"Nosocomial" is one of my favorite words. What a grand way of saying "hospitals are full of sick people and if you go there, you might get sick!"
(An infection transmitted in a hospital, clinic, or other medical setting is a "nosocomial" infection.)
I also like "epizootic" (an animal epidemic) and "zoonotic" (an adjective used to describe an infectious agent whose resivoir species is an animal, but can be transmitted to humans, such as rabies, anthrax, and varieties of influenza).
While I'm at it, and completly off the medical subject, I like the word "zymurgy."
Heck, I just like words!
On the actual subject, I think the problem is that medical doctors have enjoyed their privledged eductional status for so long that they haven't tried to keep their methods in the public conciousness. They don't teach their patients anything about the process of diagnosis, or about the methods of epidemiology and health statistics. Thus their patients feel like someone from, say, Spain, trying to learn about baseball from one of those fans who knows everyone's stats back to 1896. Our unfortunate Spaniard will never learn the game from such a person. However, they might observe the basics, 4 balls, 3 strikes, 3 outs per side in an inning, and then think that because they know these, they understand the game.
The person reading medical information (good or bad) on the web doesn't have the background to make intelligent judgements about the information being read.
The charlatans and the snake oil salesmen give easy answers with glib tech talk. That is so much easier to swallow than pronouncements from "on high" for physicians who won't (or can't) explain what is going on.
I don't have a cure for the problem. Doctor's don't have the time to teach elementary biology and biochemistry to every patient, and not all patients have the time or inclination to learn it.
Still, the general ignorance of the public at large about the tools and methods of science is at the root of an awful lot of bad policy making and bad decisions. You don't have to get a doctorate in every field to get enough mathematics, logic, statistics, and experimental methods to make some reasonably sound judgements about the information you are being presented.
My favorite example of this was from a story about a group of research scientists presenting results from some "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missle experiements to a congressional delegation. (I heard this story years ago, so the numbers I'm about to quote are totally out of my ass, but it is the form of the statement and the response that make my point). I believe the group was researching X-ray lasers to shoot down missiles. They said that "energies on the order of 10^32 joules would be required. To date, the best we have achieved in the lab is on the order of 10^16." To this statement, the congressional aide said, "My God! We're halfway there!"
If a person with a college degree thinks that 10^16 is halfway to 10^32, then the problem this doctor has dissuading patients from weird medical beliefs isn't so hard to understand.
I know you're joking, but your missing the point. Longhorn will detect if your AREN'T using a DRM equipped monitor and will dumb down the content in that case.
In other words, this will affect everyone who upgrades to Longhorn. The only way to see full res content will be through a NEW DRM equipped monitor.
I wasn't one of the people arguing with you, but as a programmer of some 15 years of professional experience, I will say that I think you need years of experience to become a good programmer.
But I agree with you that you can be a useful programmer in much less time.
I would also encourage anyone who has a computer to learn some programming. Otherwise I don't see the point. I don't like the way computers have become just another device to deliver entertainment. The whole point of the machine is to enable people to automate processes, to anaylze data, to, in short, compute.
Having a computer and not learning to program it has always struck me as being like having an airplane and only using it to taxi around the airfield.
I also don't think everyone who learns some programming needs to go on to become a professional and to master some sort of elite skills.
I just started doing it in the mid 70's (I was a kid) for fun. My old man was an electrical engineer and we built our first S-100 bus Z80 based system from scatch in 1976. I had to write the boot ROM for the thing to boot into a very early version of CP/M (I think it was 1.1 - it was CP/M 1.4 by the time we really had everything working). We burned our own EPROMs and we had those lovely 8-inch SSSD floppy drives. A> and B>
Ah... Memories: A> PIP B:=A:*.COM Mmmm....
The first programs I wrote were just for my own curiosity. I've always been more linguistic than mathematical (although I do well at both), so a couple of my first programs were a letter frequency counter and a vocabulary analyzer.
The first just counted how many times each letter appears in a given text file. The second kept an array of distinct words and an array of counts. I recall that I used a binary search to find the word in the one array and then used that index to find the count in the parallel array. I also recall that I wrote a bubble-sort algorithm to resort the array each time a new word was found. Of course that got to be horribly slow, so I hunted around for a faster algorithm. I'd love to claim I independently arrived at the quicksort algorithm, but I didn't. I found it in a book and worked through it to understand it.
I guess I'm both agreeing and disagreeing with you. I don't think that everyone can become a good programmer. You have to like that kind of mindset to do it. I don't think everyone can even be a useful programmer, although most probably can.
Here's where I strongly agree with you: People should be encouraged to program. They should be treated gently when they present workproduct. If someone had said to me about my little vocabulary analyzer "Boy, are you stupid! You're an idiot to sort that way! What a retard!" I doubt I would have carried on. Instead a "grownup" friend of my dad (a programmer -- my dad, as an EE, looked on programming as "the black arts" -- he always used to say that the only reason software existed was because no one had invented an editor for hardware) said "I notice that your program spends most of its time sorting that list. Do you think that you could make that sort faster?"
