Yeah, I think that's probably true. I'm even prepared to argue that there are only two ways by which humans can invent stuff:
1. By taking two existing and things or ideas and combining them using a limited set of preexisting 'combination operators' and then observing the result in reality or in a thought experiment. More formally: thing_a operator_x thing_b = result. This can then be done iteratively or recursively until we reach a desirable result or give up, for example like this:
An unusually revolutionary invention would be one where we've ventured deep down in this maze of possibilities and stumbled on something useful.
Once we've come up with an interesting idea by this process it seems that we have a desire to invent a story (for ourselves as much as for others) about how we cleverly deduced our way from an unambiguous and tractable problem formulation to the finished invention by a straight line of clinical top-down deductive logic. I don't buy those stories. Real life problems rarely if ever lend themselves to that sort of thinking.
2. By observing the results of accidents. Sometimes it seems nature does the tinkering for us.
I suspect that the real magic and mystery of invention lies in the process that the brain uses to recognize a desirable result when it sees one.
You've still got too many significant figures in your output. There's only one in the input, so 2000km.
That's correct, but practically speaking, when you translate some statement about reality you may want to avoid making the statement more surprising than the original statement. In this case you'd be spicing up the story quite a bit if you rounded it up to 2000 km.
That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is to think of China as a country run by engineers. The current president Hu Jintao is a hydraulic engineer and the next guy in line Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer and Jiang Zemin who was president before Hu Jintao was an electrical engineer. The next couple of guys in line in the politburo are economists and engineers.
Once you realize that China is run by engineers a lot of what China is doing begins to make sense in a sort of intuitive way if you're a tech person yourself.
how the hell did this get +5 anyway... brainless mods
Anyone's who's read an amateur physics forum knows that the expanding scale universe "model" is reinvented several times a year by isolated eager guys armed with high school diplomas, apocryphal tales about Einstein and quotes by Galileo. It's one of those ideas that seem obviously true for several seconds until you actually think about it.
Here's a tip: The age of simple discoveries in mature sciences is over. That's why they're called mature. Unless you've spent years studying physics intensely while getting frequent feedback from experienced physicists, your chances of making minor contributions to physics are infinitesimally close to zero. Any idea that you quickly stumble upon based on your high school or college Physics 101 understanding has literally been thought, tried and discarded a thousand times before by physicists.
Some girls don't like games but here are some to try that the female population seems to be more receptive to in my experience:
Party Games: Guitar Hero, Mario Party, Wii Party, Scene It, Monopoly Streets
Multiplayer Platformers: Mario Kart, New Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Country, Little Big Planet
Puzzle Games: Bejeweled, Peggle, Hidden Object Games like Mystery Case Files
Adventure Games: Back to the Future (big hit with my fiancee, we played through the whole thing)
For the more girly girls, you might need to go with something with the "cute" factor. Little Big Planet is especially good at this one. You can put stickers on stuff and dress your sack boy/girl. It's also multiplayer. Co-op is usually a plus.
Or pretty much any game where the majority of the female characters don't look like they're about to walk onto a porno shot. Lot's of women are into Bethesda's 'hardcore' games for example. I think that's probably partially because Bethesda has done their homework on what puts women off.
If that were the case you'd expect the road to run straight from the dorm building to the factory and not take a half kilometer detour on it's way there. It looks like the plan is for traffic to run between the town to the south and the various sites at the complex with little traffic going between sites.
Here's a clue: the two units under construction to the right of the "dorm" look like what I imagine two coal fired power units under construction would look like. Some of the larger open-air structures around the area look like "transformer stations" (or whatever they actually are) under construction.
The cost of raw materials would be close zero since that is also basically labor.
The thing is that if we look back say 300 years we see that we already have close to free energy and close to free labor by 1712's standards. The average person today uses more energy than the richest king back then and the average farmer today produces as much food as a village of hundreds of people produced back then. We can produce so much food that we have to throw away or burn a significant fraction of it to prevent our food storage from overflowing...
And yet we still have problems like homelessness and people dying from curable diseases.
When someone says greentech or cleantech or whatever cute word they like to use you know they're talking finance and/or PR and not technology or reality. The reality is that we're constantly inventing slightly better PV panels, batteries and fuel cells. I think it's obvious at this point that some of these products will eventually become competitive.
