Uh, yes, it absolutely makes things worse. See Limits To Growth and read up on the concept of overshoot. By doing permanent (or quasi-permanent) environmental damage now we jeopardise the possibility of every reaching a stable condition with a decent quality of life, and extending this aggrevates the problem hugely.
Hi. I use supercomputers to model materials for next-generation solar cells. If you're working on semiconductors, you need to probe the electronic structure of crystals with junctions and defects; basic atomistic calculations aren't going to be enough (although they have their own uses and are definitely part of the picture). These calculations help us to work out why some promising materials don't perform well in experiments, and figure out which reactions will be suitable for cheap large-scale production and processing. Even simple atomistic models require a lot of power if your system is large enough and/or you want to look at complex processes like melting.
Genuine question- why would you use the steam key when you have direct access to a drm-free version? Was this just curious testing, or am I missing something?
Agreed that Chemfig is painful, but I've yet to find a decent workflow with ChemDraw. Currently using Inkscape, which at least has a comprehensive set of shortcuts and doesn't prevent annotation. What do you recommend?
For me LyX was "LaTeX with training wheels"; after about a year of LyX I've moved to pure LaTeX for more complex functionality. However, I found LaTeX far less intimidating that it might have been as I was already familiar with the concepts and with the names of most functions.
Where it really excels though is in the well-thought-out system of keyboard shortcuts. I used it in the final year of my degree to take down lecture notes, including equations and derivations, and found I was generally able to keep up with a blackboard. Try that with Equation Editor!
I'd settle for having somebody constantly watching over them... "Sure you want to do that? Looks like an asshole move to me!"
They could have a quota for identifying a minimum number of asshole prosecutors, and their career progression could depend on declaring powerful people to be assholes.
This is a pretty disingenuous argument, and one that is used by disappointingly frequently by squirming Lib Dems. This is the wording of the pledge:
“I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.”
Nothing about being in government, and it's pretty clear that the wording allows for them being in a coalition. This was a personal promise made by individuals, not just a manifesto point.
It is enormously frustrating for scientists in a wide range of areas that they are required to hold a higher standard of integrity than the politicians, journalists and religious groups that oppose them, and yet this does not appear to carry adequate weight in public and political decision-making.
When you've been slapped down for contempt of court, your next action really shouldn't be this kind of open contempt. I wonder how Apple's UK employees feel about this disrespect to their courts?
Because humans are rubbish at accounting for sustainability; we only ever look at current availability. There'll always be someone who cares less that can undercut you.
You're generalising; "the public" is a hopelessly vague term. A "high" church with statues etc. is not really aimed at children who haven't had a Christian upbringing, they are aimed at people brought up in that tradition; pretty analogous to science professionals, no? They are open to visitors so that people can pray outside of services, as well as appreciate their art and architecture. An exhibition about evolution is actually likely to be directly aimed at family groups like yours: one of the first things I learned about science communication is that you should never aim anything at "the general public" as you can't please everyone.
Anyway, we're wondering off the point a little. I think we're actually on the same side here; there's a reason churches prefer to teach their religion to children in a sugar-coated way rather than throw them in at the deep end.
Seconded. I take glee in the simplicity and power of apt on my netbook, whereas MacPorts is always a last resort. Too much frustration trying to track down the right package name, only to discover that I'm not getting what I expected (e.g. the MacPorts version of yafc doesn't support tab completion). Next time I set a mac up I'm trying Homebrew.
The world has yet to demonstrate that commercial nuclear plants make any financial sense
Is that compared to the energy taken to commission/decommission, or is that compared with the low cost of fossil fuels which don't have to pay for the destruction they will unleash? Current consensus seems to be that it's likely climate change will wreck us before the oil runs out, so relying on current economics is not a very helpful way of decision-making.
And continuing the analogy, it is really helpful if you're playing in a band to have a basic working understanding of everyone else's instruments. It means you can ask the bassist to use more hammer-ons in this section, and understand why the singer can't do endless loud high notes.
What is "rap music"? Rapping is a technique which is used across a wide range of genres (acid jazz, hip-hop, grime...) "Rap music" is only a slightly more precise term than "guitar bands".
