And where are you, Larry and Sergei? Waiting for the unpleasantness to just go away? Shivering under the covers with the rest of your lot? Shame on you. It is nearly too late to call your side, and we are all waiting.
"Seconds to midnight" is a great unit of probability. 5% probability every minute. Conveniently, a 95% probability (2 sigma) is "One Minute To Midnight".
Or if the higgs is at 2.4 sigma now, its 24 seconds to midnight. And, its energy is about a quarter microfirkin-microfurlong!
I vote we adopt these new doomsday units into the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight (FFF) system, so that we can say "That's 3 minutes to midnight!" to mean "That's an 85% probability!"
Proud Italian Americans tend to say, that once Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered.
But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Valley's latest wunderkind. This was well before IBM got into the marketplace. But everyone knew they would, considering the surge, and the rapidly expanding business market. The thing was that at the time, IBM's entry was met with quite a bit of disappointment. We were all expecting great things, but that was decidedly not what the 1st IBM PC was. A run of the mill CPU married to an also-ran OS. Not a step forward so much as a step sideways. Also a significant departure was that none of this stuff was actually developed by IBM, but by Intel, and an unknown snot-nosed kid with a bad haircut, who's mom was on IBM's board at the time. And yet, it was destined to become a huge thing. The technology decision makers in business were certainly no more savvy then than they are now. Why did it take off? "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was what was often said.
So, as it turns out, the singular thing that IBM contributed to the PC was its logo.
I'm assuming you're talking about the US. Contrary to the incessant, shrill whining, its more like 30%, which is quite a bit lower than the 7-major-OECD average. For 40% you have to go to the UK. Germany's 45%. And boy, does their economy suck! Here:
Oh yeah "best practices". This results, taken as a whole, in the biggest pile of crap ever devised by man. The exceptions are few enough to be thought of as fortunate accidents.
What people refer to as "engineering" in the software world would have long ago brought our industrial revolution to its knees.
What people refer to as "CS math" would have brought science to its knees if scientists payed any serious attention.
Luckily, with our "sharing culture" and "gift economy", the crap tends to find its place, and so do the gems.
Do something worthwhile wether your degree is in CS, math or English lit. Seriously.
There are plenty of libraries for doing this kind of thing (object tracking). Doing it with video processing is definitely the way to go though, because other than a camera and a substantial computer (or FPGA or GPU), its all software which is freely replicated, and easier to come by if you have more people with time and talent than money. Its also a lot harder to fool. Radar is basically obsolete, limited to speed only, and easy to dispute. If you track objects (cars), you can also factor in rapid acceleration/deceleration, extreme lane-changes, other things that you can update with software, like accident detection even. The OCR on the license plate is only to figure out who to send the ticket to. The speed, acceleration, etc is all done by tracking the whole car(s). Its a nice project for state-of-the-art geekery, and will have lots of non-traffic-related applications. If the only video that makes it out of the system are the snippets containing violations as determined by software, it could be made hard to use this system for general people tracking. Hard being a relative term, of course.
Oh, and its Cairo, right? No traffic lights, no enforcement, reckless speeding, sea of pedestrians. Its gotta be Cairo. Libertarians need to spend a week or two in Cairo to see how their ideas work in practice. Its not all bad, actually. Just extreme. I love Cairo.
I'm wondering how much 'ol T. Boone had to do with the aforementioned study.
Natural gas is fossil fuel. There are sustainable, renewable, carbon-neutral ways of getting it, but this is not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is dumping sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, and long (or medium) term, that's pretty primitive thinking in my book.
It would mean more giant piles of money for T. Boone if he manages to get his way. He's good at it too.
Sorry, but Rand's philosophy is all about not having people tell her what to do. Other than that, it was pretty much her telling people what to do. Its a subtle distinction, but it does illustrate a common characteristic of people who identify themselves as Libertarians.
Yeah, the VW bug was excellent in the snow if you learned how to drift it around corners. You had to initiate a controlled slide, because if it was ever initiated for you unexpectedly, the rear would sligshot past the front so fast, there was little left to do but pray.
