I'm curious why it must be aluminum. I suppose Elon is very comfortable with building Aluminum structures given his background building rockets, and the Aluminum does help with making the supporting pylons further apart and not so bulky like would be needed for steel tubes, but I still wonder why it is necessary?
Steel tubes would seem to work just as well, although they would need to be thicker and require more materials to get them to work in the same way.
4.2.2. Tube Construction
In order to keep cost to a minimum, a uniform thickness steel tube reinforced
with stringers was selected as the material of choice for the inner diameter
tube...
> With the planned design, only one vehicle at a time can be in the tube
This is not true. The system states that it is designed to have multiple simultaneous pods, separated by several miles for safety.
I know it says that, but the design relies on a vacuum on the front and increased pressure behind. How does that work for the cars behind the first, magic?
Does not rely on a vacuum. You haven't bothered to take even one peek at the document. Quickly skimming page 4 of the document is sufficient to dispel this notion.
Honestly - is actually looking at the proposal too hard for you?
Not that construction most anywhere is immune from the problem but I would be willing to wager that much of NYC's money uis being spent to satisfy the "needs" of a few millionaire "blue-collar" guys.
Got anything at all to support this other than pure prejudice?
LOL Failboat. The Russian revolution? You mean the one that put in place the government that toppled in the 90's?..
He probably meant the second Russian revolution, that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II on 2 March 1917 due to the dire condition of most Russia citizenry, and the Tsar's mismanagement of the war. It established an elective democracy led by Alexander Kerensky.
There was a previous revolution in 1905, for similar reasons, that established some measure of democracy, but not enough.
You are thinking of the Bolshevik coup d'etat, which was not a revolution at all, and which led to a civil war. It is true that the Soviet government established by the coup called it "the Russian Revolution" but you shouldn't be so gullible as to swallow Communist propaganda.
... I was taught that it was CO2 and they 'exhale' O2. If this is true, with an increase in CO2, shouldn't nature naturally begin to grow more abundantly and plants produce more O2, or is there something missing?....
Oh yes. You are missing lots. Probably the two most important ones (to keep this short) is that A) growing things need water at the right times to grow, and B) the area of carbon storage for growing things (forests) is shrinking globally. If the temperature changes cause many forest zones of the world to dry out (as they are expected to) then growth will drop no matter how much CO2 is in the air.
Although I am not sure I buy the 20M number by 2100. That implies close to 6in/year and we are running closer to 1in/year.
This probably factors in the possibility of a sudden and dramatic change in the manner of ice release from Antarctica. It seems the ice shelves surrounding Antarctica act as ice dams holding back those slowly flowing rivers of ice we call "glaciers". Evidence is developing that when these shelves break-up glacier motion dramatically accelerates and the ice starts far more rapidly flowing into the sea, calving icebergs en masse as it does. So the ice unfortunately does not even have to melt to raise sea level. Antarctic ice stream flow can exceed 1.5 km/year.
But the article linked to is paywalled and I cannot even confirm that the claimed 20M figure is really there.
That was a long time before the bronze age.. Nobody was burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the air. SO.... How does something like this happen?...
We were clearing forests that stored carbon and replaced them with crops and other open land. Burning non-fossil fuels (i.e. forest, a common clearing practice in both Old and New Worlds) and not allowing regrowth releases CO2 just as surely.
Currently the industries that are generating vast wealth from the processes that release CO2 are using a portion of those immense financial resources in a public relations and political campaign to ensure that this cost does not come out of their revenue stream. The PR and political pay-off cost is a small fraction of what the cost of adaptation would be.
Please explain why you are sure that the cessation of the ice age, with an accompanying moderation in temperature, is not what permitted human agriculture -- and not the reverse. Please describe an experiment to falsify your premise.
The experiments have already been run many times by nature.
Take a look.
The release of carbon dioxide brings the end of great ice ages happens at intervals of about 75,000 during the last 800,000 (it has happened 11 times). The development of agriculture clearly post-dates this most recent natural CO2 and temperature surge.
Now agriculture has almost certainly helped maintaining this inter-glacial period by gradually clearing land that stored carbon as forest.
