Very true. I heard a story of some land changing hands; the buyer did soil samples to check for pollution. It was badly contaminated with arsenic. So badly, in fact, that they were able to sell the waste as arsenic ore. But, I believe that increasing awareness and oversight has dramatically improved the situation, at least as far as new pollution is concerned.
An analog engineer would agree with you, an audio one wouldn't:) (my guess, anyway -- when thinking about my sound system it's the amp, when designing electronics I'd agree with you).
They actually don't do simple PWM -- it turns out that doing so requires much more time-domain precision than is available. You may be right about the delta-sigma bit, it's not something I know very well. I do know that what these sorts of amplifiers (ADCs, whatever;) ) do is pulse density modulation, as opposed to pulse width modulation, which is normally associated with DS converters at least on the input.
I won't be finding it any more difficult to get digital audio out than I do now. I run Linux, and I'm not about to pay for DRM'ed music. A lot of the artists I listen to publish online, and they certainly don't DRM their CDs. I'll keep watching DVDs and listening to CDs (or my ogg vorbis/flac rips of them), and I don't yet see any sign of a need for me to change that. If it limits my selection somewhat, then I'll continue to quietly vote with my wallet.
I completely agree. I just go as far as to say you should get *all* the analog bits out of the PC. PCs aren't designed for analog, and they're not good at it. Ship the audio outside the case in digital form to something that's designed to handle the analog half. And besides, most PC users don't have to do the A/D half *ever* -- they get their audio in digital form, so the goal should be to keep it that way until it's as close to the speakers as possible and then only do the conversion once.
Audio should not be done inside a PC. Well, not the analog portion, anyway. Ever looked at anything inside a PC with an oscilloscope? The noise environment is awful. You should not be trying to clean up the power the PC provides to the point you can use it for analog work; it's just not worth it. Especially when you'll just get hit by all the radiated EMI inside the case.
The solution? Simple -- ship the data out digitally and do the analog work elsewhere. Fortunately this has become very easy, with S/PDIF and the availability of good amplifiers with digital inputs. Amplifier power supplies are designed to be clean, and there aren't high current noisy loads on them -- they're designed for analog work. I have a fully digital amplifier from Panasonic that I'm very happy with. (Fully digital meaning all the way to the output FETs -- it does a delta-sigma pulse density modulation directly on the output signal, which turns out to be a very low noise, inexpensive way to get high quality output.)
The costs are easy to check. Panels in the 100-200W class run about $5/W or a little less. That's consumer price, small quantity. Pick your favorite solar panel store; I looked at several panels from Northern Arizona Wind and Sun. That metric is about the most conservative I can think of, and it still justifies PV panels as energy positive. I haven't looked at the study you mention, but many such studies ignore things like the higher labor costs involved in PV compared to grid power -- just because that money doesn't get spent on energy that goes into the PV panels directly doesn't mean it has no carbon impact. I don't know how much is needed to correct for that, but I do know my method is about as conservative as possible.
$83k? Is that with batteries or grid-tie? Includes installation, I assume?
Anyway, my point wasn't that solar is economical. If you assume that the major environmental cost from solar panel manufacture is energy consumption and therefore CO2 output, it's not entirely unreasonable to take the price of the system as related to the carbon cost of making it. So we compare dollars in electricity to dollars in solar system for a comparable energy output, and we get a rough comparison of carbon costs. Also, when doing that, the economic effects of interest and inflation and rising energy prices don't much come into play, since the time frame in question is short compared to the half life of atmospheric CO2. I wasn't trying to say solar is cheaper than buying electricity, I was using dollars as a crude stand-in for total carbon cost.
BTW, why such a large system? 11kW is a *lot*, no? Even if you're trying to go off-grid (and why do that when you have time of use metering available?), wouldn't your money be better spent on batteries?
I don't know where you live, but here in California, between high electricity prices, time of use metering, and tax credits for solar installations, the payback period is under ten years if you don't count interest / inflation. And if you do you should also count expected rising energy prices, so I call it roughly a wash on that factor.
Electric power delivered to me at home is about $0.10/kwHr. Solar panels are about $5/w for the panel or a bit less. Grid tie inverters are a bit under $1/w (at least in the low kilowatts range). It's a bit pricier if you want batteries and completely off-grid, but I'll assume a simple grid tie system designed to reduce your utility bill.