That and driving with the windows cracked open and no heat to slow down the frost build-up on the inside of the windshield, and always carrying a lighter so you can melt a little peep-hole in the windshield to see through while driving 65 down the highway.
Your distinction 'ownership' vs 'membership' is pointless and only leads to additional layers of BS and lawyering.
That's true. But its a little more subtle than that. See, for people-persons, those rights are guaranteed by the constitution. For corporate-persons, these rights are at the whim of the legislature, and usually state legislatures at that.
So we can have our gumball machine make inflammatory ads about candidate X and all is copacetic in as far as state and federal laws allow because the constitution cares not a whit about gumball machines. Technically, this used to be called "commercial speech", which had to be factually correct by law, but its not fashionable to talk about that now. If these laws are too restrictive for the owners of the gumball machine, they can give money themselves to candidate Y up to the personal limit. The owners as people-persons also have 1st amendment leeway to express their love of candidate Y and hatred of candidate X. I believe that they can buy ads themselves to do so. The gumball machine, however, is limited by state and federal laws. It could give a dividend to the owners to pay for their political efforts, but only as long as state and federal laws allow it to do such things. This is all because GUMBALL MACHINES ARE NOT FRACKING PEOPLE, YOU GIT!
Well until now at least.
Now that gumball machines have 1st amendment rights, why not second amendment rights? The court just recently ruled that bearing arms is an individual right despite the quaint "regulated militia" thingie. This was decided by strict constructionists, and therefore true fact. So, can our property bear arms or not? Maybe this really only applies to various collectives for now - I don't know if this applies to actual gumball machines or say, my cat. God I hope not. Emancipation will be tough. But certainly the guns will come next. And the 5th too, that's important in case the legislature tries any "disclosure" monkey business.
Do foreign-owned gumball machines have 1st amendment rights here too? How many of the owners have to be American for it to assert these rights and buy ads unrestricted to influence our elections? Who will check their credentials and untangle the layers of corporate ownership? Will there be a corporate-person no-speak list? Will they have legal recourse? We've never really granted constitutional rights to non-human-persons before so explicitly, so there's lots of questions.
Umm, as I recall you were saying something about unintended consequences?
This is all true, but its the legal reality we have to deal with, not the real reality.
Its not that hard to envision an entirely employee-less business run by scripts. You could (in principle) set up a pair of corporations that are wholly owned by each other (can you do that? I don't know). Put that together with constitutional rights and you now have fully empowered, legally recognized autonomous non-human citizens. The hard part is setting up an automated revenue stream, but you already have things like automated trading software. The easiest corporate mission to implement is of course chaos. I don't know - buy up airtime and broadcast YouTube clips. Or static. Or randomly generated grammatically correct jibber jabber as is done now. Its a machine, after all. Who are we to guess its innermost desires?
corporations are literally the property of their shareholders. Other groups, clubs, unions, etc. are less obviously the property of their members, but the closest legally definable relationship between the group and its members is that of property and property owner. The group acts solely at the members behest and direction, no?
At best, SCOTUS granted constitutional rights to property. At worst it granted them to collectives. Is there a legal formula or principle by which we can determine what constitutional rights these collectives now possess, and which do not apply to them? Can they vote? Can they bear arms? Why not?
And exactly what types of collectives can we now welcome among our citizenry? Any collective formed willy-nilly? Does Al Qaeda now have 1st amendment rights? Saudi Aramco? Lukoil? Telmex? Why or why not?
The right of people to form a common bond group is just as fundamental as the right to speak.
Agreed. But, it does not follow that this common bond group also has the right to speak.
Corporations are property. We as individuals have property rights, and we can own property jointly or separately. Our rights to property do not endow the property with rights.
Sorry you interpreted me as being snide. Most people are not aware of the chemistry of biofuels, or the carbon cycle. I was just adopting the accepted sophomoric slashdot style in an apparently failed attempt at humor.
The main and important point is this: There is no net consumption of fixed nitrogen or phosphorus to produce biofuel. There is no practical way to make the fixed nitrogen and phosphorus magically go away somewhere so that its no longer part of the energy equation. You can't simply overlook this either because it is embodied in the accumulating piles of dead algae as you make the biofuel. These piles are equivalent to fertilizer produced from petroleum sources energetically, biochemically, and in every way that's relevant to this discussion.