Things like that keep you going.
The fact that today I could write the same program in three lines of perl without knowing anything about sorting doesn't change the usefulness of the knowledge and experience I gained by doing it the hard way.
So, while I'll be the first to say that being a good programmer is difficult, I'll also say that few professional programmers are actually good programmers who could really come up with an original non-obvious algorithm.
I'll also say don't let the naysayers break your spirit. You may never become a great programmer. But you might. (I wouldn't call myself a great programmer -- that's reserved for the Djikstra's of the world) And I guarantee that you will learn many useful and fun things along the way.
Oh, and no programmer who thinks he is an elite programmer actually is. All the really talented ones know full well that they have no monopoly on cleverness. Even a junior programmer of modest skills sometimes thinks of the one thing no one else has.
I haven't heard this one before, but I'm sure you're right that someone makes that claim. I think the NIMBY's will change their tune when their houses go cold and dark.
I'm in the most thoroughly evil sub sub-urban home you could imagine. There are no stores or other resources within 5 miles of my home, so I'm a car junkie.
But my home is very energy-efficient, with good south exposure and passive solar gain. I'm looking into a ground-source heat pump, solar thermal water heat, and PV. I'd consider a wind turbine too, but my site is less than ideal.
Oh, and if I can reply twice to the same post, I am in a fairly rural location (you don't get 2 acres in urban locations easily), and while my county has fairly generous rules with respect to towers, many municipalities have tighter restrictions. Also, much land is subject to covenants, which are entirely private arrangements, but are enforcable contracts. These are usually put in place by whomever sold or or bought a large block of land to subdivide for residences. Since such covenants are private, they are binding partically forever. I'm not sure what you would have to do to get around a covenant. I'm not even sure it is possible.
Most US states, counties, and townships have a system to apply for a variance to get around legislated roadblocks. Private covenants? I don't know how you knock those down.
Trust me. Your neighbors will be glad you have a wind turbine when you are providing power during periodic blackouts (which are coming folks, don't doubt it -- the fossil fuels party is just about over. Even those most optomistic informed opinions give us about 40 years tops.)
We're going to need to diversify our energy bases and fast. We will need wind, solar (pv and thermal), geothermal (ground source heat pumps), coal (alas, it pollutes and is finite too, but we've got more of it), splitting atoms (face it, it is better than starving in the dark and it pollutes less than coal -- it even puts less radiation in the environment than coal, barring accident), and we are going to need both ethanol and biodiesel as transportation fuels for those things that are simply too big to power with electricity from those other sources, even if they are net energy losers (which it seems they do not have to be).
Our energy future is pretty damned bleak *if* we continue to ramp up use at our present incredible level of inefficiency and waste.
The good news is that we are just beginning to see the rise of oil prices. It will continue, and even accelerate. I'm not in the "doom" camp (like dieoff.org), but it is going to be a shock and a difficult adjustment. How harsh it will be will depend a great deal on how fast prices rise and availablity falls. If it happens slowly enough the the economy can allow for the transition to alternative energies and higher conservation, then it could be a soft landing. If not, the whole industrial and service economy could collapse and we'll all be standing around without money or jobs wondering what the hell we are all going to do.
I defenitely urge people to look at sites like www.peakoil.net and yes, even dieoff.org. There are good facts amid the pessemism. I'm more optomistic because I believe with the right leadership, we can get the people of the US and the rest of the "high energy" world to join in serious conservation and habit changes that can help to shallow out that downslope side of the Hibbert curve.
As my fellow engineers like to say, "Necessity is a mutha'" (as a riff on the cliche "Necessity is the mother of invention")
We will change because we will have to.
Don't fear the "windmill." It will be part of your survival in some winter probably within the next decade.
I don't know about your part of the world, but the limits in my county are that the tower must be short enough that if it fell it would land inside your property lines. I have 2 acres, the narrow part of which is about 350 ft. so I can have (in theory) a 125 ft. tower (although IIRC the FAA gets to intervene above a certain height -- you know -- the red "don't fly into me lights").
As for noise, I don't know about this homebrew thing, but there is a commercial windmill about 10 miles from my house in minnesota. It is 250 ft high with a rotor span of 150 ft. It produces an annual average of 1.2 million kWhr (enough to power about 200 average homes). You can drive right up to it, which I did the other day. I had to turn of my radio and my carn engine to hear it AT ALL. It made a soft "whoof whoof" sound that was audible when I was right underneath it, but could not be heard from 1 block away.
I don't think this is an "or" question. I think it clearly is both. IAMDNAL (most definitely not a lawyer;-), but I think MS could argue that "it has been too long."
I wouldn't slam the plaintiff here, though. I suspect the majority of actions brought are "nuisance suits," intended to extract a "pound of justice" by the mere threat rather than cases intended for trial.
This is the judicial ecology. It's all part of the semi-free market. I'm a big fan of the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. The alternative is the good old days of range war. I can't say I'd be a fan of that.
Heh! Fortunately, I have not been intimately acquainted with syphilis, so I will readily admit that I don't know how to spell the word. Thank God, sir, for people like you!
