Have you read that essay by Asimov yet? There's really no point to this discussion until you do. The spacetime curvature is a mathematical description of what we observe, it's but one way of describing it. You are essentially arguing against yourself. Approximation is precisely what you can incrementally improve on.
Still no. Our understanding of gravity was refined by Einstein's theory, but it's not a radical change. Einstein's theories add the relativstic aspect to our understanding of gravity. This is an incremental improvement. The fact that you express it using fancy mathematics has no bearing on the crux of the issue -- namely, that it's an improvement that is incremental and subject of Asimov's essay. Similarly, Darwin's main idea has been unchanged just as the main idea of gravity (an attractive force between objects with gravitational mass) was unchanged. Yet the evolutionary theory's details have been vastly improved since Darwin, just as they have been improved for the gravitational theory. You're entirely off base in thinking that there's much difference in what happened to both of those theories since Darwin -- the basic ideas are unchanged, but the details have been vastly improved. For both.
There is a difference between "revised" and "refined". Newton's idea of gravity being some invisible pull between two objects is radically different than Einstein's notion that gravity is the curvature of space-time around an object.
In a word: NO. Read it, understand it, be enlightened. Don't be stupid. Please. At the moment, you're the English Lit friend.
In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
evolution has not been revised since it was proposed by Darwin.
Speak for yourself, oh aptly nicked one. Just because you haven't kept in touch with evolutionary biology post-Darwin doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You're of course in a large group of dumbasses who think that there has been no progress in this area since Darwin.
Evolution of course is a theory, but saying that it's just a theory is to completely miss the point. Scientific theories are science's most cherished deliverables. A scientist who makes significant contributions towards a new theory is one lucky fellow, in a rather exclusive company.
that involved having the school look into your finances and constantly pester you about what you spent money on X, Y, and Z when that money could have gone to the school
It's obviously your choice as to whether you want your finances looked into. Personally, I think good education for one's kids would well offset whatever perceived "loss" there is due to shedding a bit of privacy. Which reminds me that I need to check how much assistance we'd qualify for in a private school I have my eyes on for my kids.
A lot of physical laws govern many processes. For radioactivity to work the way some crazies out there wish it did, you would have to break lasers, life, and a lot of other stuff.
:) Knuth's code is readable because he adds a lot of prose to describe the code, and this human-centric flow of prose shapes the code. Code that needs prose to explain it is not very good at all. Most likely it's written in a programming language that is too low-level for the task at hand. Literate programming is is the wrong solution. Instead of writing prose for human consumption, one should use (or write) tools that let one express the meaning of the code such that it's comprehensible to humans in its entirety, without needing separate parts for machine use and for human use. C++ makes a step in that direction. LISP made a step in that direction long time ago and IMHO still remains the ultimately powerful way of expressing your intent such that it's human readable. Alas, it's somewhat hard to convert unadorned LISP into well performing machine code, so it's not really a universal solution -- just a much larger step in the right direction than C++ is.
Get yourself a kill-a-watt. As for longevity of the hardware: monitor the temperatures, and do some research on how the rise you observe from an idle system affects the reliability of various kinds of components, and what your financial impact may be.
Many different physical ideas can describe the same physical reality. Thus, classical electrodynamics can be described by a field view, or an action at a distance view, etc. Originally, Maxwell filled space with idler wheels, and Faraday with fields lines, but somehow the Maxwell equations themselves are pristine and independent of the elaboration of words attempting a physical description. The only true physical description is that describing the experimental meaning of the quantities in the equation - or better, the way the equations are to be used in describing experimental observations. This being the case perhaps the best way to proceed is to try to guess equations, and disregard physical models or descriptions. For example, McCullough guessed the correct equations for light propagation in a crystal long before his colleagues using elastic models could make head or tail of the phenomena, or again, Dirac obtained his equation for the description of the electron by an almost purely mathematical proposition. A simple physical view by which all the contents of this equation can be seen is still lacking.