This failure to account for all of the inputs and outputs of biofuel production is a standard way for interested parties to manipulate the mainstream press into publishing articles both for and against biofuels. This latest is the most egregious attempt I've seen. Usually its limited to things like playing with the petroleum cost of mining the iron and smelting the steel to produce farm equipment. Trying to brush the literal mountains of dead algae under the rug is something new.
You are mistaken. Biofuels do indeed come from thin air. CO2 (from thin air) + H20 + sunshine = biofuel The bulk of the mass in biofuel, just like the bulk of the mass in all plants and animals, indeed originates from thin air. True fact.
Or, to specifically address the ignorance of these "researchers", CO2 + H20 + "fixed nitrogen" + phosphates + algae = biofuel + "fixed nitrogen" + phosphates + "dead algae".
Biofuel contains nothing but oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. Anything else you need to add to make biofuel, you get just as much back out. Unlike carbon, once biology "fixes" nitrogen and phosphorus, they stay fixed. So they come back out just the way they came in, with the energy investment to fix them left intact. If you set up algae-biofuel production without accounting for what you're going to do with the heaping mounds of stinking dead algae, you have much bigger problems than fretting about your "petroleum balance".
If you set it up as part of a water treatment facility, or as a way to deal with heaping mounds of stinking chicken poo, or whatever, you will still need to do something with the heaping mounds of stinking dead algae.
Algae don't have cultural taboos about eating their dead friends and neighbors, so you can use all that dead algae as "fertilizer" for your next algae batch. Or sell it as fertilizer, thereby displacing an equivalent amount of petroleum necessary to make the fertilizer in the standard way. Or sell it as animal feed to displace an even larger amount of petroleum needed to make the fertilizer to grow and harvest the crops to make the animal feed.
This is just a long winded way of saying this is bull on the face of it. No, there is no point in reading the paper because there is nothing they can say or do to negate these basic biochemical facts.
The Virginia researchers promptly suggested "clean coal" as the answer to our woes?
Meanwhile, I kept dumping bleach into the kiddie pool all summer to keep the algae from growing. The neighbor must have been throwing in the fertilizer. Most algae is perfectly happy fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere all on their own (phosporus, not so much). Of course, that costs the algae energy to do, energy better spent fixing carbon from CO2.
The important point is, there is no nitrogen or phosphorus in algae-derived oil or ethanol (only carbon, oxygen and hydrogen). If you're throwing in nitrogen and phosphorus to grow the algae, you are leaving it behind when you make the biofuel, so the net cost of petroleum for this is 0 assuming you find something to do with what's left (like, I dunno, use it for fertilizer)?
Hopefully this kind of brain-death is attributable to whatever "science writer" coughed out this gem, and not the hapless researchers. Either way, IANRTFA.
From TFA: "The scientists have a couple of seas in mind for their off-world maritime research vessel. Ligeia Mare and Kraken Mare are both about 500km across."
From my recollection of that day, both my land-line and cell phone worked intermittently, mostly reporting that "all circuits are busy". TV coverage was also surprisingly uninformative, and at times simply a grotesque horrorshow.
Yup, the only thing that worked reliably and was consistently informative about what was happening that day was this very site.
In Mumbai, it was Twitter.
When the apocalypse finally comes, it will be ham radio.
Re:Good God, are you Clueless?
on
WiFi Triangulation
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
No, I'm not clueless, and I let everyone on board my wireless LAN without any encryption or password protection on purpose. Also, besides giving away bandwidth that I pay for to people I don't know for free, I have been known on occasion to do this with software that I write. No kidding! I just put it up on a web site and people I've never met download it for nothing. Amazing!