The Tuskegee airmen and the Tuskegee syphilus study aren't the same thing! (Although both refer to the same place).
The evil government experiment was the Tuskegee syphilus study. They told residents of Tuskegee that they would receive free syphilus treatment and then treatment was withheld so the effects of syphilus could be scientifically documented and studied.
I do not know if any of the Tuskegee Airmen (the only black squadron -- or the first, I don't remember -- in WWII) were in the study also, but they are not the same thing at all.
Yeah. I doubt you not. May main point (which is independent of the quality of the number -- typical slashdot intellectual laziness!) is that oil has such energy density just sitting in the ground and the fact the *human effort* didn't go into creating it is the only reason it is a desirable commodity.
Essentially we're spending in a couple of hundreds of years a multi-million year energy investment made by the planet long before we got here. It is only by ignoring that input that oil looks like an efficient source of energy.
Unfortunately, this "ingore the real inputs" makes every alternative look disproportionately poor. That was my point.
I certainly wouldn't dismiss anything you are saying and I haven't done anything like original research on this question myself.
I am parroting the figure from a paper. I believe it does include the costs of refining and transportation. I doubt it includes the costs of infrstructure (road construction and maintenance) but I would have to not only find the paper again, but also read the methodology part. I don't claim expertise.
Also (to further your point) it obviously dismisses all the energy it took to get the oli created in the first place, which is why oil is such a phonomenally appealing energy source. All the costs are completely hidden in the distant past.
Believe me, I'm not trying to make the case for oil here! I'm just trying to point out why we are so easily addicted to the stuff when there are clearly much more sustainable and environmentally-friendly energy sources available.
But in my defense, I did say it was "off the top of my head." I'd love to say that everything on Slashdot is carefully researched and backed up with footnotes, but we all know how true that is...
Still, I was wrong. You are right. Please don't quit reading, however. Do what you did: hold me (and everyone else) to the truth. "Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice."
Those time projections are based on *US Supply*. But I agree, the nuclear option is just another holding measure.
The somewhat hyperbolic site I link to in my parent post gets one major thing wrong, IMHO. He points out that the energy return on energy invested in making hydrogen from water by is 1/1.7, which he says makes it impossible. If solar photovoltaics are used to provide that electricity, however, it becomes totally feasible. Hydrogen can be the storage medium and transportable form for renewable electricity.
That said, all the energy density problems and economies of scale issues are still there. We will all have to do with less. Right now oil's EROEI is about 30/1, which is just phenomenally good. That free ride is coming to an end.
Still, I tend to be an optimist. I do believe we will shift resources. I do believe we can get public-spirited conservation. I do believe we can actually substantially reduce oil demand (we will have to) and the market will make us do it. I'm not sure there will have to be "oil panic" scenario the doomsayers paint. The price will make us do things differently. They (the peak oil doom crowd like the site I referenced) assume that the peak itself will be a catastrophic moment. I'm not sure I believe that. I think we've just seen the start of a steady, perhaps accelerating rise in prices. But I promise you, that will reach a point where it reduces demand and where it will drive investment in new technologies.
As for the other uses of oil in making plastics, drugs, paints, etc. Well, the switch to alternatives will "free up" some of that supply. Also, it is possible to synthetically produce many of those products from more basic organic compounds, it is just too expensive to o so right now.
No, my big worry is fertilizer and the food supply. I don't see how we can avoid a decrease in food production. Still, from Paul Erlich onwards, those who have given us predictions of doom by such-and-such a time have been consistently wrong. And I think that is only because their predictions are based on an "all things being equal" basis. The trouble is things change. New technologies, new efficiencies, clever ideas. That won't stop happening.
The one thing we can be sure of, however, is that the world 50 years from now will not look much like the world of today. And I'd say that might be a very good thing. Sure, it might be an epoch-shattering disaster. But I'd prefer to work on making it a good thing.
It is going to be a challenging time. I sure agree with you on that!
The Clinton administration signed the Kyoto treaty, which the Bush administration withdrew from. The Clinton administration set up the "million solar roofs" program. Those are just two things I know off the top of my head.
That said, I don't think any American administration has taken energy seriously. Oddly, I think the Bush administration does, but only because the oil peak is something the oil-industry connected administration understands well.
Make no mistake. I like much of what is in the Bush energy bill (although I don't think it goes nearly far enough and my personal repulsion for the man and his politics is boundless). Before you assume too much about me from these statements, one of the things I wholeheartedly endorse is streamlining licensure of nuclear power plants (despite the fact that he [Bush] continues to call them "nucular" plants).
The oil supply is going start shrinking soon folks. When it does, the price is going to shoot up and the oil companies will make even more money than they do today, but not for too much longer. We have very few alternatives to oil. Yes, solar and wind can supplement. And we'll build that. But they aren't there all the time. Yes, coal is there. But it is just as exhaustible as oil and we'll face the problem again in the future.