In fact we had a recent episode when pandemic disasters reversed this process of land clearing, causing a dip in atmospheric CO2, and precipitating the event know as the "Little Ice Age". First the Black Death and Central Asian population by a third starting in 1346, then the greatest pandemic even in world history (a series of them actually) depopulated the New World starting in 1492. This second collapse of agricultural civilization was much larger than the Black Death, but followed before recovery from same.
Humans have been manipulating global climate for 10,000 years.
No wonder most movies seem like derivative things you can predict what will happen... because they apparently are.
Still, keep making the superhero movies, and I'll keep going. =)
it's just not this book though.
...
If you think about it, it is inevitable that it can't just be this book. Because if it were, then it would mean that this author was someone of striking originality, almost a contradiction in terms. Instead this must be a careful codification of formulas already commonly known.
If this book is indeed very influential it is only because it was produced and marketed well, and so reached a wide audience.
I will, briefly. The Campbell monomyth is actually a grouping of various mythic acts with some major variations in which a hero in a legend may become involved. Any particular story "following" this pattern may differ radically from another since they may include different subsets of the acts and have none in common. Yet they will both be described as Campbell adherents as "Campbellian". I think Campbell's work is valid to a point, but the notion of single myth is way oversold.
This screenplay guide appears to be on an entirely different level of formulaic-ness.
After reading the article, I see that they researched numerous aspects of building this mosquito burning laser fence, and even tested some subcomponents.
They assert "In fact, for a few thousand dollars, a reasonably skilled engineer (such as a typical IEEE Spectrum reader) could probably assemble a version of our fence... " but as far as I can tell they didn't actually build a functioning fence themselves!
Come on Intellectual Ventures all it takes is a reasonably skilled engineer, and a few thousand dollars, so where is your f*cking fence to prove it in practice?!
Ah, "backyard star wars" - of course! No need to actually make something that works! Just declare you've solved the problem and move on!
(The involvement of Lowell Wood - he of the insanely over-hyped x-ray laser fame - explains a lot. Wood, as far as I can tell, has never been associated with any successful project or program.)
... because Ballmer has a stiffie for the iPhone yet doesn't have a damned clue about what makes an iPhone an iPhone! News Flash, Jobs spent more than 3 decades slowly but surely building up Apple to be a high end boutique brand, refused to cut prices even in the 90s when they were on the ropes, because for his entire strategy to work it NEEDED to be expensive!
A perfect analogy would be slapping a new coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting to get Porsche money for it, because MSFT slaughtered the competition precisely because they were NOT expensive, they were the Walmart to Apple's Macy's and there is NO WAY IN HELL they are gonna suddenly flip that and get people to pay more than for an Apple to buy WinPhones and Wintabs, its NEVER gonna happen, it will NEVER work, the MSFT stores are ghost towns, all the little shops like mine have "Yes we have Win 7!" signs in the window, he is burning the damned company to the ground trying to force a strategy that has less of a chance of succeeding than Heaven's Gate II has a chance of being made!
...
And Apple execs too can destroy a company trying to make it the "next Apple".
Former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson, confident in his extreme brilliance that had made Apple incredibly profitable (of course, why share credit with Steve Jobs or anyone else?), extended the benefits of his genius to J.C. Penney's, attempting to run it like an Apple store: dumping value priced merchandise for boutique items; no discounts, not ever; simply throwing away unread a huge consumer study just completed declaring that "just like at Apple, customers don’t always know what they want”.
... If the US government is trying its best to restrict its surveillance to non-US persons, what does it do if it accidentally intercepts and reads communications from a US person?
Probably the same thing the Police and Federal Agencies do when they falsely arrest you. They say "Oops! So you didn't do anything wrong. But we are keeping all of your info in our database of criminals forever, just in case."
Does this technicality allow the U.S. government to open sealed First Class mail whenever it likes? Sure its a domestic delivery but we haven't confirmed that both the sender and the intended recipient are U.S. citizens.
Extended to the physical mails it is analogous to deeming all sealed letters and other private mail to be suspicious and in need of permanent archiving, and so create Postal Bots that open each letter, photocopies its contents, the reseals it it until the Government decides it wants to devote the resources to looking it up and reading it.
In the email case the saving is easier, and the reading is harder than with physical mail but they both accomplish the same task (treating private mail as government property) with manageable levels of effort.
He will be correct if and when the population stops growing due to lack of resources.