That means your solar panel needs to produce 60,000 wHr of electricity per watt to pay for itself, ie it needs to operate for 60k sunny hours. That's about 25 years or so, in a reasonably sunny mid-latitude climate. That's about the life of the solar panel.
Now, that only sort of answers how green they are. In terms of carbon budget, they probably come out ahead -- not all the cost of the solar panel pays for the energy to make it, there are other costs as well. In terms of total pollution, I don't really know -- there are some nasty chemicals involved, but I think the silicon industry in general is pretty good about disposal (I don't know details off hand, sorry). I don't think there are any subsidies on the manufacturing, just tax credits and such when you buy them, so I think I've fully accounted the costs.
So, overall, I'd guess they're marginally greener than the alternatives. Solar panel prices are falling rapidly, which means they're getting greener to make (at least if we assume manufacturing techniques aren't getting messier). I'd guess they start to come out clearly ahead in the next couple years.
Excellent, even. I can see it beating Star Wars. But the likes of Blade Runner? I mean, nothing against Serenity, but I really don't think it's the Best Science Fiction Film Ever.
You don't know how much people are spending. Just like now. Right now, people pay tax on income and the poor pay less of a percentage of their income. Under the Fairtax sales tax + rebate plan, the poor get taxed at the same rate as everyone else and get a rebate check of the same size as everyone else -- but since they're spending less, that check represents a larger fraction of their income, so their effective tax rate is lower.
The question of where the deficit gets made up is a straw man argument. Progressiveness or regressiveness of a tax system is orthogonal to the overall rate and revenue generated. The defecit is made up by ensuring that enough *total* tax is paid. You can make a tax system more progressive without changing revenue generation by lowering taxes on the poor and raising them on the rich to balance it out, or more regressive by doing the reverse. The Fairtax proposal sets the tax rate and the rebate amount so as to keep revenue and progressiveness similar to the current system. (I believe -- I know they keep revenue the same, I don't remember details on relative progressiveness or how exactly it's measured; I'm not an economist.)
The biggest argument in favor of the system is actually that it's *less* complicated than income tax and *less* prone to abuse and loopholes. It's assessed exactly as sales taxes are currently, and hiding spending is harder than hiding income. Sure there will be abuse, just like now, but it should be harder to hide it in a simpler system, so there should be less of it.
There are plenty of arguments against Fairtax and similar proposal, but they aren't the ones you listed.
First, the income tax is progressive. This would be impossible to achieve with sales tax.
Not so. The Fairtax proposal (I'm not really a fan overall, but they have some interesting points) and plenty of others like it have a very simple solution to this. A sales tax with a per-person monthly rebate of a fixed amount, usually set as roughly the amount of sales tax a person at the poverty line would pay. So a person at the poverty line pays their sales tax at the same rate as everyone else, but gets all of it back in a monthly check, so they effectively pay 0% tax. A person spending at twice the poverty level gets half of their tax back, so is taxed at 50% of the nominal rate. A person spending at 10x the poverty line pays 90% of the nominal rate, and so on.
This is progressive tax because the percentage of income spent on tax (net, obviously) rises as income rises.
(Like I said, I'm not really advocating such proposals as I think there are other problems, but sales taxes can certainly be made progressive.)
The most important point, I think, is that we need to start doing the easy things *now*, even if we don't *know* that we need to. We do know we might need to, and we do know the consequences might be really severe. We can't sit around and ignore the problem, we can't simply study it until we realize it's too late, but at the same time, well... Don't Panic, as a certain author might say.
Yes, in an ideal world, we should know the cause before we act. However, there is such a thing as paralysis through analysis. If we spend too much time studying the problem without doing things, we are likely to end up with a harder problem to solve once we know what the cause is. We need to strike a balance, by continuing to study the problem and learn more about the causes and best solutions, while at the same time enacting partial solutions based on our best knowledge of what is going on. We have to balance the risk that our initial countermeasures are useless (unlikely IMHO, but they might or might not be as helpful as we hope; they might even be harmful, I suppose) against the risk that if we wait to get started the problem becomes harder and more expensive to solve. My intuition is that the result of that analysis is that we shouldn't yet panic, we should keep researching the problem, and most importantly we should start trying for the low hanging fruit in terms of greenhouse gas reduction.