I think what's going to happen from a US point of view is that there is going to be a lot of money in buying these products in China and distributing them and installing them and turning them into easy to sell services in the US. It's easy (well... relatively speaking) to outsource production to Chinese factories, but it's currently not allowed to take Chinese workers onto US soil to do local work like construction work and maintenance so that has to be done in the US by US workers.
In order to have copyright you must first create a work. Most of the code examples that people post on those sites are so short and trivial that I doubt that very many of them (as published in isolation) would qualify as works in most jurisdictions. Even if you have a code example that is complex enough to qualify as a work you could still probably copy-paste a few lines from that work without breaching the copyright, especially if those lines are trivial or obvious or constitute best practice in the language.
Don't say that. I imagine there would eventually be an in game trade system which would allow anyone to buy ships and turrets with DCPU-16 software preinstalled.
The whole thing sounds to me like a scheme for transforming smart kids into proper nerds who write assembly and know their P from their I from their D. I like it.
In addition to that I think a big share of the world's installed base of computers does not have powerful enough GPUs to run even the latest casual games. A big share of new computers are also shipping with relatively feeble GPUs. I imagine that Valve and Nvidia and AMD view this as a challenge and I guess one could imagine Valve teaming up with Nvidia or AMD to make one or several cheap laptops with powerful GPUs and then try to popularize those laptops just to get powerful GPUs into the hands of more people.
And yet, IQ scores continue to climb every year. The average person in 1880 would score 70 today. The brightest Greek mind would likely sound like an idiot today if you tried to talk to him. He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
Well, hold your horses. What about variance?
I think it's reasonable to assume that the variance in IQ:s would have been much greater in samples taken in Ancient Greece than it is in the US or Western Europe today. If you grew up in a wealthy family with a home in one of the cities odds are your IQ would be closer to 100 than to 70 and that some of your friends would have IQ:s in the 110+ range and some few would have IQ:s in the 120+ and 130+ ranges. If you grew up as a slave on a rural farm, odds are your IQ would be in the 50's or 60's (or just barely good enough to do your slave job) because of recurring malnutrition and disease and lack of education.
TFA/TFP makes a similar mistake in saying that a person brought from 1000 BC to today would be one of the most brilliant people alive today. I doubt that, again because of variance. I think there's a good chance he wouldn't even be able to get into Mensa, let alone be brilliant.
If we brought 1000 people back from 1000 BC and had all of them do an IQ test we would get a much more predictable result and maybe that's what the TFP was trying to say, but I really dislike when people neglect to think about variance.
Sustaining our current level is not going to be major problem. All you need to do in order to sustain your current level of energy supply is to invest a little bit more of your energy from existing wells into these new but not as good energy sources. It's sort of like a tax. Another way to put it is that the bad news is that we need to replace 160 exajoules of energy supply, but the good news is that we have 160 exajoules of energy supply to work with.
The problem is how we're going to allow for global economic growth in the future. We might want some 10,000 exajoules per year on a global scale by mid-century. We do not have 10,000 exajoules to work with. It's going to have to come from exponential growth. That's a problem, because you can't have rapid growth with slowly growing energy sources.
Sure, doubling time is a valid way to think about it. If we're going to expand our global energy supply fast enough to make the 21st century as prosperous as the 20th century then we need energy sources that scale as rapidly as the ones we used in the 20th century.
However if all we want to do is to replace our existing level of energy supply in the western world then we can afford to use things that scale more slowly. All they need to do is to scale fast enough to replace the energy that we lose because of peak conventional oil or because of a political will to phase out middle eastern oil.
True, but we don't necessarily need to grow our fossil energy supply at the same rate that they did in the 19th and 20th century. In fact, we probably don't want to expand our fossil energy supply that fast if we care about climate change.
The things that do need to have a high rate of energy return on energy investment are emerging non-fossil energy sources such as wind turbines and photovoltaics. If our wind turbine or pv panel projects don't pay back their energy investments at roughly the rate that oil and coal used to do back in the 20th century then we are indeed headed for trouble, either a lack of energy or recurring weather catastrophes like droughts and hurricanes.
Talking about EROI is about as meaningless as talking about ROI. Nobody cares about ROI in and of itself. You have to add time to the equation. The relevant measures in economy are measures of rate of return on investment. The relevant energy measures will always be measures of rate of energy return on energy investment.
