means? Well, hang on a second." (click, click, tappity tappity tap) "There we are, it looks like you were trying to pick something, right? OK, it says that someone else already picked the item, you didn't reprint that pick directive by any chance did you? You didn't? Hmm..." (looks at screen showing John HAD in fact done a pick reprint 15 minutes ago) "Ah, there we have it, must have been a printing error. Frank somehow got the same pick sheet you did and picked that item before you tried, so you and Frank need to have a chat about who is picking what. I'll send you a report of pending picks for your area and you and Frank can divvy it up."
The database also comes in really handy for identifying problems that the users experience often. "We had program XYZ raise error ABC 24 times yesterday, we need to identify what procedural breakdown is causing this, or what controls we can put in the program to prevent it."
I'd like you all to know I'm feeling very compressed.
- Marvin.
I can finally stop reading the articles and the summaries, and apply this algorithm to the first post to understand the article instead. What a time saver!
No, it's all according to plan. This was simply Quexarotflmao resetting the celestial clock to compensate for 3 extra butterflies flapping their wings in Madagascar last year. The end of the b'ak'tun approaches apace. All is as it should be.
I'm neither a geophysicist nor a celestial mechanic, but I have the qualification of having read the summary. I hope that's sufficient qualification.
AFAICR the only way to change RPM with unchanged mass is to move mass towards or away from the axis of rotation, which earthquakes, being crustal events, cannot do...
From the summary:
Santa Maria Island off the coast near Concepcion, Chile’s second-largest city, may have been raised 2 meters (6 feet) as a result of the latest quake
Earthquakes are tectonic plate events, true, but that doesn't mean there isn't a vertical component. To oversimplify the concept so this isn't a 4000 word post, the tectonic plates in South America are colliding. When they bump, one of them slides up over the other. Tectonic plate movements in those circumstances can eventually create (and have created) whole mountain ranges.
In this specific case, it was limited to raising decent-sized island a few feet. But that has the effect of moving some land mass higher, which moves mass away from the axis of rotation.
It'll do what everything else does to the PS3, turn it into an expensive blue ring-shaped nightlight.
I never understood why this was called the "blue ring of death". It ensures you cannot play violent video games any more, which according to recent conclusive studies should reduce deaths.
It all depends on who you are. Southwest obviously thinks that Kevin Smith would have a measurable effect.
I had that capability once in an island fortress, but I it was destroyed when I decided to torture a government agent rather than just shooting the sonofabitch.
Lesson learned: Next time I design a superfortress with world destruction capabilities, the big red button that says "PRESS HERE TO DESTROY COMPLEX" won't be hooked up to the actual self-destruct mechanism. I'll just make it out of metal and wire 4,000 volts to it.
Right, but it only takes a single pebble to start an avalanche.
Now, mind you, if a nuclear weapon ever did trigger an earthquake it would probably just be the trigger event, and the pressure would still have been there from the start. If anything, the nuclear weapon would cause the earthquake to happen sooner, thereby possibly reducing the severity of the eventual quake.
Wow, I just had a brilliant idea. California is worried about the Next Big Quake, and the solution to their problem is so simple - let's trigger whatever pressure is there now in a smaller quake.
Dust off and nuke the state from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.
That lot of bastards? No, it's the People's Judean Front. Next you'll be thinking it was the Judean People's Front or something stupid like that.
Thank you. That'll take some time to slog through in detail.
Books don't sell themselves, you know.
Watching Bambi, obviously. I always wondered about that bunny, he seemed like the quiet type. The ones you gotta watch out for.
Fair enough.
The summary and all the articles I've read identify this as a metastudy. The problem with metastudies is that you are standing on the backs of giants, and you don't know how rigorously your giants were built.