Seriously, I've been a scientist (biologist/biochemist/cell biologist) for some time. I've also been programming for about 20 years both professionally and not. I've never tried the corporate thing, but was pretty close a couple years ago. Now I'm doing my own take on bioinformatics and loving it. I can tell you that its not for everybody. The relevant metric really is productivity. Publishing papers, generally having some sort of measurable impact on science. Other than that, you can do anything you want, and are in fact required to do so. For many people that prospect is daunting even if they are talented engineers and computer scientists. Even in people I hire for my projects who are ostensibly developers, I look for people who can work independently. I expect to help them with direction, design, architechture, even nasty bugs, but really they are expected to be fully motivated from within and figure out not only how to do something, but what to do in the first place. Usually these people are absolutely miserable in the corporate world, but not always so.
The other thing you have to be is very flexible. One day you're happily spewing Perl, the next you're stringing cable or attacking the server with a screw driver. Science labs are generally poorly staffed with IT specialists (systems, networks, databases, etc), so expect to perform some or all of these things for your various 'lab duties'. The great thing is that open source is de rigour, so this is one of the best ways to get paid for writing open source software.
There is a pay trade-off, but its no where near what it was 2-3 years ago. Most academic IT positions pay competitive salaries with industry norms these days. You don't get stock options, but if you come up with something you think you can sell, there are well-trod paths to form companies to do that. Unlike in a company, you actually get to own a piece of what you make, and generally there are resources you can tap to help you along. Universities generally encourage this sort of thing. The other things that make up for the pay trade-off non-financially are a great work environment, interesting people, and most importantly interesting work that actually matters.
If you're one of these people, science is definitely for you, and what's more can really use you. Especially biology-related computing fields these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, that's a lot of punctuation. Why do they have a pre-teen for a CEO?
Well,for a long time chat applications seemed to be about the only examples of node.js in use, so maybe they have a point.
And where are you, Larry and Sergei? Waiting for the unpleasantness to just go away? Shivering under the covers with the rest of your lot? Shame on you. It is nearly too late to call your side, and we are all waiting.
"Seconds to midnight" is a great unit of probability.
5% probability every minute. Conveniently, a 95% probability (2 sigma) is "One Minute To Midnight".
Or if the higgs is at 2.4 sigma now, its 24 seconds to midnight.
And, its energy is about a quarter microfirkin-microfurlong!
I vote we adopt these new doomsday units into the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight (FFF) system, so that we can say "That's 3 minutes to midnight!" to mean "That's an 85% probability!"
Proud Italian Americans tend to say, that once Columbus discovered America, it stayed discovered.
But that's not a good analogy for IBM's contribution to the PC. The fact is that the PC was already there, and had a decent market, and was starting to make dramatic inroads into small and medium businesses thanks to the PC's first killer-app VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet program). This program first ran on the AppleII and propelled Apple from a small (actually fairly dominant) enthusiast company to Silicon Valley's latest wunderkind. This was well before IBM got into the marketplace. But everyone knew they would, considering the surge, and the rapidly expanding business market. The thing was that at the time, IBM's entry was met with quite a bit of disappointment. We were all expecting great things, but that was decidedly not what the 1st IBM PC was. A run of the mill CPU married to an also-ran OS. Not a step forward so much as a step sideways. Also a significant departure was that none of this stuff was actually developed by IBM, but by Intel, and an unknown snot-nosed kid with a bad haircut, who's mom was on IBM's board at the time. And yet, it was destined to become a huge thing. The technology decision makers in business were certainly no more savvy then than they are now. Why did it take off? "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM" was what was often said.
So, as it turns out, the singular thing that IBM contributed to the PC was its logo.
I'm assuming you're talking about the US.
Contrary to the incessant, shrill whining, its more like 30%, which is quite a bit lower than the 7-major-OECD average. For 40% you have to go to the UK. Germany's 45%. And boy, does their economy suck!
Here:
Oh yeah "best practices". This results, taken as a whole, in the biggest pile of crap ever devised by man. The exceptions are few enough to be thought of as fortunate accidents.
What people refer to as "engineering" in the software world would have long ago brought our industrial revolution to its knees.
What people refer to as "CS math" would have brought science to its knees if scientists payed any serious attention.
Luckily, with our "sharing culture" and "gift economy", the crap tends to find its place, and so do the gems.