Splitting those atoms is the only sure way we have to keep our economy alive and to do so without destroying our climate. Yes, the waste is a problem, but nothing compared to inaction when the oil supply begins to shrink.
The other big thing to do is go after EFFICIENCY. The good news is that the price of energy will force it (again, this left-leaning liberal might suprise you by saying "markets work."), but the bad news is that we might not be able to make the needed changes quickly enough.
I'm genuinely worried about the next 25 years and energy. I'm far more worried about this than the "terrorist threat." Why? Because when gasoline rises to $10+ USD per gallon it will affect many more people than any suicidal maniac possibly could, even with NBC weapons.
A world without oil (or oil prohibitively expensive) is a world where everything you have must be made and moved with your own hands. Take a look around you and ask yourself how much of what you have now you could have in such a world?
Obviously human ingenuity and engineering skills won't disappear. We'll come up with things. The new computer controlled phase driven electric motors being developed might very well give us a way to do our transport and civil engineering with electricity instead of oil. Other developments will come. But how soon?
I can imagine a return of regional food production. The return of railroads for the bulk of freight and interstate travel. Etc.
Our present just-in-time economy is based on cheap oil. It won't be with us much longer.
BigDecimal doesn't a Currency class make. I'm talking about something that will do currency exchange and financial calculations. Mine uses BigDecimal inside.
But even if you just handle one currency and can thus use BigDecimal directly, you still can't overload the algebraic operators.
Operator overloading
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Java 1.5 vs C#
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· Score: 3, Informative
Say Amen!
Just because operator overloading can be used for evil is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Java lacks a Currency class, so I wrote a Money class some time ago that I use for common financial calculations, and it takes care of the pesky problem (and newbie mistake) of using floating point types for money.
BUT, in Java, you have to have add(), sub(), mult(), and div() methods. Reading RPN style caclulations consisting of sequenced and nested method calls instead of algebraic operators is painful. Operator overloading is wonderful in those cases.
Operator overloading certainly can be evil: What does it mean to increment an Employee? Do I really want to know? But for new types that you can actually do algebra with, it is quite helpful.
And there are other cases.
In my C++ days I wrote a FileHash class that kept an index of offsets to the start of each text line in a text file. Then I overloaded the array subscript operator so that a text file could used like an array of char pointers (or a String class if you liked). That was a perfectly good use of overloading.
Moreover I think overloading the array subscript on ordered collections also makes perfect sense.
I often wish Java had this feature. I agree with every simplifying choice they made except this one.
I get you now. But I don't think those are "environmentalists." I, too, mistrust those who see "nature" as an idyll. Nature is harmonious, but it is a harmony "red in tooth and claw." Malthus had it right.
So I get what you are saying, but I don't think the people you describe have anything to do with climatological research.
This is the same argument an addict makes. Anyone who argues that we will "destroy all life on earth" is clearly engaged in hyperbole. But when folks point up the massive shifts in earth's climate in the past, they should remember that they correspond (in geologic terms) with epochs of mass extinction. We might be clever enough to survive a massive upheaval in the climate of the planet, or we might not. Still, if the upheval is caused or accelerated by human activity, then wouldn't it be even more clever to slow or stop it?
Please note that I am not taking sides on that question. I don't know enough about it. But I do know that the assertion made at the top is true: The majority of climatologists not directly funded by energy companies believe human production of greenhouse gases are warming the planet.
The famous wager between ecologist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon illustrates the difficulty that the environmental side of the argument will always have. The environmental argument can only be made on the assumption "if things remain the same." But things never remain the same. Scarcity doesn't have to "kill," it can simply make alternatives economical. The cost to run enough wire through the ocean to support modern global telecommunications became too high. Putting satellites in orbit (a ridiculously expensive undertaking in the days of telegraphs and slow boats) became quite reasonable.
I very firmly believe that once the costs of global warming are realized, market forces will push us into alternatives. This is already happening. Insurance companies are funding climate research. They have a powerful economic interest that may be opposite to the energy industry's interests.
I believe global warming is happening (and I say "believe" because I don't know the science well, and I would be surprised if more than 1% of the people reading and posting here actually know the science well), and I believe that eventually markets respond to all forces that act on them. The question is how far wrong can things go before the market "understands" the problem?
The problem is one of measurement. We need to be able to quantify the human impact on the environment. We can point out things like the PPM of CO2, but we can't tie that directly to costs, or even to climate change. Alas, global climate is a system much more complex than even the international system of currency, and look how well we understand that.
I am hopeful, but not sanguine about our ability to deal with the issue.
But, I must acknowledge, I rely upon argumentum ad vericundium. And so do the "global warming is bunk" crowd here. So our discussion may be interesting, but is certainly not terribly useful.
But, if I may ask, why in the world do you think it is a bad thing to be interested in the persistence of one's own ass?
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"Nosocomial" is one of my favorite words. What a grand way of saying "hospitals are full of sick people and if you go there, you might get sick!"
(An infection transmitted in a hospital, clinic, or other medical setting is a "nosocomial" infection.)