These things should be roughly interchangeable. The Water Online article gives a nice plot with "water permeability" in units of "L/cm2/day/MPa", showing a 2-3 order difference on a log scale. This is a slightly odd set of units, but essentially this is a flux/pressure applied. That is a pretty good metric for membrane performance. Pressure and area will scale with cost and energy in a roughly linear fashion; membrane technology is notorious for not enjoying economy of scale in the same way traditional operations such as distillation do. As this is a theoretical model, we don't know what additional costs and issues there might be in terms of auxiliary systems.
You still can't run away from osmotic pressure. If you have a membrane with a different concentration on each side, the solvent (water in this case) will tend to flow to the more concentrated side. This is true even if the membrane offers no resistance; it's simply diffusion at work. This effect is osmosis. In order to counteract this effect, an additional pressure of water is needed to pass water through the membrane. It's called reverse osmosis because you are opposing the usual behaviour of osmosis. If you run the process in "dead-end" mode like a coffee filter, as many seem to be suggesting here, the problem will not be "clogging", the problem will be the huge pressure build-up as salt at the filter becomes more and more concentrated.
TLDR; it's still reverse osmosis, because no membrane can make osmotic pressure disappear.
All of which is not to say that this isn't a very promising proposal. It shouldn't be toooooo hard to test this in the lab in the near future.
According to the other article people are posting, this is based on Molecular Dynamics simulations. MD is a theoretical technique that uses time-dependent Newtonian mechanics. It relies heavily on having good-quality data for the interactions between the atoms, but allows relatively large systems to be modelled. The wikipedia article contains a fair bit of information (probably too much).
TLDR: This is just based on computational modelling. The model is fairly crude, but is a standard technique for this scale of system and the results should be taken seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh, did not know that.*Increases size*
And who boils live frogs anyway? Wouldn't crab or lobster make for a much better analogy?
Only if you're a terrible chef
Depends what continent they die on...
Uh, yes, it absolutely makes things worse. See Limits To Growth and read up on the concept of overshoot. By doing permanent (or quasi-permanent) environmental damage now we jeopardise the possibility of every reaching a stable condition with a decent quality of life, and extending this aggrevates the problem hugely.
Hi. I use supercomputers to model materials for next-generation solar cells. If you're working on semiconductors, you need to probe the electronic structure of crystals with junctions and defects; basic atomistic calculations aren't going to be enough (although they have their own uses and are definitely part of the picture). These calculations help us to work out why some promising materials don't perform well in experiments, and figure out which reactions will be suitable for cheap large-scale production and processing. Even simple atomistic models require a lot of power if your system is large enough and/or you want to look at complex processes like melting.
Genuine question- why would you use the steam key when you have direct access to a drm-free version? Was this just curious testing, or am I missing something?
Agreed that Chemfig is painful, but I've yet to find a decent workflow with ChemDraw. Currently using Inkscape, which at least has a comprehensive set of shortcuts and doesn't prevent annotation. What do you recommend?
For me LyX was "LaTeX with training wheels"; after about a year of LyX I've moved to pure LaTeX for more complex functionality. However, I found LaTeX far less intimidating that it might have been as I was already familiar with the concepts and with the names of most functions.
Where it really excels though is in the well-thought-out system of keyboard shortcuts. I used it in the final year of my degree to take down lecture notes, including equations and derivations, and found I was generally able to keep up with a blackboard. Try that with Equation Editor!
I'd settle for having somebody constantly watching over them... "Sure you want to do that? Looks like an asshole move to me!"
They could have a quota for identifying a minimum number of asshole prosecutors, and their career progression could depend on declaring powerful people to be assholes.
This is a pretty disingenuous argument, and one that is used by disappointingly frequently by squirming Lib Dems. This is the wording of the pledge:
“I pledge to vote against any increase in fees in the next parliament and to pressure the government to introduce a fairer alternative.”
Nothing about being in government, and it's pretty clear that the wording allows for them being in a coalition. This was a personal promise made by individuals, not just a manifesto point.
It is enormously frustrating for scientists in a wide range of areas that they are required to hold a higher standard of integrity than the politicians, journalists and religious groups that oppose them, and yet this does not appear to carry adequate weight in public and political decision-making.