If your mirror is 99% reflective (which would be very, very good -- and it won't stay that way in a dusty dirty battlefield), you'd still be absorbing 1kW of power. Which might be very easy or very hard to dissipate, depending on the beam diameter and how well the targeting system can keep it on the same piece of armor. And, as soon as your armor starts to heat up more than a little, the reflectivity will drop and it will fail.
Everyone always thinks mirrors are an easy answer to laser weapons, but it's not really that simple; sure they're worth considering, but they're not obviously a winning strategy.
A better armor might actually be an ablative -- eg a phenolic or graphite plate that absorbs all the heat at the very surface, and vaporizes into a cloud of gas that then takes the majority of the heating while the armor continues ablating from conducted heat and laser heating that gets through -- meanwhile the targeting system frantically tries to keep the laser on the same spot long enough to punch all the way through, and the tank driver tries to conduct evasive action. Modern ablative technology for rocket engines can take 1kW/cm^2 of heating and last for minutes of service; ablatives derived from such technologies might make very effective armors.
Industrial uses of high-powered lasers include laser cutting and welding. I don't have any experience with either one, but I imagine they could benefit from power increases (cut thicker parts faster) and solid state (hopefully means cheaper and lower maintenance).
Laser-thermal rockets are also not that far away from reality; what they lack is a fair bit of development effort, currently hindered by the cost of high power continuous output lasers. The basic way they work is a high power laser on the ground aimed at a heat exchanger on the rocket that heats hydrogen (the best working gas) to very high temperatures (relatively... 2-3000 kelvin is enough to be interesting with hydrogen) and exhaust it, developing several times the specific impulse of conventional chemical rockets. The advantages are lowered cost if you have a high flight rate -- you can use the expensive bits for many many launches per day, realistically limited only by how fast you can get new boosters into position. And yes, the math suggests you can do single stage to orbit (depends on the details of your heat exchanger performance, obviously). And, they're absurdly power-hungry -- one newton of thrust requires ~ 5kW of laser power; even a demonstration rocket would likely need hundreds of kilowatts or more of power.
As long as it's actually critical to the job, you're right. You can't fire (or even fail to hire) someone because they can't use the stairs into the building; but if the job description involves, for example, lifting and moving things that can't be done in a wheelchair, then someone in a wheelchair is legitimately unsuited for the job. There's also language about reasonable accommodations -- if you as an employer can make reasonable changes to the facilities, etc. then you are obligated to do so.
One example that comes to mind (though I have no idea if it's ADA related) is that we recently hired a new machinist at work. He's short. Our lathe isn't particularly usable by someone his height. Well, guess what? It now has a platform in front of it so he can use it easily. We did it because it's the right thing to do; however, I'm sure the ADA would prohibit us from rejecting him because of it.
Oh, IANAL and all that. But I have been known to read those giant anti-discrimination posters employers are required to post.
The PTS relates the impact risk to the background risk in a logarithmic way -- that is, the probability of Apophis hitting us is 0.003 times the probability that we will be struck by some other asteroid of equal or larger size first. Or, put another way, yes we should be worried about asteroid impacts, and yes we should keep watching Apophis, but it's not (by our understanding) a big cause to go and panic.
That said, Apophis is the second highest ranked asteroid we know about by the PTS, behind 2007 CA19 at -0.91 (potential impact in 2012). And if it gets the people with the budgets to start considering the problem, that's a good thing. Right now, though, it would seem that our best use of money is to spend more effort looking for asteroids -- so far, the number we find appears to be fairly well correlated to how hard we look, suggesting that we have found a very, very small fraction of the NEOs out there.
After your first week or two of free soda you get tired of the sugar and start drinking water, juice, milk, etc.
Heathen! Heathen! Quick, someone take away his geek license!
On a slightly more serious note, the engineering shop I work at runs on liquid caffeine. Diet, sugared, or coke C2 (actually, they stopped selling that in southern California, apparently, which is a problem because it's the only thing our VP liked...) -- it seems everyone drinks either soda or coffee in copious quantity. It's amazing how much we as a society seem to need our stimulants.