The idea of the electron "moving around" the nucleus doesn't make much sense at all, just as the notion of the electron being "attracted" to a proton -- when you get down to a certain scale of things and certain systems. The fact that the electron is bound to a proton breaks the applicability of classical theories to both proton and electron. The best explanation we have at the moment for this is the theory of quantum electrodynamics. There, all of electrical interactions are modeled by photons, so that if you got an interaction, there's a photon involved. Photons are the carriers of all kinds of electromagnetic interactions, including what we'd classically call electrostatic attraction/repulsion.
In a way, what you're asking is why certain physical laws are one way and not the other -- we have zero clue about that. The natural law is somehow set up in such a way, that there no trick that will let you know the momentum and the position of a particle all at once. This is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. An electron "crashed" onto the proton would be such a trick: you know precisely where it is (stuck to the proton), and what momentum it has (non relative to the proton, it's stuck). We don't know what is that "something" that makes the nature work that way. No clue at all. There is, at the moment, nothing more fundamental that would explain this universal behavior of nature. Sorry about that.
Good code is, apart from performance if and where it matters, really about readability by humans. Most of software engineering has nothing to do with software or computers, everything about human cognition. Design patterns are only idioms that are needed by humans, machines don't care one iota about those, and so on.
The best of assembly is only "good" to the CPU -- it's likely to be next to incomprehensible to humans. When you go far enough in optimizing assembly code, you, for example, may end up manually threading parallel processes that have strict timing requirements. This leads to utterly incomprehensible mess that, when run on the target, seems to perform as if by magic. I wrote such code and while it did the job, it's not what I'd consider good code. It'd be good code if there was a higher-level language that let me express the same thing, and produced equally well performing assembly at the output:) Sometimes it's impossible to write good code using a tool (language) that's not fit for the job. Too often such a tool (language) doesn't exist. Writing good code then requires writing a tool that will write the good code for you, and using that tool to do the job.
Case in point: a lot of the "cool" code for Parallax's Propeller platform, and for Microchip's PIC12 CPUs, is really about cycle counting and, when truly optimized, is really unfit for human consumption. There are no mainstream languages out there that would convert a more straight-line higher-level code and timing constraints into timing-optimized assembly. You're not a good programmer simply by the virtue of being able to coax the assembler to do your bidding. You're a good programmer if you can design the tool you need to produce the assembler for you -- in the demonstrable absence of an off-the-shelf solution.
You still have to do your homework. Read the Asimov's essay, and listen to Feynman's lectures, start to finish. For further reference, the edited version of the lectures is in Feynman's book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter". If you're in the U.S., you should be able to get it through a local library.
Just because you, a human, has a concept of what motion is, doesn't mean you can apply that concept to everything, in all circumstances. That's why physics is "hard": you have to unlearn stuff from everyday life, since it simply and plainly doesn't work when you get to tiny things.
There's no such thing as a "path" of an electron around a nucleus. Yes, you can write down such a thing in words, but it's simply nonsensical. That's perhaps the biggest mental leap that people need to make when starting to learn quantum-scale behavior. The concepts that you know stop working and make absolutely no sense anymore.
The reuse of the word "orbit" to mean the quantum energy state of a bound electron is IMHO a contributor to this disaster. People think "oh, an orbit, like in a planet" -- well, just because it's called an orbit doesn't mean it's got anything to do AT ALL with elliptical motion! You have an orbit that has no path at all, so any notion of what shape the path has is just gobbledygook. Just get it into your head that talking of a path of a bound electron is like talking about a path of a thought in your head. Nonsense. Wakalixes on a stick.
Orbitals have shapes, but that's something else, and even then it's not a path, is a somewhat nice scalar function defined in 3 dimensions. It's nice enough that we can plot a surface that follows an arbitrary scalar value and it looks like a shape to us.
Equally nonsensical is saying that electrons are "not moving in a linear fashion". WTF does that even mean?
Maybe you're hung up on literate programming, but seriously, while the code is decent, there just isn't much room for stellar stuff in a language as crusty as legacy Pascal. I'd argue that the language is seriously limiting what you can express while still keeping the code performing well.