So far, all the articles I've read only mention how he and seven other researchers (at least two of them his students and one a former colleague) did a metastudy of 130 previous studies that involved 130,000 kids, and found a "not huge" effect that is nonetheless clear and irrefutable. Irrefutable enough that the conversation needs to stop right now and everyone needs to stop questioning it. And how this finding validates what he refers to as his life's work and something he's been trying to prove for a long time. But, of course, to get details, I have to buy a book he's authored.
So, without plunking down $40 on the book the article is advertising, is there somewhere I can read a summary of this metastudy? What he was looking for specifically as markers that supposedly prove the causation he said he has proven? What is it about these specific 130 studies that proves something that each one of the individual studies apparently could not?
Usually, metastudies are really good at correlation, and he may well have demonstrated that there is an identifiable correlation between kids who play video games and kids who engage in violent behavior. But that's useless in terms of convincing anyone that the video games changed that behavior. In other words, even telling me that every single child ever convicted of a violent crime was an avid video gamer tells me nothing about whether the video games were a contributing factor to their violent behavior. A kid with a propensity toward violence may well find violent games and media appealing.
I can see, and possibly even buy, the argument that exposing a kid to massive violence desensitizes them to it and lowers the barrier toward acting out things in a violent manner. I don't see how a metastudy is going to demonstrate "conclusive" proof of that theory. You need to study large groups of real kids, determine their propensity toward violence before playing violent video games, expose part of them to violent video games and media, part to benign video games and media, and do not expose others to games or media at all, and determine if the propensity for violence increases or decreases as a whole in each of your three segments.
He has made pretty extraordinary claims, claims that happen to prove what he calls his life's work, but in order to learn more you have to buy his book.
I remain skeptical.
But you have to use the right definitions.
"Conclusive": Of, relating to, or being a CONCLUSION.
"Conclusion": (2) The last part of something.
So they proved it conclusively, by writing it up as the last step in performing the study.
Doesn't mean they proved it irrefutably. Just that they concluded their study with a possibly-flawed statement. ;)
Suicidal squirrels, fortunately, only cut out small portions of the power grid. Usually one minor transformer. In return for your inconvenience at losing the power for a few hours until the power company can get out to replace it, you get a pre-cooked ready-to-eat meal.
You'd have to have a large number of kamikaze tree rats being zapped in a very carefully though-out pattern in order to take out a single major transformer, and several major transformers to have a grid-wide problem.
And squirrels just ain't that smart. :)
Yes, this is hardly unique to aviation.
I drive a manual transmission car that possesses a simple key. Should my accelerator go apeshit on me (whether this was a stuck floor mat or a software problem in the accelerator), I have several options to stop the engine from pouring speed into the chassis. Among others, I can push down the clutch pedal (resulting in the engine possibly revving itself to death, but with me able to bring the car to a controlled, if very noisy and probably engine-fatal, stop), and I can turn the key to the Accessory position (which will disable my power steering and the power assist on the brakes, but I can also let up on the clutch to use the engine as a brake and give me back some hydraulic assist). Turning the key into the OFF position locks the steering wheel, which is bad mojo, but at least if I overreact on that one I can get the car slowed down before I hit whatever is in front of me.
The Lexus involved in the much-discussed incident had safety features galore, and was driven by an experienced driver. However, some of the safety features certainly contributed to the accident. Setting aside the likelihood of noticing that a floor mat was stuck under the go pedal and having the time and clarity of thought to reach down and pull it out while the car is accelerating wildly into traffic... an experienced driver knows that in a battle between engine and brakes, the engine will win, so it's utterly vital to get the engine out of play early on.
I've had this happen, and in my case it was a poorly-wired cruise control (aftermarket, that was installed by an idiot apparently). So my first instinct was to tap the brakes, which disengaged the cruise and all was well, I pulled over and physically disconnected the cruise control from the throttle. Obviously, that wasn't the problem here, so the driver probably moved on to another logical step.