I'm sure the Neocons could find someone as abhorrent as Bush if they wanted to. If they did, I'd vote for the lesser of the evils (aka Hillary, or almost anyone the Democrats have talked about running).
"Something Considered Harmful" is one of the more cliche ways to title an essay like this. Can't we come up with *slightly* better titles? Like, say, the one the blog post used?
Anyway, it's been said far better than I could manage already, so I won't keep ranting here.
Her stance on video games isn't just about video games. It shows she believes that I need protecting from myself, and that I am incapable of protecting my children from video games. It shows that she places these values above free speech. It shows that she is quick to jump on the "Think of the children!" bandwagon, regardless of any actual evidence or logic.
Her belief that she knows better than I do what's good for me is the big reason I don't want to vote for her (though I might, depending who the opponent is -- she'd be better than Bush, of that I'm certain). Her stance on video games is just one example of this.
Actually no... most memory chips are sold in bits, kbits, mbits, etc. SRAM, DRAM, Flash, anything -- individual memory chips are mostly sold in bits. This (oddly, perhaps) includes both chips that are intended to be aggregated into RAM sticks and 16 bit wide SRAM chips intended for embedded devices. I have no idea why, but I've gone shopping for discrete memory chips before and that's largely the way it is.
Now, obviously two groups coming up with the same size and density in two days suggests a slashdot dupe, but two expressing it in bits? No, that's not at all surprising.
You're off by a bit there:) Atoms have diameters measured in picometers; bond lengths tend to be tends to a hundred or so picometers. Current high end chips are made on 65nm processes these days, with 45 and 30 (iirc) not too far off -- but the point is silicon litho techniques do tens of nanometers, not microns. You can get micron level precision with machine tools, even -- very expensive ones, granted, but still:)
I agree completely though, calling this nanotech is a little iffy when you can see the things with merely a strong magnifying glass and resolve details with a decent optical microscope.
Slashdot Mirror
Very true. I heard a story of some land changing hands; the buyer did soil samples to check for pollution. It was badly contaminated with arsenic. So badly, in fact, that they were able to sell the waste as arsenic ore. But, I believe that increasing awareness and oversight has dramatically improved the situation, at least as far as new pollution is concerned.
An analog engineer would agree with you, an audio one wouldn't :) (my guess, anyway -- when thinking about my sound system it's the amp, when designing electronics I'd agree with you).
They actually don't do simple PWM -- it turns out that doing so requires much more time-domain precision than is available. You may be right about the delta-sigma bit, it's not something I know very well. I do know that what these sorts of amplifiers (ADCs, whatever ;) ) do is pulse density modulation, as opposed to pulse width modulation, which is normally associated with DS converters at least on the input.
Well, to wander off on a non-topical rant...
I won't be finding it any more difficult to get digital audio out than I do now. I run Linux, and I'm not about to pay for DRM'ed music. A lot of the artists I listen to publish online, and they certainly don't DRM their CDs. I'll keep watching DVDs and listening to CDs (or my ogg vorbis/flac rips of them), and I don't yet see any sign of a need for me to change that. If it limits my selection somewhat, then I'll continue to quietly vote with my wallet.
I completely agree. I just go as far as to say you should get *all* the analog bits out of the PC. PCs aren't designed for analog, and they're not good at it. Ship the audio outside the case in digital form to something that's designed to handle the analog half. And besides, most PC users don't have to do the A/D half *ever* -- they get their audio in digital form, so the goal should be to keep it that way until it's as close to the speakers as possible and then only do the conversion once.
Audio should not be done inside a PC. Well, not the analog portion, anyway. Ever looked at anything inside a PC with an oscilloscope? The noise environment is awful. You should not be trying to clean up the power the PC provides to the point you can use it for analog work; it's just not worth it. Especially when you'll just get hit by all the radiated EMI inside the case.
The solution? Simple -- ship the data out digitally and do the analog work elsewhere. Fortunately this has become very easy, with S/PDIF and the availability of good amplifiers with digital inputs. Amplifier power supplies are designed to be clean, and there aren't high current noisy loads on them -- they're designed for analog work. I have a fully digital amplifier from Panasonic that I'm very happy with. (Fully digital meaning all the way to the output FETs -- it does a delta-sigma pulse density modulation directly on the output signal, which turns out to be a very low noise, inexpensive way to get high quality output.)