I also like "epizootic" (an animal epidemic) and "zoonotic" (an adjective used to describe an infectious agent whose resivoir species is an animal, but can be transmitted to humans, such as rabies, anthrax, and varieties of influenza).
While I'm at it, and completly off the medical subject, I like the word "zymurgy."
Heck, I just like words!
On the actual subject, I think the problem is that medical doctors have enjoyed their privledged eductional status for so long that they haven't tried to keep their methods in the public conciousness. They don't teach their patients anything about the process of diagnosis, or about the methods of epidemiology and health statistics. Thus their patients feel like someone from, say, Spain, trying to learn about baseball from one of those fans who knows everyone's stats back to 1896. Our unfortunate Spaniard will never learn the game from such a person. However, they might observe the basics, 4 balls, 3 strikes, 3 outs per side in an inning, and then think that because they know these, they understand the game.
The person reading medical information (good or bad) on the web doesn't have the background to make intelligent judgements about the information being read.
The charlatans and the snake oil salesmen give easy answers with glib tech talk. That is so much easier to swallow than pronouncements from "on high" for physicians who won't (or can't) explain what is going on.
I don't have a cure for the problem. Doctor's don't have the time to teach elementary biology and biochemistry to every patient, and not all patients have the time or inclination to learn it.
Still, the general ignorance of the public at large about the tools and methods of science is at the root of an awful lot of bad policy making and bad decisions. You don't have to get a doctorate in every field to get enough mathematics, logic, statistics, and experimental methods to make some reasonably sound judgements about the information you are being presented.
My favorite example of this was from a story about a group of research scientists presenting results from some "Star Wars" anti-ballistic missle experiements to a congressional delegation. (I heard this story years ago, so the numbers I'm about to quote are totally out of my ass, but it is the form of the statement and the response that make my point). I believe the group was researching X-ray lasers to shoot down missiles. They said that "energies on the order of 10^32 joules would be required. To date, the best we have achieved in the lab is on the order of 10^16." To this statement, the congressional aide said, "My God! We're halfway there!"
If a person with a college degree thinks that 10^16 is halfway to 10^32, then the problem this doctor has dissuading patients from weird medical beliefs isn't so hard to understand.
I know you're joking, but your missing the point. Longhorn will detect if your AREN'T using a DRM equipped monitor and will dumb down the content in that case.
In other words, this will affect everyone who upgrades to Longhorn. The only way to see full res content will be through a NEW DRM equipped monitor.
Even more evil than you thought, eh?
I wasn't one of the people arguing with you, but as a programmer of some 15 years of professional experience, I will say that I think you need years of experience to become a good programmer.
But I agree with you that you can be a useful programmer in much less time.
I would also encourage anyone who has a computer to learn some programming. Otherwise I don't see the point. I don't like the way computers have become just another device to deliver entertainment. The whole point of the machine is to enable people to automate processes, to anaylze data, to, in short, compute.
Having a computer and not learning to program it has always struck me as being like having an airplane and only using it to taxi around the airfield.
I also don't think everyone who learns some programming needs to go on to become a professional and to master some sort of elite skills.
I just started doing it in the mid 70's (I was a kid) for fun. My old man was an electrical engineer and we built our first S-100 bus Z80 based system from scatch in 1976. I had to write the boot ROM for the thing to boot into a very early version of CP/M (I think it was 1.1 - it was CP/M 1.4 by the time we really had everything working). We burned our own EPROMs and we had those lovely 8-inch SSSD floppy drives. A> and B>
Ah... Memories: A> PIP B:=A:*.COM Mmmm....
The first programs I wrote were just for my own curiosity. I've always been more linguistic than mathematical (although I do well at both), so a couple of my first programs were a letter frequency counter and a vocabulary analyzer.
The first just counted how many times each letter appears in a given text file. The second kept an array of distinct words and an array of counts. I recall that I used a binary search to find the word in the one array and then used that index to find the count in the parallel array. I also recall that I wrote a bubble-sort algorithm to resort the array each time a new word was found. Of course that got to be horribly slow, so I hunted around for a faster algorithm. I'd love to claim I independently arrived at the quicksort algorithm, but I didn't. I found it in a book and worked through it to understand it.
I guess I'm both agreeing and disagreeing with you. I don't think that everyone can become a good programmer. You have to like that kind of mindset to do it. I don't think everyone can even be a useful programmer, although most probably can.
Here's where I strongly agree with you: People should be encouraged to program. They should be treated gently when they present workproduct. If someone had said to me about my little vocabulary analyzer "Boy, are you stupid! You're an idiot to sort that way! What a retard!" I doubt I would have carried on. Instead a "grownup" friend of my dad (a programmer -- my dad, as an EE, looked on programming as "the black arts" -- he always used to say that the only reason software existed was because no one had invented an editor for hardware) said "I notice that your program spends most of its time sorting that list. Do you think that you could make that sort faster?"
Things like that keep you going.
The fact that today I could write the same program in three lines of perl without knowing anything about sorting doesn't change the usefulness of the knowledge and experience I gained by doing it the hard way.