Simple thought experiment: Company A builds a hydroelectric dam that lasts for 120 years and has an EROI of 120. Company B builds wind turbines that last for 25 years and have an EROI of 30. They both invest 1 unit of energy at year one. After 25 years company A has produced a net amount of (-1) + 25 = 24 units of energy. Company B has produced (-1) + 30 = 29 units of energy. The wind turbines are a better investment than the hydro dam from a purely energetic perspective (but not necessarily from an economic perspective).
It gets even worse for the hydro dam when you take into account that it takes as much as 20 years to build it, locking up energy investments for that time, while wind turbines only take a year or so from factory to operation, thus locking up energy for a shorter amount of time. Now I'm not saying that wind turbines are better than hydro dams. The examples could have been about any two technologies. All I'm saying is that EROI is bullshit if you use it without taking time into account.
Commercial transport is all about speed (up to a point). An electric plane would be significantly slower than a jet and a slower plane will produce fewer passenger miles per unit of time, which means it will take longer to produce the number of passenger miles needed to pay back the purchasing cost of the plane. Pilots and flight attendants are also about as productive as the plane is fast. In other words if you downgrade to a slower plane you need to pay for more labor to produce the same number of passenger miles. Also, passengers will not be willing to pay as much for a slow flight as they would for a faster flight all else being equal.
The fuel cost only amounts to something like a third of the cost of a typical ticket on a low cost airline, which means that the best the electric plane could do if it was as fast as a jet (which it wouldn't be) would be to cut the price by a third, so it's not like it would be revolutionary.
I think one could imagine a solar powered military drone, either heavier than air or lighter than air, that could stay airborne for weeks or months at a time and function as a sort of poor man's satellite which would be effective against Talibans and pirates and anyone else who doesn't have access to high altitude anti-aircraft missiles. I don't know why the US military or some other military dealing with guerrilla adversaries hasn't tried that.
You could ship it by rail the whole way, but that seems like a waste of railway cars and space in the railway schedule that could be better used to transport valuable and/or time-critical freight or passengers on passenger trains. I think they actually use ships and ship the garbage to the harbor nearest to the power plant where they then load the garbage on trucks or railway cars depending on a bunch of factors like how far away the plant is and whether it has a rail connection.
Slow-going ships are ridiculously fuel-efficient and can transport equally ridiculous amounts of freight and since we have rivers and seas virtually everywhere in Europe there is no reason not to use ships for stuff that isn't time-critical.
I imagine some of the garbage is probably kind of smelly, which might be another reason to take the sea route rather than on railways that pass through towns and cities...
You're joking, but half-seriously, imagine if a manufacturer would make a cheap 'tablet' without a display and with physical network ports and just enough ventilation that you could stack multiple tablets as high as you please without overheating. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
I imagine the power adapters and the power strips connected in series would look really silly.
Scrubbing is not really contingent on anything. Things like plastic, wood, paper and other organic waste also produce toxic gases and ash even when you burn them at high temperatures in nearly ideal conditions. For one thing everything that lives AFAIK contains considerable amounts of sulfur. Remember when your chemistry teacher had you burn sulfur to make sulfuric acid?
S + O2 SO2 (fuel burns) 2 SO2 + O2 2 SO3 (more burning) SO3 + H2O H2SO4 (exhaust comes into contact with water in the atmosphere)
By the way the scrubber can actually salvage a little bit of extra heat that you can use for district heating so it's not purely a loss.
Yeah, the embryo is (literally) incredibly complex, recursive and fractal-like. The whole process of going from a single cell to an adult creature is far beyond human grasp. The first few cell divisions are reasonably well understood but as you imagine it gets exponentially more complex from there on. IIRC the thing that keeps the fractal-like development of the embryo from derailing and resulting in a fleshy tumor-like lump is the communications system that the cells create as part of the process of building the embryo.
Sure, a lot of published science is wrong, but some of it is to definite and impressive to be wrong. For example, they can reliably do certain startlingly Frankenstein's monster-like things with fruit fly embryos. If you didn't know better you might think that we're close to having 'designer fruit flies', but the truth is that they've merely uncovered mechanisms here and there that allow them to do certain things. It's not yet clear how far those mechanisms and principles that they have discovered so far will take them in understanding the whole process of going from DNA to creature.