The costs are easy to check. Panels in the 100-200W class run about $5/W or a little less. That's consumer price, small quantity. Pick your favorite solar panel store; I looked at several panels from Northern Arizona Wind and Sun. That metric is about the most conservative I can think of, and it still justifies PV panels as energy positive. I haven't looked at the study you mention, but many such studies ignore things like the higher labor costs involved in PV compared to grid power -- just because that money doesn't get spent on energy that goes into the PV panels directly doesn't mean it has no carbon impact. I don't know how much is needed to correct for that, but I do know my method is about as conservative as possible.
$83k? Is that with batteries or grid-tie? Includes installation, I assume?
Anyway, my point wasn't that solar is economical. If you assume that the major environmental cost from solar panel manufacture is energy consumption and therefore CO2 output, it's not entirely unreasonable to take the price of the system as related to the carbon cost of making it. So we compare dollars in electricity to dollars in solar system for a comparable energy output, and we get a rough comparison of carbon costs. Also, when doing that, the economic effects of interest and inflation and rising energy prices don't much come into play, since the time frame in question is short compared to the half life of atmospheric CO2. I wasn't trying to say solar is cheaper than buying electricity, I was using dollars as a crude stand-in for total carbon cost.
BTW, why such a large system? 11kW is a *lot*, no? Even if you're trying to go off-grid (and why do that when you have time of use metering available?), wouldn't your money be better spent on batteries?
I don't know where you live, but here in California, between high electricity prices, time of use metering, and tax credits for solar installations, the payback period is under ten years if you don't count interest / inflation. And if you do you should also count expected rising energy prices, so I call it roughly a wash on that factor.
Electric power delivered to me at home is about $0.10/kwHr. Solar panels are about $5/w for the panel or a bit less. Grid tie inverters are a bit under $1/w (at least in the low kilowatts range). It's a bit pricier if you want batteries and completely off-grid, but I'll assume a simple grid tie system designed to reduce your utility bill.
That means your solar panel needs to produce 60,000 wHr of electricity per watt to pay for itself, ie it needs to operate for 60k sunny hours. That's about 25 years or so, in a reasonably sunny mid-latitude climate. That's about the life of the solar panel.
Now, that only sort of answers how green they are. In terms of carbon budget, they probably come out ahead -- not all the cost of the solar panel pays for the energy to make it, there are other costs as well. In terms of total pollution, I don't really know -- there are some nasty chemicals involved, but I think the silicon industry in general is pretty good about disposal (I don't know details off hand, sorry). I don't think there are any subsidies on the manufacturing, just tax credits and such when you buy them, so I think I've fully accounted the costs.
So, overall, I'd guess they're marginally greener than the alternatives. Solar panel prices are falling rapidly, which means they're getting greener to make (at least if we assume manufacturing techniques aren't getting messier). I'd guess they start to come out clearly ahead in the next couple years.
Excellent, even. I can see it beating Star Wars. But the likes of Blade Runner? I mean, nothing against Serenity, but I really don't think it's the Best Science Fiction Film Ever.
You don't know how much people are spending. Just like now. Right now, people pay tax on income and the poor pay less of a percentage of their income. Under the Fairtax sales tax + rebate plan, the poor get taxed at the same rate as everyone else and get a rebate check of the same size as everyone else -- but since they're spending less, that check represents a larger fraction of their income, so their effective tax rate is lower.
The question of where the deficit gets made up is a straw man argument. Progressiveness or regressiveness of a tax system is orthogonal to the overall rate and revenue generated. The defecit is made up by ensuring that enough *total* tax is paid. You can make a tax system more progressive without changing revenue generation by lowering taxes on the poor and raising them on the rich to balance it out, or more regressive by doing the reverse. The Fairtax proposal sets the tax rate and the rebate amount so as to keep revenue and progressiveness similar to the current system. (I believe -- I know they keep revenue the same, I don't remember details on relative progressiveness or how exactly it's measured; I'm not an economist.)