Which means he has been right almost everywhere through nearly all of human history
The escape from resource limits has been quite recent in most places (less than a century).
He will finally be completely wrong if and when the population stops growing due to prosperity and educated females.
This is the one dramatic change in human ecology that will prevent the resource limit from eventually being reached again, although there are limited regions (e.g Rwanda) where the resource limit has again been hit already.
Unless we can support that much life with food, water and other resources, war for diminishing resources will wipe out enough population before we even get close to that.
Reverend Malthus wrote the same in 1798 in "An Essay on the Principle of Population", and was wrong then. Malthusian predictions have been wrong ever since.
Yet another person who has no idea what Malthus wrote.
In that 100 plus page work he basically simply stated that population growth was generally restricted by available resources, and that it tended to increase to the limit of those resources ("Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio").
This is not only not wrong, it is without question a correct statement of affairs.
Indeed until quite recently (about 1950 in fact) the amount of food that could be produced by a hectare of land had been essentially unchanged since ancient times. Small increases had been obtained by better agricultural practices but we aren't talking about even a doubling of productivity in 2000 years.
Increases in population until the start of the Green Revolution (an advance in scientific plant breeding) had been obtained by putting more land under production (that arithmetic increase thing Malthus mentioned).
Since that time we have had a true revolution in food production, with productivity increasing several-fold, and it still continues.
That 200 years is a conservative estimate. Advanced breeder and thorium reactors can push that figure up to the thousands, which is more than enough time to crack fusion.
Simply extracting uranium from sea water, without breeding, will push the figure to thousands of years as well.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm curious why it must be aluminum. I suppose Elon is very comfortable with building Aluminum structures given his background building rockets, and the Aluminum does help with making the supporting pylons further apart and not so bulky like would be needed for steel tubes, but I still wonder why it is necessary?
Steel tubes would seem to work just as well, although they would need to be thicker and require more materials to get them to work in the same way.
4.2.2. Tube Construction
In order to keep cost to a minimum, a uniform thickness steel tube reinforced with stringers was selected as the material of choice for the inner diameter tube...
Please, please, please at least skim the paper.
> With the planned design, only one vehicle at a time can be in the tube
This is not true. The system states that it is designed to have multiple simultaneous pods, separated by several miles for safety.
I know it says that, but the design relies on a vacuum on the front and increased pressure behind. How does that work for the cars behind the first, magic?
Does not rely on a vacuum. You haven't bothered to take even one peek at the document. Quickly skimming page 4 of the document is sufficient to dispel this notion.
Honestly - is actually looking at the proposal too hard for you?
Not that construction most anywhere is immune from the problem but I would be willing to wager that much of NYC's money uis being spent to satisfy the "needs" of a few millionaire "blue-collar" guys.
Got anything at all to support this other than pure prejudice?
LOL Failboat. The Russian revolution? You mean the one that put in place the government that toppled in the 90's? ..
He probably meant the second Russian revolution, that overthrew Tsar Nicholas II on 2 March 1917 due to the dire condition of most Russia citizenry, and the Tsar's mismanagement of the war. It established an elective democracy led by Alexander Kerensky.
There was a previous revolution in 1905, for similar reasons, that established some measure of democracy, but not enough.
You are thinking of the Bolshevik coup d'etat, which was not a revolution at all, and which led to a civil war. It is true that the Soviet government established by the coup called it "the Russian Revolution" but you shouldn't be so gullible as to swallow Communist propaganda.
... I was taught that it was CO2 and they 'exhale' O2. If this is true, with an increase in CO2, shouldn't nature naturally begin to grow more abundantly and plants produce more O2, or is there something missing?....
Oh yes. You are missing lots. Probably the two most important ones (to keep this short) is that A) growing things need water at the right times to grow, and B) the area of carbon storage for growing things (forests) is shrinking globally. If the temperature changes cause many forest zones of the world to dry out (as they are expected to) then growth will drop no matter how much CO2 is in the air.
...First the Black Death where the European and Central Asian...
That would be the acceleration is accelerating.
Although I am not sure I buy the 20M number by 2100. That implies close to 6in/year and we are running closer to 1in/year.