There is actually a sensitivity setting under Appearance --> Behavior, but the highest sensitivity isn't as sensitive as it could be and the algorithm they use seems a bit flaky and inconsistent in general.
The thing about Canonical is that they seem to have some understanding and sense of direction when it comes to details. I'm pleased to see that they've made the workspace switcher button movable in 12.10. That means that you could put it high enough up on the launcher that it doesn't hide. They've also made it so that you zoom down to a workspace by single clicking instead of double clicking. These two changes mean that workspace switching with the mouse could be done reflexively, which means that users could learn to do it as part of their workflow. I'm also very pleased to see close window buttons on the windows in the window spread. I only wish the windows in the spread would stay where they are and not rearrange when you close one of them, because that makes it difficult to close many windows at a time (and it's kind of chafing on the eyes too).
Maybe they'll work on the launcher auto hide functionality for 13.04. It seems like an important thing if you use it. I feel I can afford to dedicate 32 pixels on the side of my 16:9 display to having my apps visible at a glance.
I am not a biologist and I don't know how it works, but I think I can answer your question on a conceptual level. Whenever you see persistent large-scale organization it is a good idea to assume that there is some sort of feedback mechanism involved. I guess there is some sort of inter-cell communication scheme where cells that grow in the wrong place (or misbehave in some other way) are discouraged and cells that grow in the right place (and behave) are encouraged.
I wondered the same thing as you and I was recommended the book Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll as the best way for a layman to learn more about the current understanding of how it works. It is essentially a book that tries to explain how genes, cells and embryos are connected physically and conceptually. I found the book quite challenging, but I think I that I understand some of it. Many of the results are quite mind-blowing. I don't regret having forced myself through about half of the book, painstakingly googling and wikipediaing biology terms as I went along.
It's not the first tablet to do that. Microsoft tried the same idea back in 2004-2005 with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. The technology was immature, the implementation sucked and the market was not ready.
As someone noted in the comments above there may be a business-user, business-app market this time around. I'm thinking about a user who realizes he needs to make some minor last minute edits to an Excel file and then update his Power point presentation to reflect those changes. That sort of stuff.
Almost nobody cares when something was "invented", whatever that means (first thought of? first described in detail? first prototype? first series production?). New inventions begin to matter when they become useful and affordable to a large number of users in the wealthy parts of the world.
If the things I listed have not dramatically changed the way that you consume media and tele-communicate then you're probably someone who doesn't consume a lot of newly produced media and someone who prefers to communicate by means that were in common use before 1997. As I said, narrow fields.
Maybe you're thinking of large mechanical stuff? I guess the last time people saw dramatic change thanks to such things must have been around the time when the B707 went into series production and satellites arguably brought important improvements in things like communications and weather forecasting. Approximately 0% of the population flew into space...
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I think that's probably true. I'm even prepared to argue that there are only two ways by which humans can invent stuff:
1. By taking two existing and things or ideas and combining them using a limited set of preexisting 'combination operators' and then observing the result in reality or in a thought experiment. More formally: thing_a operator_x thing_b = result. This can then be done iteratively or recursively until we reach a desirable result or give up, for example like this:
thing_a operator_y thing_b = result_2
thing_a operator_z thing_b = result_3
thing_a operator_x thing_c = result_4
thing_a operator_x thing_d = result_5 Hmm... Interesting!
result_5 operator_x thing_b = result_6
result_5 operator_y thing_b = result_7
And so on until we give up.
An unusually revolutionary invention would be one where we've ventured deep down in this maze of possibilities and stumbled on something useful.
Once we've come up with an interesting idea by this process it seems that we have a desire to invent a story (for ourselves as much as for others) about how we cleverly deduced our way from an unambiguous and tractable problem formulation to the finished invention by a straight line of clinical top-down deductive logic. I don't buy those stories. Real life problems rarely if ever lend themselves to that sort of thinking.
2. By observing the results of accidents. Sometimes it seems nature does the tinkering for us.
I suspect that the real magic and mystery of invention lies in the process that the brain uses to recognize a desirable result when it sees one.
You've still got too many significant figures in your output. There's only one in the input, so 2000km.
That's correct, but practically speaking, when you translate some statement about reality you may want to avoid making the statement more surprising than the original statement. In this case you'd be spicing up the story quite a bit if you rounded it up to 2000 km.