So what you are saying is that an electron is not subject to the same laws of physics in different locations?
Yes and no. The electron exhibits quantum behavior. The classical notion of motion "around" the nucleus simply makes no sense. It doesn't apply in such circumstances. Demonstrably so - you can argue all you want, but what we see is precisely that what you have a problem with. I can't get over people who just won't accept reality for what it is. When the electron is free, its behavior often matches the classical theory, or even non-quantum relativistic theory, nevertheless it's still being described properly by quantum electrodynamics. When the electron is around the nucleus, quantum electrodynamics describe its behavior properly, while the classical theory doesn't anymore. For an introduction to this conundrum, you need to read Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong and listen to Feynman's QED lectures.
Why is it that that the negatively charged electrons in atoms are not attracted to and crash into the positively charged nucleus?
Because an electron bound to a nucleus has different properties than a free electron. Demonstrably so. In a synchrotron accelerator, you're accelerating free electrons. You don't need an accelerator to accerate electrons bound to a nucleus, photons do that just fine, but of course you can't boost them without limits. If you give them enough energy, they are freed from the nucleus. What I find curious is that I've learned that in high school, while you, supposedly an adult, pretend (perhaps dishonestly) that such basic knowledge is somehow best ignored.
This is so stupid I don't even know where to start.
Where do you think all this stuff is stored? For all practical purposes, everything that has been extracted has already been burned up, as far as fossil fuels go. The storage capacity is a tiny fraction of even yearly extraction. The "billions" in contracted reserves are a drop in the bucket. The fossil fuel economy is measured in trillions, not billions. Daily U.S. oil consumption, in crude equivalent, is on the order of USD 1 billion worth. Get a sense of scale, will you, pwetty pwetty please?
Oh, the US has simply exported its bubble, and a lot of Europe went for it hook, line and sinker. US exports its culture and media quite aggresively -- what, you don't think it has an impact on lifestyles and fiscal policy in Europe? Go to any ex-eastern-bloc country and look at how the teenagers there dress. It's as if a thousand US sitcom casts had escaped onto the streets mid-shoot. The clothing is merely a superficial aspect of a much broader trend.
Individual wheel drive as usually envisioned is silly. Yeah, it looks cool to have a direct drive motor on a wheel assembly But that's unsprung mass and you want to reduce it, not add to it. Once you have to get power to the wheel through a driveshaft of one sort or another, there's no point in having individual anything as it just adds duplicated mass for stuff like housings, mounting, etc. One motor, one gearbox, and two wheel drive right where the motor is - that's what's the most economical in any and all terms: weight, material cost, servicability, etc. RWD with motor in the front is heavier, AWD is heavier, one motor per wheel is heavier, and so on. About the only cheaper but worse handling solution than FWD is to have RWD with a solid (straight) axle and rear-mounted motor. You save some weight by not having four sets of universal joints. That's about all of the optimization you can do in an electric car.
There's a point at which you're talking about really small number of moving parts compared to anything with a conventional ICE, and the point of diminishing returns is staring right at you. Just count the number of rolling contact, spline and friction interfaces between the piston and the wheel in a conventional FWD car. An electric car cuts this by an order of magnitude!
Hydroelectric generation != hydroelectric storage. You can still develop plenty of new hydro storage to provide base load as generation shifts to bursty wind and solar.
You don't really need to do any deep analysis here. Any non-renewable fuels are necessarily a finite resource because our planet's crust and atmosphere have finite masses. All of the oxygen available to burn the fossil fuels is in the atmosphere and the crust. All of the fossil fuels are in the crust as well. That's as finite as it gets. There's no way to "never" run out of fossil fuels. We'll either run out of fossil fuels or out of atmospheric oxygen. Getting oxygen out of the crust is a very slow process, so at the moment it's best to forget about it.