So, while I'll be the first to say that being a good programmer is difficult, I'll also say that few professional programmers are actually good programmers who could really come up with an original non-obvious algorithm.
I'll also say don't let the naysayers break your spirit. You may never become a great programmer. But you might. (I wouldn't call myself a great programmer -- that's reserved for the Djikstra's of the world) And I guarantee that you will learn many useful and fun things along the way.
Oh, and no programmer who thinks he is an elite programmer actually is. All the really talented ones know full well that they have no monopoly on cleverness. Even a junior programmer of modest skills sometimes thinks of the one thing no one else has.
I haven't heard this one before, but I'm sure you're right that someone makes that claim. I think the NIMBY's will change their tune when their houses go cold and dark.
Oh, and yes, I do have stairs in my house.
I'm in the most thoroughly evil sub sub-urban home you could imagine. There are no stores or other resources within 5 miles of my home, so I'm a car junkie.
But my home is very energy-efficient, with good south exposure and passive solar gain. I'm looking into a ground-source heat pump, solar thermal water heat, and PV. I'd consider a wind turbine too, but my site is less than ideal.
Actually, I'm further south, in Hassan Township, just south of Rogers. But, yes, you've ID'd the correct wind turbine!
Oh, and if I can reply twice to the same post, I am in a fairly rural location (you don't get 2 acres in urban locations easily), and while my county has fairly generous rules with respect to towers, many municipalities have tighter restrictions. Also, much land is subject to covenants, which are entirely private arrangements, but are enforcable contracts. These are usually put in place by whomever sold or or bought a large block of land to subdivide for residences. Since such covenants are private, they are binding partically forever. I'm not sure what you would have to do to get around a covenant. I'm not even sure it is possible.
Most US states, counties, and townships have a system to apply for a variance to get around legislated roadblocks. Private covenants? I don't know how you knock those down.
Trust me. Your neighbors will be glad you have a wind turbine when you are providing power during periodic blackouts (which are coming folks, don't doubt it -- the fossil fuels party is just about over. Even those most optomistic informed opinions give us about 40 years tops.)
We're going to need to diversify our energy bases and fast. We will need wind, solar (pv and thermal), geothermal (ground source heat pumps), coal (alas, it pollutes and is finite too, but we've got more of it), splitting atoms (face it, it is better than starving in the dark and it pollutes less than coal -- it even puts less radiation in the environment than coal, barring accident), and we are going to need both ethanol and biodiesel as transportation fuels for those things that are simply too big to power with electricity from those other sources, even if they are net energy losers (which it seems they do not have to be).
Our energy future is pretty damned bleak *if* we continue to ramp up use at our present incredible level of inefficiency and waste.
The good news is that we are just beginning to see the rise of oil prices. It will continue, and even accelerate. I'm not in the "doom" camp (like dieoff.org), but it is going to be a shock and a difficult adjustment. How harsh it will be will depend a great deal on how fast prices rise and availablity falls. If it happens slowly enough the the economy can allow for the transition to alternative energies and higher conservation, then it could be a soft landing. If not, the whole industrial and service economy could collapse and we'll all be standing around without money or jobs wondering what the hell we are all going to do.
I defenitely urge people to look at sites like www.peakoil.net and yes, even dieoff.org. There are good facts amid the pessemism. I'm more optomistic because I believe with the right leadership, we can get the people of the US and the rest of the "high energy" world to join in serious conservation and habit changes that can help to shallow out that downslope side of the Hibbert curve.
As my fellow engineers like to say, "Necessity is a mutha'" (as a riff on the cliche "Necessity is the mother of invention")
We will change because we will have to.
Don't fear the "windmill." It will be part of your survival in some winter probably within the next decade.
Boy, am I a great typist or what? I had to turn "off" my radio and my "car" engine...
I don't know about your part of the world, but the limits in my county are that the tower must be short enough that if it fell it would land inside your property lines. I have 2 acres, the narrow part of which is about 350 ft. so I can have (in theory) a 125 ft. tower (although IIRC the FAA gets to intervene above a certain height -- you know -- the red "don't fly into me lights").
As for noise, I don't know about this homebrew thing, but there is a commercial windmill about 10 miles from my house in minnesota. It is 250 ft high with a rotor span of 150 ft. It produces an annual average of 1.2 million kWhr (enough to power about 200 average homes). You can drive right up to it, which I did the other day. I had to turn of my radio and my carn engine to hear it AT ALL. It made a soft "whoof whoof" sound that was audible when I was right underneath it, but could not be heard from 1 block away.
I don't think this is an "or" question. I think it clearly is both. IAMDNAL (most definitely not a lawyer ;-), but I think MS could argue that "it has been too long."
I wouldn't slam the plaintiff here, though. I suspect the majority of actions brought are "nuisance suits," intended to extract a "pound of justice" by the mere threat rather than cases intended for trial.
This is the judicial ecology. It's all part of the semi-free market. I'm a big fan of the right to petition the government for redress of grievances. The alternative is the good old days of range war. I can't say I'd be a fan of that.