That's one way to look at it. Another way to look at it is to think of China as a country run by engineers. The current president Hu Jintao is a hydraulic engineer and the next guy in line Xi Jinping is a chemical engineer and Jiang Zemin who was president before Hu Jintao was an electrical engineer. The next couple of guys in line in the politburo are economists and engineers.
Once you realize that China is run by engineers a lot of what China is doing begins to make sense in a sort of intuitive way if you're a tech person yourself.
how the hell did this get +5 anyway ... brainless mods
Anyone's who's read an amateur physics forum knows that the expanding scale universe "model" is reinvented several times a year by isolated eager guys armed with high school diplomas, apocryphal tales about Einstein and quotes by Galileo. It's one of those ideas that seem obviously true for several seconds until you actually think about it.
Here's a tip: The age of simple discoveries in mature sciences is over. That's why they're called mature. Unless you've spent years studying physics intensely while getting frequent feedback from experienced physicists, your chances of making minor contributions to physics are infinitesimally close to zero. Any idea that you quickly stumble upon based on your high school or college Physics 101 understanding has literally been thought, tried and discarded a thousand times before by physicists.
Some girls don't like games but here are some to try that the female population seems to be more receptive to in my experience:
Party Games: Guitar Hero, Mario Party, Wii Party, Scene It, Monopoly Streets
Multiplayer Platformers: Mario Kart, New Super Mario Bros, Donkey Kong Country, Little Big Planet
Puzzle Games: Bejeweled, Peggle, Hidden Object Games like Mystery Case Files
Adventure Games: Back to the Future (big hit with my fiancee, we played through the whole thing)
For the more girly girls, you might need to go with something with the "cute" factor. Little Big Planet is especially good at this one. You can put stickers on stuff and dress your sack boy/girl. It's also multiplayer. Co-op is usually a plus.
Or pretty much any game where the majority of the female characters don't look like they're about to walk onto a porno shot. Lot's of women are into Bethesda's 'hardcore' games for example. I think that's probably partially because Bethesda has done their homework on what puts women off.
If that were the case you'd expect the road to run straight from the dorm building to the factory and not take a half kilometer detour on it's way there. It looks like the plan is for traffic to run between the town to the south and the various sites at the complex with little traffic going between sites.
Here's a clue: the two units under construction to the right of the "dorm" look like what I imagine two coal fired power units under construction would look like. Some of the larger open-air structures around the area look like "transformer stations" (or whatever they actually are) under construction.
The cost of raw materials would be close zero since that is also basically labor.
The thing is that if we look back say 300 years we see that we already have close to free energy and close to free labor by 1712's standards. The average person today uses more energy than the richest king back then and the average farmer today produces as much food as a village of hundreds of people produced back then. We can produce so much food that we have to throw away or burn a significant fraction of it to prevent our food storage from overflowing...
And yet we still have problems like homelessness and people dying from curable diseases.
When someone says greentech or cleantech or whatever cute word they like to use you know they're talking finance and/or PR and not technology or reality. The reality is that we're constantly inventing slightly better PV panels, batteries and fuel cells. I think it's obvious at this point that some of these products will eventually become competitive.
I think what's going to happen from a US point of view is that there is going to be a lot of money in buying these products in China and distributing them and installing them and turning them into easy to sell services in the US. It's easy (well... relatively speaking) to outsource production to Chinese factories, but it's currently not allowed to take Chinese workers onto US soil to do local work like construction work and maintenance so that has to be done in the US by US workers.
In order to have copyright you must first create a work. Most of the code examples that people post on those sites are so short and trivial that I doubt that very many of them (as published in isolation) would qualify as works in most jurisdictions. Even if you have a code example that is complex enough to qualify as a work you could still probably copy-paste a few lines from that work without breaching the copyright, especially if those lines are trivial or obvious or constitute best practice in the language.
Don't say that. I imagine there would eventually be an in game trade system which would allow anyone to buy ships and turrets with DCPU-16 software preinstalled.
The whole thing sounds to me like a scheme for transforming smart kids into proper nerds who write assembly and know their P from their I from their D. I like it.