The quality of the source code can't be considered in a vacuum. It is part of the overall quality of both design and implementation. TeX's design is crusty, and the source code shows no less. It's a reasonably well done crusty code. Nothing stellar there, I'm afraid. Yes, if you compare it to a lot of the stuff out there it does shine, but that's almost by definition. A lot of the stuff out there is mediocre, but that's due to the current distribution of human capabilities, nothing more. It's not going to change either, unless we find some magical elixir to make us all superhuman.
You claim that there aren't "many people today" who white such code. That's true, but not for entirely good reasons. For one, the code doesn't use all that many abstractions -- it's rather boring old Pascal. A modern C++ port could be half the size if done by an exceptionally good developer -- that's the benefit of having a compiler that can do more computation while compiling. Even a decently good C++ implementation could be 25% smaller and easier to maintain. So part of the reason that nobody writes code like that anymore is that it's not really the way we should be writing code anymore.
Knuth wrote reasonably nice code for its time, that's all. Alas, this has nothing to do with his quality as a researcher and author. His publication ethics are impeccable and his level of effort and dedication to his magnum opus is setting an example to us all. Every time I see a supposedly basic textbook being redone I think to myself: "Yeah, the previous one was crap, so they redo it, and the new one will equally be crap. Nobody seems to care enough to do it once, do it right, and keep on improving vs. redoing." Knuth's work has seen numerous incremental improvements, and his methods are rather thorough and detail-oriented. One example is him being adamant about collecting maximum detail in the references, including full names (with middle names) of the authors. Knuth knows academic research, and that includes research done in collecting references. He knows what a pain in the ass it is to have incomplete or erroneous references. Most authors don't pay anywhere near such level of attention to references, causing some readers of their papers quite a bit of suffering. As much as I adore Feynman's timeless Caltech commencement speech, the "man named Young" joke is on him.
Slashdot Mirror
Have you read that essay by Asimov yet? There's really no point to this discussion until you do. The spacetime curvature is a mathematical description of what we observe, it's but one way of describing it. You are essentially arguing against yourself. Approximation is precisely what you can incrementally improve on.
Still no. Our understanding of gravity was refined by Einstein's theory, but it's not a radical change. Einstein's theories add the relativstic aspect to our understanding of gravity. This is an incremental improvement. The fact that you express it using fancy mathematics has no bearing on the crux of the issue -- namely, that it's an improvement that is incremental and subject of Asimov's essay. Similarly, Darwin's main idea has been unchanged just as the main idea of gravity (an attractive force between objects with gravitational mass) was unchanged. Yet the evolutionary theory's details have been vastly improved since Darwin, just as they have been improved for the gravitational theory. You're entirely off base in thinking that there's much difference in what happened to both of those theories since Darwin -- the basic ideas are unchanged, but the details have been vastly improved. For both.
Seconded!
There is a difference between "revised" and "refined". Newton's idea of gravity being some invisible pull between two objects is radically different than Einstein's notion that gravity is the curvature of space-time around an object.
In a word: NO. Read it, understand it, be enlightened. Don't be stupid. Please.
At the moment, you're the English Lit friend.
In short, my English Lit friend, living in a mental world of absolute rights and wrongs, may be imagining that because all theories are wrong, the earth may be thought spherical now, but cubical next century, and a hollow icosahedron the next, and a doughnut shape the one after.
evolution has not been revised since it was proposed by Darwin.
Speak for yourself, oh aptly nicked one. Just because you haven't kept in touch with evolutionary biology post-Darwin doesn't mean it doesn't exist. You're of course in a large group of dumbasses who think that there has been no progress in this area since Darwin.
Evolution of course is a theory, but saying that it's just a theory is to completely miss the point. Scientific theories are science's most cherished deliverables. A scientist who makes significant contributions towards a new theory is one lucky fellow, in a rather exclusive company.
that involved having the school look into your finances and constantly pester you about what you spent money on X, Y, and Z when that money could have gone to the school
It's obviously your choice as to whether you want your finances looked into. Personally, I think good education for one's kids would well offset whatever perceived "loss" there is due to shedding a bit of privacy. Which reminds me that I need to check how much assistance we'd qualify for in a private school I have my eyes on for my kids.