"We have suggested that Samsung were infringing on our IP. DISREGARD THAT, I SUCK COCKS"
When you've been slapped down for contempt of court, your next action really shouldn't be this kind of open contempt. I wonder how Apple's UK employees feel about this disrespect to their courts?
Comment the subject fail is.
...we're starting to be in a world where they might start to stifle innovation. Governments may need to look at the patent system...
Why has it become "good" writing to hedge everything you ever say? Out with it, man!
Because humans are rubbish at accounting for sustainability; we only ever look at current availability. There'll always be someone who cares less that can undercut you.
You're generalising; "the public" is a hopelessly vague term. A "high" church with statues etc. is not really aimed at children who haven't had a Christian upbringing, they are aimed at people brought up in that tradition; pretty analogous to science professionals, no? They are open to visitors so that people can pray outside of services, as well as appreciate their art and architecture. An exhibition about evolution is actually likely to be directly aimed at family groups like yours: one of the first things I learned about science communication is that you should never aim anything at "the general public" as you can't please everyone.
Anyway, we're wondering off the point a little. I think we're actually on the same side here; there's a reason churches prefer to teach their religion to children in a sugar-coated way rather than throw them in at the deep end.
You should try taking them to a professional conference for evolutionary biologists and see how much they enjoy that.
Seconded. I take glee in the simplicity and power of apt on my netbook, whereas MacPorts is always a last resort. Too much frustration trying to track down the right package name, only to discover that I'm not getting what I expected (e.g. the MacPorts version of yafc doesn't support tab completion). Next time I set a mac up I'm trying Homebrew.
The world has yet to demonstrate that commercial nuclear plants make any financial sense
Is that compared to the energy taken to commission/decommission, or is that compared with the low cost of fossil fuels which don't have to pay for the destruction they will unleash? Current consensus seems to be that it's likely climate change will wreck us before the oil runs out, so relying on current economics is not a very helpful way of decision-making.
And continuing the analogy, it is really helpful if you're playing in a band to have a basic working understanding of everyone else's instruments. It means you can ask the bassist to use more hammer-ons in this section, and understand why the singer can't do endless loud high notes.
What is "rap music"? Rapping is a technique which is used across a wide range of genres (acid jazz, hip-hop, grime...) "Rap music" is only a slightly more precise term than "guitar bands".
These things should be roughly interchangeable. The Water Online article gives a nice plot with "water permeability" in units of "L/cm2/day/MPa", showing a 2-3 order difference on a log scale. This is a slightly odd set of units, but essentially this is a flux/pressure applied. That is a pretty good metric for membrane performance. Pressure and area will scale with cost and energy in a roughly linear fashion; membrane technology is notorious for not enjoying economy of scale in the same way traditional operations such as distillation do. As this is a theoretical model, we don't know what additional costs and issues there might be in terms of auxiliary systems.
You still can't run away from osmotic pressure. If you have a membrane with a different concentration on each side, the solvent (water in this case) will tend to flow to the more concentrated side. This is true even if the membrane offers no resistance; it's simply diffusion at work. This effect is osmosis. In order to counteract this effect, an additional pressure of water is needed to pass water through the membrane. It's called reverse osmosis because you are opposing the usual behaviour of osmosis. If you run the process in "dead-end" mode like a coffee filter, as many seem to be suggesting here, the problem will not be "clogging", the problem will be the huge pressure build-up as salt at the filter becomes more and more concentrated.
TLDR; it's still reverse osmosis, because no membrane can make osmotic pressure disappear.
All of which is not to say that this isn't a very promising proposal. It shouldn't be toooooo hard to test this in the lab in the near future.
According to the other article people are posting, this is based on Molecular Dynamics simulations. MD is a theoretical technique that uses time-dependent Newtonian mechanics. It relies heavily on having good-quality data for the interactions between the atoms, but allows relatively large systems to be modelled. The wikipedia article contains a fair bit of information (probably too much).
TLDR: This is just based on computational modelling. The model is fairly crude, but is a standard technique for this scale of system and the results should be taken seriously.