In my case, that would be taking the car out of gear. Safety feature #1 comes into play. The car was an automatic, and the interlock prevented the transmission and/or engine from being damaged. It ignored NEUTRAL and REVERSE settings while at speed and under heavy acceleration. If the driver had been able to idle the engine, NEUTRAL would have worked. But he couldn't, and the interlock (a safety feature) worked against him. So on to the next attempt...
I'd continue by turning off the key, which will cause sudden deceleration, a certain amount of loss of control, but will get the engine out of play. However, in this case the starter mechanism was a button that you'd normally push to turn the engine off at idle, but to keep some idiot from pushing the button at speed and shutting down the car, the car ignored all but a 3-second push to the button when the car was in operation. Unless you had (trivial but necessary) specialized training in how that button worked, you might not think about doing that.
I suppose if it was one of those "key must be present" cars with the fancy starter button, he could have thrown the keyfob out the window and hoped the engine would shut itself down once the keyfob was out of range, but I expect another safety feature would have prevented that from happening. :)
So, there are at least two cases where safety features built into the controls of the car made the car paradoxically less safe, at least under these specific circumstances.
Continuing with that conjecture, how long would it be before city folk started a mass exodus from the city, into the country where resources are somewhat less scarce but nowhere near plentiful enough to sustain an incoming population that large?
Maine, my home state, has about 1.3 million people. If half the people from the urban area surrounding Boston came north due to resource shortages, our population would triple. Unless all of them are rugged survivalists, they are going to want clean water and food somehow, and chances are we'll be as out of power as they are.
This is why preparedness is just as vital in the city, and I would argue even more so. Our population is too great to be sustained directly from the land. We, as a society, have become dependent on energy-intensive factory farming and water treatment just to sustain our population density overall. If people have to leave the cities temporarily to find water, where are they going to find it? How are they going to get it without fouling it?
Good point.
Seriously, you wonder why survival nutters always arm themselves so well? It usually has little to do with an invasion of foreigners. In the event of the [insert disaster here] apocalypse they are always expecting, they fully expect to have to defend their resources from people who have not prepared.
In "Caves of Steel", Asimov talks of urbanization in terms of resource dependence. He conjectures the buildup of cities to the point where mere hours of interruption of any single service can cause death on a significant scale. We're nowhere near there yet, but I wonder how many people truly grasp just how utterly dependent the residents of a large city are on a continuous flow of goods and services, and how devastating an interruption to that flow would be.
New Orleans has a population of 1.2 million and a density of 2,500 people per square mile. The remaining unaffected population of the United States took days to get resources down to the population, most of whom had been evacuated to areas unaffected by the storm, and continued helping out for months. Supplies were trucked in from unaffected cities, of which there were plenty nearby.
New York City has a population of over 8 million with a population density of 27,000 people per square mile.
How many days would elapse between a meltdown of the power system across a small portion of the Eastern seaboard and the first death in New York? How fast would that death toll escalate?
First off, military equipment is generally heavily shielded and almost always locally powered. The military might be bringing a lot of its resources to bear helping out US citizens, but that means you'll have a lot of armed and trained soldiers handy if/when someone did something like that. And we'll have lots of carriers near shore helping with recovery efforts, so there'll be no lack of hardware to use. Any conventional invasion is going to be met with more resistance, not less.
Second, how many countries have the capability to engage a war against a large superpower on their own soil? One with a heavily armed local populace?
Assuming they succeed, what do they think they will gain? Resources? We sell them cheaply already. Factories? Closed down. Control over the population? Good luck with that. Did you miss the "armed population" bit? Combine armaments with an already extant xenophobia, you're going to have a mess on your hands. Look what the US did to our own citizens of Japanese descent after Pearl Harbor.
And nothing stops the nukes from being ready. We can reach out and touch every spot on the planet. We're the only nation that has ever demonstrated a willingness to actually use 'em. Coincidentally, against the aforementioned nation that tried attacking us on our soil. If enough military resources have to be diverted from saving citizens from the disaster to repelling an invasion, we'll just cut off the enemies supply lines. At the source. With big boom. BIG boom.