In addition to that I think a big share of the world's installed base of computers does not have powerful enough GPUs to run even the latest casual games. A big share of new computers are also shipping with relatively feeble GPUs. I imagine that Valve and Nvidia and AMD view this as a challenge and I guess one could imagine Valve teaming up with Nvidia or AMD to make one or several cheap laptops with powerful GPUs and then try to popularize those laptops just to get powerful GPUs into the hands of more people.
And yet, IQ scores continue to climb every year. The average person in 1880 would score 70 today. The brightest Greek mind would likely sound like an idiot today if you tried to talk to him. He wouldn't know anything about DNA, quantum mechanics, evolution, economics, astronomy, virology, microbiology, ad nauseum.
Well, hold your horses. What about variance?
I think it's reasonable to assume that the variance in IQ:s would have been much greater in samples taken in Ancient Greece than it is in the US or Western Europe today. If you grew up in a wealthy family with a home in one of the cities odds are your IQ would be closer to 100 than to 70 and that some of your friends would have IQ:s in the 110+ range and some few would have IQ:s in the 120+ and 130+ ranges. If you grew up as a slave on a rural farm, odds are your IQ would be in the 50's or 60's (or just barely good enough to do your slave job) because of recurring malnutrition and disease and lack of education.
TFA/TFP makes a similar mistake in saying that a person brought from 1000 BC to today would be one of the most brilliant people alive today. I doubt that, again because of variance. I think there's a good chance he wouldn't even be able to get into Mensa, let alone be brilliant.
If we brought 1000 people back from 1000 BC and had all of them do an IQ test we would get a much more predictable result and maybe that's what the TFP was trying to say, but I really dislike when people neglect to think about variance.
Sustaining our current level is not going to be major problem. All you need to do in order to sustain your current level of energy supply is to invest a little bit more of your energy from existing wells into these new but not as good energy sources. It's sort of like a tax. Another way to put it is that the bad news is that we need to replace 160 exajoules of energy supply, but the good news is that we have 160 exajoules of energy supply to work with.
The problem is how we're going to allow for global economic growth in the future. We might want some 10,000 exajoules per year on a global scale by mid-century. We do not have 10,000 exajoules to work with. It's going to have to come from exponential growth. That's a problem, because you can't have rapid growth with slowly growing energy sources.
Sure, doubling time is a valid way to think about it. If we're going to expand our global energy supply fast enough to make the 21st century as prosperous as the 20th century then we need energy sources that scale as rapidly as the ones we used in the 20th century.
However if all we want to do is to replace our existing level of energy supply in the western world then we can afford to use things that scale more slowly. All they need to do is to scale fast enough to replace the energy that we lose because of peak conventional oil or because of a political will to phase out middle eastern oil.
True, but we don't necessarily need to grow our fossil energy supply at the same rate that they did in the 19th and 20th century. In fact, we probably don't want to expand our fossil energy supply that fast if we care about climate change.
The things that do need to have a high rate of energy return on energy investment are emerging non-fossil energy sources such as wind turbines and photovoltaics. If our wind turbine or pv panel projects don't pay back their energy investments at roughly the rate that oil and coal used to do back in the 20th century then we are indeed headed for trouble, either a lack of energy or recurring weather catastrophes like droughts and hurricanes.
Talking about EROI is about as meaningless as talking about ROI. Nobody cares about ROI in and of itself. You have to add time to the equation. The relevant measures in economy are measures of rate of return on investment. The relevant energy measures will always be measures of rate of energy return on energy investment.
Simple thought experiment: Company A builds a hydroelectric dam that lasts for 120 years and has an EROI of 120. Company B builds wind turbines that last for 25 years and have an EROI of 30. They both invest 1 unit of energy at year one. After 25 years company A has produced a net amount of (-1) + 25 = 24 units of energy. Company B has produced (-1) + 30 = 29 units of energy. The wind turbines are a better investment than the hydro dam from a purely energetic perspective (but not necessarily from an economic perspective).
It gets even worse for the hydro dam when you take into account that it takes as much as 20 years to build it, locking up energy investments for that time, while wind turbines only take a year or so from factory to operation, thus locking up energy for a shorter amount of time. Now I'm not saying that wind turbines are better than hydro dams. The examples could have been about any two technologies. All I'm saying is that EROI is bullshit if you use it without taking time into account.