Do something worthwhile wether your degree is in CS, math or English lit. Seriously.
There are plenty of libraries for doing this kind of thing (object tracking). Doing it with video processing is definitely the way to go though, because other than a camera and a substantial computer (or FPGA or GPU), its all software which is freely replicated, and easier to come by if you have more people with time and talent than money. Its also a lot harder to fool. Radar is basically obsolete, limited to speed only, and easy to dispute. If you track objects (cars), you can also factor in rapid acceleration/deceleration, extreme lane-changes, other things that you can update with software, like accident detection even. The OCR on the license plate is only to figure out who to send the ticket to. The speed, acceleration, etc is all done by tracking the whole car(s). Its a nice project for state-of-the-art geekery, and will have lots of non-traffic-related applications. If the only video that makes it out of the system are the snippets containing violations as determined by software, it could be made hard to use this system for general people tracking. Hard being a relative term, of course.
Oh, and its Cairo, right? No traffic lights, no enforcement, reckless speeding, sea of pedestrians. Its gotta be Cairo.
Libertarians need to spend a week or two in Cairo to see how their ideas work in practice. Its not all bad, actually. Just extreme. I love Cairo.
I've never met a Libertarian who neglected to tell me what to do.
I'm not sure you're very familiar with Ayn Rand or her cult. Or maybe its hard to see it as such unless you're looking at it from the outside.
I'm wondering how much 'ol T. Boone had to do with the aforementioned study.
Natural gas is fossil fuel. There are sustainable, renewable, carbon-neutral ways of getting it, but this is not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is dumping sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere, and long (or medium) term, that's pretty primitive thinking in my book.
It would mean more giant piles of money for T. Boone if he manages to get his way. He's good at it too.
Sorry, but Rand's philosophy is all about not having people tell her what to do. Other than that, it was pretty much her telling people what to do. Its a subtle distinction, but it does illustrate a common characteristic of people who identify themselves as Libertarians.
Yeah, the VW bug was excellent in the snow if you learned how to drift it around corners. You had to initiate a controlled slide, because if it was ever initiated for you unexpectedly, the rear would sligshot past the front so fast, there was little left to do but pray.
That and driving with the windows cracked open and no heat to slow down the frost build-up on the inside of the windshield, and always carrying a lighter so you can melt a little peep-hole in the windshield to see through while driving 65 down the highway.
Good times.
whoever manages the gum ball machine on behalf of its owners, is allowed to spend money to elect candidates who favor gumball sales
Only in as far as state and federal laws allow gumball machines to do such things.
The gumball machine does not have constitutional rights, dammit!
I don't think he's getting it.
Your distinction 'ownership' vs 'membership' is pointless and only leads to additional layers of BS and lawyering.
That's true.
But its a little more subtle than that.
See, for people-persons, those rights are guaranteed by the constitution. For corporate-persons, these rights are at the whim of the legislature, and usually state legislatures at that.
So we can have our gumball machine make inflammatory ads about candidate X and all is copacetic in as far as state and federal laws allow because the constitution cares not a whit about gumball machines. Technically, this used to be called "commercial speech", which had to be factually correct by law, but its not fashionable to talk about that now. If these laws are too restrictive for the owners of the gumball machine, they can give money themselves to candidate Y up to the personal limit. The owners as people-persons also have 1st amendment leeway to express their love of candidate Y and hatred of candidate X. I believe that they can buy ads themselves to do so. The gumball machine, however, is limited by state and federal laws. It could give a dividend to the owners to pay for their political efforts, but only as long as state and federal laws allow it to do such things. This is all because GUMBALL MACHINES ARE NOT FRACKING PEOPLE, YOU GIT!
Well until now at least.
Now that gumball machines have 1st amendment rights, why not second amendment rights? The court just recently ruled that bearing arms is an individual right despite the quaint "regulated militia" thingie. This was decided by strict constructionists, and therefore true fact. So, can our property bear arms or not? Maybe this really only applies to various collectives for now - I don't know if this applies to actual gumball machines or say, my cat. God I hope not. Emancipation will be tough. But certainly the guns will come next. And the 5th too, that's important in case the legislature tries any "disclosure" monkey business.