Heh! Fortunately, I have not been intimately acquainted with syphilis, so I will readily admit that I don't know how to spell the word. Thank God, sir, for people like you!
The Tuskegee airmen and the Tuskegee syphilus study aren't the same thing! (Although both refer to the same place).
The evil government experiment was the Tuskegee syphilus study. They told residents of Tuskegee that they would receive free syphilus treatment and then treatment was withheld so the effects of syphilus could be scientifically documented and studied.
I do not know if any of the Tuskegee Airmen (the only black squadron -- or the first, I don't remember -- in WWII) were in the study also, but they are not the same thing at all.
And the very model of a modern Major General.
Couldn't resist...
Yeah. I doubt you not. May main point (which is independent of the quality of the number -- typical slashdot intellectual laziness!) is that oil has such energy density just sitting in the ground and the fact the *human effort* didn't go into creating it is the only reason it is a desirable commodity.
Essentially we're spending in a couple of hundreds of years a multi-million year energy investment made by the planet long before we got here. It is only by ignoring that input that oil looks like an efficient source of energy.
Unfortunately, this "ingore the real inputs" makes every alternative look disproportionately poor. That was my point.
I certainly wouldn't dismiss anything you are saying and I haven't done anything like original research on this question myself.
I am parroting the figure from a paper. I believe it does include the costs of refining and transportation. I doubt it includes the costs of infrstructure (road construction and maintenance) but I would have to not only find the paper again, but also read the methodology part. I don't claim expertise.
Also (to further your point) it obviously dismisses all the energy it took to get the oli created in the first place, which is why oil is such a phonomenally appealing energy source. All the costs are completely hidden in the distant past.
Believe me, I'm not trying to make the case for oil here! I'm just trying to point out why we are so easily addicted to the stuff when there are clearly much more sustainable and environmentally-friendly energy sources available.
But in my defense, I did say it was "off the top of my head." I'd love to say that everything on Slashdot is carefully researched and backed up with footnotes, but we all know how true that is...
Still, I was wrong. You are right. Please don't quit reading, however. Do what you did: hold me (and everyone else) to the truth. "Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice."
Yes. You're perfectly correct. My sloppiness. My bad.
Those time projections are based on *US Supply*. But I agree, the nuclear option is just another holding measure.
The somewhat hyperbolic site I link to in my parent post gets one major thing wrong, IMHO. He points out that the energy return on energy invested in making hydrogen from water by is 1/1.7, which he says makes it impossible. If solar photovoltaics are used to provide that electricity, however, it becomes totally feasible. Hydrogen can be the storage medium and transportable form for renewable electricity.
That said, all the energy density problems and economies of scale issues are still there. We will all have to do with less. Right now oil's EROEI is about 30/1, which is just phenomenally good. That free ride is coming to an end.
Still, I tend to be an optimist. I do believe we will shift resources. I do believe we can get public-spirited conservation. I do believe we can actually substantially reduce oil demand (we will have to) and the market will make us do it. I'm not sure there will have to be "oil panic" scenario the doomsayers paint. The price will make us do things differently. They (the peak oil doom crowd like the site I referenced) assume that the peak itself will be a catastrophic moment. I'm not sure I believe that. I think we've just seen the start of a steady, perhaps accelerating rise in prices. But I promise you, that will reach a point where it reduces demand and where it will drive investment in new technologies.
As for the other uses of oil in making plastics, drugs, paints, etc. Well, the switch to alternatives will "free up" some of that supply. Also, it is possible to synthetically produce many of those products from more basic organic compounds, it is just too expensive to o so right now.
No, my big worry is fertilizer and the food supply. I don't see how we can avoid a decrease in food production. Still, from Paul Erlich onwards, those who have given us predictions of doom by such-and-such a time have been consistently wrong. And I think that is only because their predictions are based on an "all things being equal" basis. The trouble is things change. New technologies, new efficiencies, clever ideas. That won't stop happening.
The one thing we can be sure of, however, is that the world 50 years from now will not look much like the world of today. And I'd say that might be a very good thing. Sure, it might be an epoch-shattering disaster. But I'd prefer to work on making it a good thing.
It is going to be a challenging time. I sure agree with you on that!
The Clinton administration signed the Kyoto treaty, which the Bush administration withdrew from. The Clinton administration set up the "million solar roofs" program. Those are just two things I know off the top of my head.
That said, I don't think any American administration has taken energy seriously. Oddly, I think the Bush administration does, but only because the oil peak is something the oil-industry connected administration understands well.
Make no mistake. I like much of what is in the Bush energy bill (although I don't think it goes nearly far enough and my personal repulsion for the man and his politics is boundless). Before you assume too much about me from these statements, one of the things I wholeheartedly endorse is streamlining licensure of nuclear power plants (despite the fact that he [Bush] continues to call them "nucular" plants).
The oil supply is going start shrinking soon folks. When it does, the price is going to shoot up and the oil companies will make even more money than they do today, but not for too much longer. We have very few alternatives to oil. Yes, solar and wind can supplement. And we'll build that. But they aren't there all the time. Yes, coal is there. But it is just as exhaustible as oil and we'll face the problem again in the future.