The biggest argument in favor of the system is actually that it's *less* complicated than income tax and *less* prone to abuse and loopholes. It's assessed exactly as sales taxes are currently, and hiding spending is harder than hiding income. Sure there will be abuse, just like now, but it should be harder to hide it in a simpler system, so there should be less of it.
There are plenty of arguments against Fairtax and similar proposal, but they aren't the ones you listed.
First, the income tax is progressive. This would be impossible to achieve with sales tax.
Not so. The Fairtax proposal (I'm not really a fan overall, but they have some interesting points) and plenty of others like it have a very simple solution to this. A sales tax with a per-person monthly rebate of a fixed amount, usually set as roughly the amount of sales tax a person at the poverty line would pay. So a person at the poverty line pays their sales tax at the same rate as everyone else, but gets all of it back in a monthly check, so they effectively pay 0% tax. A person spending at twice the poverty level gets half of their tax back, so is taxed at 50% of the nominal rate. A person spending at 10x the poverty line pays 90% of the nominal rate, and so on.
This is progressive tax because the percentage of income spent on tax (net, obviously) rises as income rises.
(Like I said, I'm not really advocating such proposals as I think there are other problems, but sales taxes can certainly be made progressive.)
The most important point, I think, is that we need to start doing the easy things *now*, even if we don't *know* that we need to. We do know we might need to, and we do know the consequences might be really severe. We can't sit around and ignore the problem, we can't simply study it until we realize it's too late, but at the same time, well... Don't Panic, as a certain author might say.
Yes, in an ideal world, we should know the cause before we act. However, there is such a thing as paralysis through analysis. If we spend too much time studying the problem without doing things, we are likely to end up with a harder problem to solve once we know what the cause is. We need to strike a balance, by continuing to study the problem and learn more about the causes and best solutions, while at the same time enacting partial solutions based on our best knowledge of what is going on. We have to balance the risk that our initial countermeasures are useless (unlikely IMHO, but they might or might not be as helpful as we hope; they might even be harmful, I suppose) against the risk that if we wait to get started the problem becomes harder and more expensive to solve. My intuition is that the result of that analysis is that we shouldn't yet panic, we should keep researching the problem, and most importantly we should start trying for the low hanging fruit in terms of greenhouse gas reduction.
If your mirror is 99% reflective (which would be very, very good -- and it won't stay that way in a dusty dirty battlefield), you'd still be absorbing 1kW of power. Which might be very easy or very hard to dissipate, depending on the beam diameter and how well the targeting system can keep it on the same piece of armor. And, as soon as your armor starts to heat up more than a little, the reflectivity will drop and it will fail.
Everyone always thinks mirrors are an easy answer to laser weapons, but it's not really that simple; sure they're worth considering, but they're not obviously a winning strategy.
A better armor might actually be an ablative -- eg a phenolic or graphite plate that absorbs all the heat at the very surface, and vaporizes into a cloud of gas that then takes the majority of the heating while the armor continues ablating from conducted heat and laser heating that gets through -- meanwhile the targeting system frantically tries to keep the laser on the same spot long enough to punch all the way through, and the tank driver tries to conduct evasive action. Modern ablative technology for rocket engines can take 1kW/cm^2 of heating and last for minutes of service; ablatives derived from such technologies might make very effective armors.
Industrial uses of high-powered lasers include laser cutting and welding. I don't have any experience with either one, but I imagine they could benefit from power increases (cut thicker parts faster) and solid state (hopefully means cheaper and lower maintenance).
Laser-thermal rockets are also not that far away from reality; what they lack is a fair bit of development effort, currently hindered by the cost of high power continuous output lasers. The basic way they work is a high power laser on the ground aimed at a heat exchanger on the rocket that heats hydrogen (the best working gas) to very high temperatures (relatively... 2-3000 kelvin is enough to be interesting with hydrogen) and exhaust it, developing several times the specific impulse of conventional chemical rockets. The advantages are lowered cost if you have a high flight rate -- you can use the expensive bits for many many launches per day, realistically limited only by how fast you can get new boosters into position. And yes, the math suggests you can do single stage to orbit (depends on the details of your heat exchanger performance, obviously). And, they're absurdly power-hungry -- one newton of thrust requires ~ 5kW of laser power; even a demonstration rocket would likely need hundreds of kilowatts or more of power.