Do foreign-owned gumball machines have 1st amendment rights here too? How many of the owners have to be American for it to assert these rights and buy ads unrestricted to influence our elections? Who will check their credentials and untangle the layers of corporate ownership? Will there be a corporate-person no-speak list? Will they have legal recourse?
We've never really granted constitutional rights to non-human-persons before so explicitly, so there's lots of questions.
Umm, as I recall you were saying something about unintended consequences?
This is all true, but its the legal reality we have to deal with, not the real reality.
Its not that hard to envision an entirely employee-less business run by scripts. You could (in principle) set up a pair of corporations that are wholly owned by each other (can you do that? I don't know). Put that together with constitutional rights and you now have fully empowered, legally recognized autonomous non-human citizens. The hard part is setting up an automated revenue stream, but you already have things like automated trading software. The easiest corporate mission to implement is of course chaos. I don't know - buy up airtime and broadcast YouTube clips. Or static. Or randomly generated grammatically correct jibber jabber as is done now. Its a machine, after all. Who are we to guess its innermost desires?
corporations are literally the property of their shareholders.
Other groups, clubs, unions, etc. are less obviously the property of their members, but the closest legally definable relationship between the group and its members is that of property and property owner. The group acts solely at the members behest and direction, no?
At best, SCOTUS granted constitutional rights to property. At worst it granted them to collectives. Is there a legal formula or principle by which we can determine what constitutional rights these collectives now possess, and which do not apply to them? Can they vote? Can they bear arms? Why not?
And exactly what types of collectives can we now welcome among our citizenry? Any collective formed willy-nilly? Does Al Qaeda now have 1st amendment rights? Saudi Aramco? Lukoil? Telmex? Why or why not?
Discuss...
The right of people to form a common bond group is just as fundamental as the right to speak.
Agreed.
But, it does not follow that this common bond group also has the right to speak.
Corporations are property. We as individuals have property rights, and we can own property jointly or separately. Our rights to property do not endow the property with rights.
Sorry you interpreted me as being snide.
Most people are not aware of the chemistry of biofuels, or the carbon cycle. I was just adopting the accepted sophomoric slashdot style in an apparently failed attempt at humor.
The main and important point is this: There is no net consumption of fixed nitrogen or phosphorus to produce biofuel. There is no practical way to make the fixed nitrogen and phosphorus magically go away somewhere so that its no longer part of the energy equation. You can't simply overlook this either because it is embodied in the accumulating piles of dead algae as you make the biofuel. These piles are equivalent to fertilizer produced from petroleum sources energetically, biochemically, and in every way that's relevant to this discussion.
This failure to account for all of the inputs and outputs of biofuel production is a standard way for interested parties to manipulate the mainstream press into publishing articles both for and against biofuels. This latest is the most egregious attempt I've seen. Usually its limited to things like playing with the petroleum cost of mining the iron and smelting the steel to produce farm equipment. Trying to brush the literal mountains of dead algae under the rug is something new.
Sorry for any misunderstanding.
Biofuels don't just come from thin air"
You are mistaken. Biofuels do indeed come from thin air.
CO2 (from thin air) + H20 + sunshine = biofuel
The bulk of the mass in biofuel, just like the bulk of the mass in all plants and animals, indeed originates from thin air.
True fact.
Or, to specifically address the ignorance of these "researchers",
CO2 + H20 + "fixed nitrogen" + phosphates + algae = biofuel + "fixed nitrogen" + phosphates + "dead algae".
Biofuel contains nothing but oxygen, hydrogen and carbon. Anything else you need to add to make biofuel, you get just as much back out. Unlike carbon, once biology "fixes" nitrogen and phosphorus, they stay fixed. So they come back out just the way they came in, with the energy investment to fix them left intact.
If you set up algae-biofuel production without accounting for what you're going to do with the heaping mounds of stinking dead algae, you have much bigger problems than fretting about your "petroleum balance".
If you set it up as part of a water treatment facility, or as a way to deal with heaping mounds of stinking chicken poo, or whatever, you will still need to do something with the heaping mounds of stinking dead algae.