Satellites would probably come online shortly after the storm passed, depending on the severity of the storm. A high X-Class solar flare could cause damage to a satellite, we just haven't experienced one of those since 1921 and satellites were not much of a concern then. :)
The power grid would probably be down for the count. The geomagetic storm would cause transformers to overload and burn out, which would overload other transformers nearby exacerbating the effects of the storm. You'd potentially end up with simultaneous cascade failures across many of the independent grids, and significant damage to the linkage between the grids. The Northeast power outage was caused by a minor overload in a single transmission line, and the system didn't suffer from a lot of damage, it just took a while to restart the entire grid due to its complexity. We haven't really improved things since then, so losing a good number of transformers means we'd have to replace a lot of them, THEN deal with restarting each grid. Parts of each grid might stay up as isolated pockets, and parts would come up slowly, but full restoration of power within each grid could take months. Restoration of the interlinks between grids could take even longer, so areas like Southern California could go back to browouts for an extended period.
Heck, we can go a week or two until full restoration during major snowstorms here in New England. And that's an isolated series of small power outages where the underlying grid is stable.
Yes and no. You can limit damage that way, but there will still be damage.
And if American companies didn't have the stomach to put circuit breakers in their transformers, what makes you think we'll have the stomach to turn off the US power grid for a day at a time each time a major X-Class geomagnetic storm is expected? We don't even do a really great job at evacuating people from a single city when a hurricane is about to strike.
Why does any disaster have to be Katrina, especially when there is no comparison to the scope or nature of Katrina.
Because they are comparing the effects, not the scope or nature. Katrina caused a lack of food and water for an urban population. The cause will be different, but the same lack will be present.
I find the dialogue to be western centric and kind of out of touch
It's a study by the American government on the effects of a geomagnetic storm hitting the United States on the American electric grid. How would do you expect it NOT to be American-centric? America doesn't run the electric grid in your country, and your electric grid is probably different from ours. If you want relevant data for your grid, you'll need to do it with relevant local data. Have your government ask for a copy of this study. I'm sure the Americans will gladly offer it up if your country is friendly and asks nicely. Then your country can use it as the basis for your own analysis and study. Then it can be as [insert your country name here]-centric as you need it to be.
Honestly, the challenges are going to be different, so the study has to be done bearing in mind the specific geographic challenges.
Oh noes! My data is not available to me!!
Electricity will be gone, which means for a significant portion of the population of America potable water will be gone. Large cities everywhere are utterly dependent on electricity for basic services due to extreme population density, and in some cities the body count clock starts ticking within a few days of power loss. The higher the population density, the more interdependent people are.
What about places where lack of electricity is all it takes to cripple a water purification system or a hospital?
As in New York City? Boston? Los Angeles?
Honestly, this study is relatively useless outside America and maybe Europe. And some areas in Europe might have even been smart and put circuit breakers in their transformers. America sure as hell didn't, and that means our entire mains grid is now at risk due to geomagnetic interference. Those transformers have to be replaced one by one, and there is one of them for each and every house in my area. Plus there are some HUGE ones at power substations that supply entire towns. The power company keeps a supply of all their various types of transformers them because they do burn out and go BOOM, but they might have 5-10% of what they'd need if every one of them toasts out across the entire grid. It'll take time to make the rest.
Subsaharan Africa doesn't have as sophisticated a power grid, power tends to be generated more locally, so a water purification system in Africa is probably not going to suffer from any ill effect due to the collapse of a power grid. Not to mention most rural areas haven't built up the dependence on electricity. Their response will be markedly different than, say, New York City, or Boston. Especially in the winter when people will freeze to death in a few days if they aren't prepared. You can't leave the high-rise and start a fire, and if you can the other 4,999,999 people around you will all have the same need, and you'll run out of fuel in a couple of days, even if you treat the library and Central Park as fuel sources.