Splitting those atoms is the only sure way we have to keep our economy alive and to do so without destroying our climate. Yes, the waste is a problem, but nothing compared to inaction when the oil supply begins to shrink.
The other big thing to do is go after EFFICIENCY. The good news is that the price of energy will force it (again, this left-leaning liberal might suprise you by saying "markets work."), but the bad news is that we might not be able to make the needed changes quickly enough.
I'm genuinely worried about the next 25 years and energy. I'm far more worried about this than the "terrorist threat." Why? Because when gasoline rises to $10+ USD per gallon it will affect many more people than any suicidal maniac possibly could, even with NBC weapons.
A world without oil (or oil prohibitively expensive) is a world where everything you have must be made and moved with your own hands. Take a look around you and ask yourself how much of what you have now you could have in such a world?
Obviously human ingenuity and engineering skills won't disappear. We'll come up with things. The new computer controlled phase driven electric motors being developed might very well give us a way to do our transport and civil engineering with electricity instead of oil. Other developments will come. But how soon?
I can imagine a return of regional food production. The return of railroads for the bulk of freight and interstate travel. Etc.
Our present just-in-time economy is based on cheap oil. It won't be with us much longer.
BigDecimal doesn't a Currency class make. I'm talking about something that will do currency exchange and financial calculations. Mine uses BigDecimal inside.
But even if you just handle one currency and can thus use BigDecimal directly, you still can't overload the algebraic operators.
Say Amen!
Just because operator overloading can be used for evil is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Java lacks a Currency class, so I wrote a Money class some time ago that I use for common financial calculations, and it takes care of the pesky problem (and newbie mistake) of using floating point types for money.
BUT, in Java, you have to have add(), sub(), mult(), and div() methods. Reading RPN style caclulations consisting of sequenced and nested method calls instead of algebraic operators is painful. Operator overloading is wonderful in those cases.
Operator overloading certainly can be evil: What does it mean to increment an Employee? Do I really want to know? But for new types that you can actually do algebra with, it is quite helpful.
And there are other cases.
In my C++ days I wrote a FileHash class that kept an index of offsets to the start of each text line in a text file. Then I overloaded the array subscript operator so that a text file could used like an array of char pointers (or a String class if you liked). That was a perfectly good use of overloading.
Moreover I think overloading the array subscript on ordered collections also makes perfect sense.
I often wish Java had this feature. I agree with every simplifying choice they made except this one.
I get you now. But I don't think those are "environmentalists." I, too, mistrust those who see "nature" as an idyll. Nature is harmonious, but it is a harmony "red in tooth and claw." Malthus had it right.
So I get what you are saying, but I don't think the people you describe have anything to do with climatological research.
Oh, and I misspelled "verecundium".
I know how quick Latin fans are to pounce!
This is the same argument an addict makes. Anyone who argues that we will "destroy all life on earth" is clearly engaged in hyperbole. But when folks point up the massive shifts in earth's climate in the past, they should remember that they correspond (in geologic terms) with epochs of mass extinction. We might be clever enough to survive a massive upheaval in the climate of the planet, or we might not. Still, if the upheval is caused or accelerated by human activity, then wouldn't it be even more clever to slow or stop it?
Please note that I am not taking sides on that question. I don't know enough about it. But I do know that the assertion made at the top is true: The majority of climatologists not directly funded by energy companies believe human production of greenhouse gases are warming the planet.
The famous wager between ecologist Paul Ehrlich and economist Julian Simon illustrates the difficulty that the environmental side of the argument will always have. The environmental argument can only be made on the assumption "if things remain the same." But things never remain the same. Scarcity doesn't have to "kill," it can simply make alternatives economical. The cost to run enough wire through the ocean to support modern global telecommunications became too high. Putting satellites in orbit (a ridiculously expensive undertaking in the days of telegraphs and slow boats) became quite reasonable.
I very firmly believe that once the costs of global warming are realized, market forces will push us into alternatives. This is already happening. Insurance companies are funding climate research. They have a powerful economic interest that may be opposite to the energy industry's interests.
I believe global warming is happening (and I say "believe" because I don't know the science well, and I would be surprised if more than 1% of the people reading and posting here actually know the science well), and I believe that eventually markets respond to all forces that act on them. The question is how far wrong can things go before the market "understands" the problem?
The problem is one of measurement. We need to be able to quantify the human impact on the environment. We can point out things like the PPM of CO2, but we can't tie that directly to costs, or even to climate change. Alas, global climate is a system much more complex than even the international system of currency, and look how well we understand that.
I am hopeful, but not sanguine about our ability to deal with the issue.
But, I must acknowledge, I rely upon argumentum ad vericundium. And so do the "global warming is bunk" crowd here. So our discussion may be interesting, but is certainly not terribly useful.
But, if I may ask, why in the world do you think it is a bad thing to be interested in the persistence of one's own ass?
Quite right. Of course, what are the politics like in California? ;-)