This probably factors in the possibility of a sudden and dramatic change in the manner of ice release from Antarctica. It seems the ice shelves surrounding Antarctica act as ice dams holding back those slowly flowing rivers of ice we call "glaciers". Evidence is developing that when these shelves break-up glacier motion dramatically accelerates and the ice starts far more rapidly flowing into the sea, calving icebergs en masse as it does. So the ice unfortunately does not even have to melt to raise sea level. Antarctic ice stream flow can exceed 1.5 km/year.
But the article linked to is paywalled and I cannot even confirm that the claimed 20M figure is really there.
Seems to me then that if the choice is between global warming and global cooling, I'll take global warming. Thank you for you time.
And of course this is not the choice at all. It is about how much global warming will occur and how fast.
That was a long time before the bronze age.. Nobody was burning fossil fuels and dumping CO2 into the air. SO.... How does something like this happen? ...
We were clearing forests that stored carbon and replaced them with crops and other open land. Burning non-fossil fuels (i.e. forest, a common clearing practice in both Old and New Worlds) and not allowing regrowth releases CO2 just as surely.
You left out, who will pay the costs of adapting.
Currently the industries that are generating vast wealth from the processes that release CO2 are using a portion of those immense financial resources in a public relations and political campaign to ensure that this cost does not come out of their revenue stream. The PR and political pay-off cost is a small fraction of what the cost of adaptation would be.
Please explain why you are sure that the cessation of the ice age, with an accompanying moderation in temperature, is not what permitted human agriculture -- and not the reverse. Please describe an experiment to falsify your premise.
The experiments have already been run many times by nature.
Take a look. The release of carbon dioxide brings the end of great ice ages happens at intervals of about 75,000 during the last 800,000 (it has happened 11 times). The development of agriculture clearly post-dates this most recent natural CO2 and temperature surge.
Now agriculture has almost certainly helped maintaining this inter-glacial period by gradually clearing land that stored carbon as forest.
In fact we had a recent episode when pandemic disasters reversed this process of land clearing, causing a dip in atmospheric CO2, and precipitating the event know as the "Little Ice Age". First the Black Death and Central Asian population by a third starting in 1346, then the greatest pandemic even in world history (a series of them actually) depopulated the New World starting in 1492. This second collapse of agricultural civilization was much larger than the Black Death, but followed before recovery from same.
Humans have been manipulating global climate for 10,000 years.
On the other hand it's good for TV.
So true. Much of the best adventure and drama of the past decade has been made for cable.
No wonder most movies seem like derivative things you can predict what will happen ... because they apparently are.
Still, keep making the superhero movies, and I'll keep going. =)
it's just not this book though.
...
If you think about it, it is inevitable that it can't just be this book. Because if it were, then it would mean that this author was someone of striking originality, almost a contradiction in terms. Instead this must be a careful codification of formulas already commonly known.
If this book is indeed very influential it is only because it was produced and marketed well, and so reached a wide audience.
So aren't you going to discuss?
I will, briefly. The Campbell monomyth is actually a grouping of various mythic acts with some major variations in which a hero in a legend may become involved. Any particular story "following" this pattern may differ radically from another since they may include different subsets of the acts and have none in common. Yet they will both be described as Campbell adherents as "Campbellian". I think Campbell's work is valid to a point, but the notion of single myth is way oversold.
This screenplay guide appears to be on an entirely different level of formulaic-ness.
I understand why I never go to summer blockbusters.
After reading the article, I see that they researched numerous aspects of building this mosquito burning laser fence, and even tested some subcomponents.
They assert "In fact, for a few thousand dollars, a reasonably skilled engineer (such as a typical IEEE Spectrum reader) could probably assemble a version of our fence... " but as far as I can tell they didn't actually build a functioning fence themselves!
Come on Intellectual Ventures all it takes is a reasonably skilled engineer, and a few thousand dollars, so where is your f*cking fence to prove it in practice?!
Ah, "backyard star wars" - of course! No need to actually make something that works! Just declare you've solved the problem and move on!
(The involvement of Lowell Wood - he of the insanely over-hyped x-ray laser fame - explains a lot. Wood, as far as I can tell, has never been associated with any successful project or program.)