A lot of physical laws govern many processes. For radioactivity to work the way some crazies out there wish it did, you would have to break lasers, life, and a lot of other stuff.
:) Knuth's code is readable because he adds a lot of prose to describe the code, and this human-centric flow of prose shapes the code. Code that needs prose to explain it is not very good at all. Most likely it's written in a programming language that is too low-level for the task at hand. Literate programming is is the wrong solution. Instead of writing prose for human consumption, one should use (or write) tools that let one express the meaning of the code such that it's comprehensible to humans in its entirety, without needing separate parts for machine use and for human use. C++ makes a step in that direction. LISP made a step in that direction long time ago and IMHO still remains the ultimately powerful way of expressing your intent such that it's human readable. Alas, it's somewhat hard to convert unadorned LISP into well performing machine code, so it's not really a universal solution -- just a much larger step in the right direction than C++ is.
Get yourself a kill-a-watt. As for longevity of the hardware: monitor the temperatures, and do some research on how the rise you observe from an idle system affects the reliability of various kinds of components, and what your financial impact may be.
You really want to read Feynman's Nobel Lecture. The highlight is:
Many different physical ideas can describe the same physical reality. Thus, classical electrodynamics can be described by a field view, or an action at a distance view, etc. Originally, Maxwell filled space with idler wheels, and Faraday with fields lines, but somehow the Maxwell equations themselves are pristine and independent of the elaboration of words attempting a physical description. The only true physical description is that describing the experimental meaning of the quantities in the equation - or better, the way the equations are to be used in describing experimental observations. This being the case perhaps the best way to proceed is to try to guess equations, and disregard physical models or descriptions. For example, McCullough guessed the correct equations for light propagation in a crystal long before his colleagues using elastic models could make head or tail of the phenomena, or again, Dirac obtained his equation for the description of the electron by an almost purely mathematical proposition. A simple physical view by which all the contents of this equation can be seen is still lacking.
The idea of the electron "moving around" the nucleus doesn't make much sense at all, just as the notion of the electron being "attracted" to a proton -- when you get down to a certain scale of things and certain systems. The fact that the electron is bound to a proton breaks the applicability of classical theories to both proton and electron. The best explanation we have at the moment for this is the theory of quantum electrodynamics. There, all of electrical interactions are modeled by photons, so that if you got an interaction, there's a photon involved. Photons are the carriers of all kinds of electromagnetic interactions, including what we'd classically call electrostatic attraction/repulsion.
In a way, what you're asking is why certain physical laws are one way and not the other -- we have zero clue about that. The natural law is somehow set up in such a way, that there no trick that will let you know the momentum and the position of a particle all at once. This is known as Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle. An electron "crashed" onto the proton would be such a trick: you know precisely where it is (stuck to the proton), and what momentum it has (non relative to the proton, it's stuck). We don't know what is that "something" that makes the nature work that way. No clue at all. There is, at the moment, nothing more fundamental that would explain this universal behavior of nature. Sorry about that.
You're in good company. Feynman spoke like a blue-collar guy too.
Good code is, apart from performance if and where it matters, really about readability by humans. Most of software engineering has nothing to do with software or computers, everything about human cognition. Design patterns are only idioms that are needed by humans, machines don't care one iota about those, and so on.
The best of assembly is only "good" to the CPU -- it's likely to be next to incomprehensible to humans. When you go far enough in optimizing assembly code, you, for example, may end up manually threading parallel processes that have strict timing requirements. This leads to utterly incomprehensible mess that, when run on the target, seems to perform as if by magic. I wrote such code and while it did the job, it's not what I'd consider good code. It'd be good code if there was a higher-level language that let me express the same thing, and produced equally well performing assembly at the output :) Sometimes it's impossible to write good code using a tool (language) that's not fit for the job. Too often such a tool (language) doesn't exist. Writing good code then requires writing a tool that will write the good code for you, and using that tool to do the job.