Algae don't have cultural taboos about eating their dead friends and neighbors, so you can use all that dead algae as "fertilizer" for your next algae batch. Or sell it as fertilizer, thereby displacing an equivalent amount of petroleum necessary to make the fertilizer in the standard way. Or sell it as animal feed to displace an even larger amount of petroleum needed to make the fertilizer to grow and harvest the crops to make the animal feed.
This is just a long winded way of saying this is bull on the face of it.
No, there is no point in reading the paper because there is nothing they can say or do to negate these basic biochemical facts.
The Virginia researchers promptly suggested "clean coal" as the answer to our woes?
Meanwhile, I kept dumping bleach into the kiddie pool all summer to keep the algae from growing. The neighbor must have been throwing in the fertilizer.
Most algae is perfectly happy fixing nitrogen from the atmosphere all on their own (phosporus, not so much). Of course, that costs the algae energy to do, energy better spent fixing carbon from CO2.
The important point is, there is no nitrogen or phosphorus in algae-derived oil or ethanol (only carbon, oxygen and hydrogen). If you're throwing in nitrogen and phosphorus to grow the algae, you are leaving it behind when you make the biofuel, so the net cost of petroleum for this is 0 assuming you find something to do with what's left (like, I dunno, use it for fertilizer)?
Hopefully this kind of brain-death is attributable to whatever "science writer" coughed out this gem, and not the hapless researchers. Either way, IANRTFA.
Pirates?
From TFA: "The scientists have a couple of seas in mind for their off-world maritime research vessel. Ligeia Mare and Kraken Mare are both about 500km across."
Its the Kraken!
Run for your lives, mateys!
From my recollection of that day, both my land-line and cell phone worked intermittently, mostly reporting that "all circuits are busy". TV coverage was also surprisingly uninformative, and at times simply a grotesque horrorshow.
Yup, the only thing that worked reliably and was consistently informative about what was happening that day was this very site.
In Mumbai, it was Twitter.
When the apocalypse finally comes, it will be ham radio.
No, I'm not clueless, and I let everyone on board my wireless LAN without any encryption or password protection on purpose. Also, besides giving away bandwidth that I pay for to people I don't know for free, I have been known on occasion to do this with software that I write. No kidding! I just put it up on a web site and people I've never met download it for nothing. Amazing!
Seriously, I've been a scientist (biologist/biochemist/cell biologist) for some time. I've also been programming for about 20 years both professionally and not. I've never tried the corporate thing, but was pretty close a couple years ago. Now I'm doing my own take on bioinformatics and loving it. I can tell you that its not for everybody. The relevant metric really is productivity. Publishing papers, generally having some sort of measurable impact on science. Other than that, you can do anything you want, and are in fact required to do so. For many people that prospect is daunting even if they are talented engineers and computer scientists. Even in people I hire for my projects who are ostensibly developers, I look for people who can work independently. I expect to help them with direction, design, architechture, even nasty bugs, but really they are expected to be fully motivated from within and figure out not only how to do something, but what to do in the first place. Usually these people are absolutely miserable in the corporate world, but not always so.
The other thing you have to be is very flexible. One day you're happily spewing Perl, the next you're stringing cable or attacking the server with a screw driver. Science labs are generally poorly staffed with IT specialists (systems, networks, databases, etc), so expect to perform some or all of these things for your various 'lab duties'. The great thing is that open source is de rigour, so this is one of the best ways to get paid for writing open source software.
There is a pay trade-off, but its no where near what it was 2-3 years ago. Most academic IT positions pay competitive salaries with industry norms these days. You don't get stock options, but if you come up with something you think you can sell, there are well-trod paths to form companies to do that. Unlike in a company, you actually get to own a piece of what you make, and generally there are resources you can tap to help you along. Universities generally encourage this sort of thing. The other things that make up for the pay trade-off non-financially are a great work environment, interesting people, and most importantly interesting work that actually matters.
If you're one of these people, science is definitely for you, and what's more can really use you. Especially biology-related computing fields these days.