... because Ballmer has a stiffie for the iPhone yet doesn't have a damned clue about what makes an iPhone an iPhone! News Flash, Jobs spent more than 3 decades slowly but surely building up Apple to be a high end boutique brand, refused to cut prices even in the 90s when they were on the ropes, because for his entire strategy to work it NEEDED to be expensive!
A perfect analogy would be slapping a new coat of paint on a Pinto and expecting to get Porsche money for it, because MSFT slaughtered the competition precisely because they were NOT expensive, they were the Walmart to Apple's Macy's and there is NO WAY IN HELL they are gonna suddenly flip that and get people to pay more than for an Apple to buy WinPhones and Wintabs, its NEVER gonna happen, it will NEVER work, the MSFT stores are ghost towns, all the little shops like mine have "Yes we have Win 7!" signs in the window, he is burning the damned company to the ground trying to force a strategy that has less of a chance of succeeding than Heaven's Gate II has a chance of being made!
...
And Apple execs too can destroy a company trying to make it the "next Apple".
Former Apple retail chief Ron Johnson, confident in his extreme brilliance that had made Apple incredibly profitable (of course, why share credit with Steve Jobs or anyone else?), extended the benefits of his genius to J.C. Penney's, attempting to run it like an Apple store: dumping value priced merchandise for boutique items; no discounts, not ever; simply throwing away unread a huge consumer study just completed declaring that "just like at Apple, customers don’t always know what they want”.
Chief’s Silicon Valley Stardom Quickly Clashed at J.C. Penney.
Former Apple retail chief presides over JC Penney's lowest sales in 20 Years.
Apple exec fired after 17 months.
I believe Angeret is counting the fact that Ballmer, himself, is also a dick - as well as having one as an appendage.
... If the US government is trying its best to restrict its surveillance to non-US persons, what does it do if it accidentally intercepts and reads communications from a US person?
Probably the same thing the Police and Federal Agencies do when they falsely arrest you. They say "Oops! So you didn't do anything wrong. But we are keeping all of your info in our database of criminals forever, just in case."
Does this technicality allow the U.S. government to open sealed First Class mail whenever it likes? Sure its a domestic delivery but we haven't confirmed that both the sender and the intended recipient are U.S. citizens.
Extended to the physical mails it is analogous to deeming all sealed letters and other private mail to be suspicious and in need of permanent archiving, and so create Postal Bots that open each letter, photocopies its contents, the reseals it it until the Government decides it wants to devote the resources to looking it up and reading it.
In the email case the saving is easier, and the reading is harder than with physical mail but they both accomplish the same task (treating private mail as government property) with manageable levels of effort.
He will be correct if and when the population stops growing due to lack of resources.
Which means he has been right almost everywhere through nearly all of human history
The escape from resource limits has been quite recent in most places (less than a century).
He will finally be completely wrong if and when the population stops growing due to prosperity and educated females.
This is the one dramatic change in human ecology that will prevent the resource limit from eventually being reached again, although there are limited regions (e.g Rwanda) where the resource limit has again been hit already.
Unless we can support that much life with food, water and other resources, war for diminishing resources will wipe out enough population before we even get close to that.
Reverend Malthus wrote the same in 1798 in "An Essay on the Principle of Population", and was wrong then. Malthusian predictions have been wrong ever since.
Yet another person who has no idea what Malthus wrote.
In that 100 plus page work he basically simply stated that population growth was generally restricted by available resources, and that it tended to increase to the limit of those resources ("Population, when unchecked, increases in a geometrical ratio, and subsistence for man in an arithmetical ratio").
This is not only not wrong, it is without question a correct statement of affairs.
Indeed until quite recently (about 1950 in fact) the amount of food that could be produced by a hectare of land had been essentially unchanged since ancient times. Small increases had been obtained by better agricultural practices but we aren't talking about even a doubling of productivity in 2000 years.
Increases in population until the start of the Green Revolution (an advance in scientific plant breeding) had been obtained by putting more land under production (that arithmetic increase thing Malthus mentioned).
Since that time we have had a true revolution in food production, with productivity increasing several-fold, and it still continues.
Here take a look: http://www.esp.org/books/malthus/population/malthus.pdf
That 200 years is a conservative estimate. Advanced breeder and thorium reactors can push that figure up to the thousands, which is more than enough time to crack fusion.
Simply extracting uranium from sea water, without breeding, will push the figure to thousands of years as well.