Case in point: a lot of the "cool" code for Parallax's Propeller platform, and for Microchip's PIC12 CPUs, is really about cycle counting and, when truly optimized, is really unfit for human consumption. There are no mainstream languages out there that would convert a more straight-line higher-level code and timing constraints into timing-optimized assembly. You're not a good programmer simply by the virtue of being able to coax the assembler to do your bidding. You're a good programmer if you can design the tool you need to produce the assembler for you -- in the demonstrable absence of an off-the-shelf solution.
You still have to do your homework. Read the Asimov's essay, and listen to Feynman's lectures, start to finish. For further reference, the edited version of the lectures is in Feynman's book "QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter". If you're in the U.S., you should be able to get it through a local library.
Just because you, a human, has a concept of what motion is, doesn't mean you can apply that concept to everything, in all circumstances. That's why physics is "hard": you have to unlearn stuff from everyday life, since it simply and plainly doesn't work when you get to tiny things.
There's no such thing as a "path" of an electron around a nucleus. Yes, you can write down such a thing in words, but it's simply nonsensical. That's perhaps the biggest mental leap that people need to make when starting to learn quantum-scale behavior. The concepts that you know stop working and make absolutely no sense anymore.
The reuse of the word "orbit" to mean the quantum energy state of a bound electron is IMHO a contributor to this disaster. People think "oh, an orbit, like in a planet" -- well, just because it's called an orbit doesn't mean it's got anything to do AT ALL with elliptical motion! You have an orbit that has no path at all, so any notion of what shape the path has is just gobbledygook. Just get it into your head that talking of a path of a bound electron is like talking about a path of a thought in your head. Nonsense. Wakalixes on a stick.
Orbitals have shapes, but that's something else, and even then it's not a path, is a somewhat nice scalar function defined in 3 dimensions. It's nice enough that we can plot a surface that follows an arbitrary scalar value and it looks like a shape to us.
Equally nonsensical is saying that electrons are "not moving in a linear fashion". WTF does that even mean?
Maybe you're hung up on literate programming, but seriously, while the code is decent, there just isn't much room for stellar stuff in a language as crusty as legacy Pascal. I'd argue that the language is seriously limiting what you can express while still keeping the code performing well.
So what you are saying is that an electron is not subject to the same laws of physics in different locations?
Yes and no. The electron exhibits quantum behavior. The classical notion of motion "around" the nucleus simply makes no sense. It doesn't apply in such circumstances. Demonstrably so - you can argue all you want, but what we see is precisely that what you have a problem with. I can't get over people who just won't accept reality for what it is. When the electron is free, its behavior often matches the classical theory, or even non-quantum relativistic theory, nevertheless it's still being described properly by quantum electrodynamics. When the electron is around the nucleus, quantum electrodynamics describe its behavior properly, while the classical theory doesn't anymore. For an introduction to this conundrum, you need to read Asimov's The Relativity of Wrong and listen to Feynman's QED lectures.
Every planet with an atmosphere begs to differ.
Why is it that that the negatively charged electrons in atoms are not attracted to and crash into the positively charged nucleus?
Because an electron bound to a nucleus has different properties than a free electron. Demonstrably so. In a synchrotron accelerator, you're accelerating free electrons. You don't need an accelerator to accerate electrons bound to a nucleus, photons do that just fine, but of course you can't boost them without limits. If you give them enough energy, they are freed from the nucleus. What I find curious is that I've learned that in high school, while you, supposedly an adult, pretend (perhaps dishonestly) that such basic knowledge is somehow best ignored.
This is so stupid I don't even know where to start.
Where do you think all this stuff is stored? For all practical purposes, everything that has been extracted has already been burned up, as far as fossil fuels go. The storage capacity is a tiny fraction of even yearly extraction. The "billions" in contracted reserves are a drop in the bucket. The fossil fuel economy is measured in trillions, not billions. Daily U.S. oil consumption, in crude equivalent, is on the order of USD 1 billion worth. Get a sense of scale, will you, pwetty pwetty please?