As long as it's actually critical to the job, you're right. You can't fire (or even fail to hire) someone because they can't use the stairs into the building; but if the job description involves, for example, lifting and moving things that can't be done in a wheelchair, then someone in a wheelchair is legitimately unsuited for the job. There's also language about reasonable accommodations -- if you as an employer can make reasonable changes to the facilities, etc. then you are obligated to do so.
One example that comes to mind (though I have no idea if it's ADA related) is that we recently hired a new machinist at work. He's short. Our lathe isn't particularly usable by someone his height. Well, guess what? It now has a platform in front of it so he can use it easily. We did it because it's the right thing to do; however, I'm sure the ADA would prohibit us from rejecting him because of it.
Oh, IANAL and all that. But I have been known to read those giant anti-discrimination posters employers are required to post.
This asteroid has a Palermo Technical Scale risk assessment of -2.52.
The PTS relates the impact risk to the background risk in a logarithmic way -- that is, the probability of Apophis hitting us is 0.003 times the probability that we will be struck by some other asteroid of equal or larger size first. Or, put another way, yes we should be worried about asteroid impacts, and yes we should keep watching Apophis, but it's not (by our understanding) a big cause to go and panic.
That said, Apophis is the second highest ranked asteroid we know about by the PTS, behind 2007 CA19 at -0.91 (potential impact in 2012). And if it gets the people with the budgets to start considering the problem, that's a good thing. Right now, though, it would seem that our best use of money is to spend more effort looking for asteroids -- so far, the number we find appears to be fairly well correlated to how hard we look, suggesting that we have found a very, very small fraction of the NEOs out there.
After your first week or two of free soda you get tired of the sugar and start drinking water, juice, milk, etc.
Heathen! Heathen! Quick, someone take away his geek license!
On a slightly more serious note, the engineering shop I work at runs on liquid caffeine. Diet, sugared, or coke C2 (actually, they stopped selling that in southern California, apparently, which is a problem because it's the only thing our VP liked...) -- it seems everyone drinks either soda or coffee in copious quantity. It's amazing how much we as a society seem to need our stimulants.
Well duh. They're still alive, aren't they?
Great Balls of Fire, even...
I'm sure the Neocons could find someone as abhorrent as Bush if they wanted to. If they did, I'd vote for the lesser of the evils (aka Hillary, or almost anyone the Democrats have talked about running).
"Something Considered Harmful" is one of the more cliche ways to title an essay like this. Can't we come up with *slightly* better titles? Like, say, the one the blog post used?
Anyway, it's been said far better than I could manage already, so I won't keep ranting here.Her stance on video games isn't just about video games. It shows she believes that I need protecting from myself, and that I am incapable of protecting my children from video games. It shows that she places these values above free speech. It shows that she is quick to jump on the "Think of the children!" bandwagon, regardless of any actual evidence or logic.
Her belief that she knows better than I do what's good for me is the big reason I don't want to vote for her (though I might, depending who the opponent is -- she'd be better than Bush, of that I'm certain). Her stance on video games is just one example of this.
Actually no... most memory chips are sold in bits, kbits, mbits, etc. SRAM, DRAM, Flash, anything -- individual memory chips are mostly sold in bits. This (oddly, perhaps) includes both chips that are intended to be aggregated into RAM sticks and 16 bit wide SRAM chips intended for embedded devices. I have no idea why, but I've gone shopping for discrete memory chips before and that's largely the way it is.
Now, obviously two groups coming up with the same size and density in two days suggests a slashdot dupe, but two expressing it in bits? No, that's not at all surprising.
You're off by a bit there :) Atoms have diameters measured in picometers; bond lengths tend to be tends to a hundred or so picometers. Current high end chips are made on 65nm processes these days, with 45 and 30 (iirc) not too far off -- but the point is silicon litho techniques do tens of nanometers, not microns. You can get micron level precision with machine tools, even -- very expensive ones, granted, but still :)
I agree completely though, calling this nanotech is a little iffy when you can see the things with merely a strong magnifying glass and resolve details with a decent optical microscope.