Oh, the US has simply exported its bubble, and a lot of Europe went for it hook, line and sinker. US exports its culture and media quite aggresively -- what, you don't think it has an impact on lifestyles and fiscal policy in Europe? Go to any ex-eastern-bloc country and look at how the teenagers there dress. It's as if a thousand US sitcom casts had escaped onto the streets mid-shoot. The clothing is merely a superficial aspect of a much broader trend.
Individual wheel drive as usually envisioned is silly. Yeah, it looks cool to have a direct drive motor on a wheel assembly But that's unsprung mass and you want to reduce it, not add to it. Once you have to get power to the wheel through a driveshaft of one sort or another, there's no point in having individual anything as it just adds duplicated mass for stuff like housings, mounting, etc. One motor, one gearbox, and two wheel drive right where the motor is - that's what's the most economical in any and all terms: weight, material cost, servicability, etc. RWD with motor in the front is heavier, AWD is heavier, one motor per wheel is heavier, and so on. About the only cheaper but worse handling solution than FWD is to have RWD with a solid (straight) axle and rear-mounted motor. You save some weight by not having four sets of universal joints. That's about all of the optimization you can do in an electric car.
There's a point at which you're talking about really small number of moving parts compared to anything with a conventional ICE, and the point of diminishing returns is staring right at you. Just count the number of rolling contact, spline and friction interfaces between the piston and the wheel in a conventional FWD car. An electric car cuts this by an order of magnitude!
Hydroelectric generation != hydroelectric storage. You can still develop plenty of new hydro storage to provide base load as generation shifts to bursty wind and solar.
You don't really need to do any deep analysis here. Any non-renewable fuels are necessarily a finite resource because our planet's crust and atmosphere have finite masses. All of the oxygen available to burn the fossil fuels is in the atmosphere and the crust. All of the fossil fuels are in the crust as well. That's as finite as it gets. There's no way to "never" run out of fossil fuels. We'll either run out of fossil fuels or out of atmospheric oxygen. Getting oxygen out of the crust is a very slow process, so at the moment it's best to forget about it.
The quality of the source code can't be considered in a vacuum. It is part of the overall quality of both design and implementation. TeX's design is crusty, and the source code shows no less. It's a reasonably well done crusty code. Nothing stellar there, I'm afraid. Yes, if you compare it to a lot of the stuff out there it does shine, but that's almost by definition. A lot of the stuff out there is mediocre, but that's due to the current distribution of human capabilities, nothing more. It's not going to change either, unless we find some magical elixir to make us all superhuman.
You claim that there aren't "many people today" who white such code. That's true, but not for entirely good reasons. For one, the code doesn't use all that many abstractions -- it's rather boring old Pascal. A modern C++ port could be half the size if done by an exceptionally good developer -- that's the benefit of having a compiler that can do more computation while compiling. Even a decently good C++ implementation could be 25% smaller and easier to maintain. So part of the reason that nobody writes code like that anymore is that it's not really the way we should be writing code anymore.
Knuth wrote reasonably nice code for its time, that's all. Alas, this has nothing to do with his quality as a researcher and author. His publication ethics are impeccable and his level of effort and dedication to his magnum opus is setting an example to us all. Every time I see a supposedly basic textbook being redone I think to myself: "Yeah, the previous one was crap, so they redo it, and the new one will equally be crap. Nobody seems to care enough to do it once, do it right, and keep on improving vs. redoing." Knuth's work has seen numerous incremental improvements, and his methods are rather thorough and detail-oriented. One example is him being adamant about collecting maximum detail in the references, including full names (with middle names) of the authors. Knuth knows academic research, and that includes research done in collecting references. He knows what a pain in the ass it is to have incomplete or erroneous references. Most authors don't pay anywhere near such level of attention to references, causing some readers of their papers quite a bit of suffering. As much as I adore Feynman's timeless Caltech commencement speech, the "man named Young" joke is on him.