Commercial transport is all about speed (up to a point). An electric plane would be significantly slower than a jet and a slower plane will produce fewer passenger miles per unit of time, which means it will take longer to produce the number of passenger miles needed to pay back the purchasing cost of the plane. Pilots and flight attendants are also about as productive as the plane is fast. In other words if you downgrade to a slower plane you need to pay for more labor to produce the same number of passenger miles. Also, passengers will not be willing to pay as much for a slow flight as they would for a faster flight all else being equal.
The fuel cost only amounts to something like a third of the cost of a typical ticket on a low cost airline, which means that the best the electric plane could do if it was as fast as a jet (which it wouldn't be) would be to cut the price by a third, so it's not like it would be revolutionary.
I think one could imagine a solar powered military drone, either heavier than air or lighter than air, that could stay airborne for weeks or months at a time and function as a sort of poor man's satellite which would be effective against Talibans and pirates and anyone else who doesn't have access to high altitude anti-aircraft missiles. I don't know why the US military or some other military dealing with guerrilla adversaries hasn't tried that.
You could ship it by rail the whole way, but that seems like a waste of railway cars and space in the railway schedule that could be better used to transport valuable and/or time-critical freight or passengers on passenger trains. I think they actually use ships and ship the garbage to the harbor nearest to the power plant where they then load the garbage on trucks or railway cars depending on a bunch of factors like how far away the plant is and whether it has a rail connection.
Slow-going ships are ridiculously fuel-efficient and can transport equally ridiculous amounts of freight and since we have rivers and seas virtually everywhere in Europe there is no reason not to use ships for stuff that isn't time-critical.
I imagine some of the garbage is probably kind of smelly, which might be another reason to take the sea route rather than on railways that pass through towns and cities...
You're joking, but half-seriously, imagine if a manufacturer would make a cheap 'tablet' without a display and with physical network ports and just enough ventilation that you could stack multiple tablets as high as you please without overheating. Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
I imagine the power adapters and the power strips connected in series would look really silly.
Scrubbing is not really contingent on anything. Things like plastic, wood, paper and other organic waste also produce toxic gases and ash even when you burn them at high temperatures in nearly ideal conditions. For one thing everything that lives AFAIK contains considerable amounts of sulfur. Remember when your chemistry teacher had you burn sulfur to make sulfuric acid?
S + O2 SO2 (fuel burns)
2 SO2 + O2 2 SO3 (more burning)
SO3 + H2O H2SO4 (exhaust comes into contact with water in the atmosphere)
By the way the scrubber can actually salvage a little bit of extra heat that you can use for district heating so it's not purely a loss.
Yeah, the embryo is (literally) incredibly complex, recursive and fractal-like. The whole process of going from a single cell to an adult creature is far beyond human grasp. The first few cell divisions are reasonably well understood but as you imagine it gets exponentially more complex from there on. IIRC the thing that keeps the fractal-like development of the embryo from derailing and resulting in a fleshy tumor-like lump is the communications system that the cells create as part of the process of building the embryo.
Sure, a lot of published science is wrong, but some of it is to definite and impressive to be wrong. For example, they can reliably do certain startlingly Frankenstein's monster-like things with fruit fly embryos. If you didn't know better you might think that we're close to having 'designer fruit flies', but the truth is that they've merely uncovered mechanisms here and there that allow them to do certain things. It's not yet clear how far those mechanisms and principles that they have discovered so far will take them in understanding the whole process of going from DNA to creature.
There is actually a sensitivity setting under Appearance --> Behavior, but the highest sensitivity isn't as sensitive as it could be and the algorithm they use seems a bit flaky and inconsistent in general.
The thing about Canonical is that they seem to have some understanding and sense of direction when it comes to details. I'm pleased to see that they've made the workspace switcher button movable in 12.10. That means that you could put it high enough up on the launcher that it doesn't hide. They've also made it so that you zoom down to a workspace by single clicking instead of double clicking. These two changes mean that workspace switching with the mouse could be done reflexively, which means that users could learn to do it as part of their workflow. I'm also very pleased to see close window buttons on the windows in the window spread. I only wish the windows in the spread would stay where they are and not rearrange when you close one of them, because that makes it difficult to close many windows at a time (and it's kind of chafing on the eyes too).
Maybe they'll work on the launcher auto hide functionality for 13.04. It seems like an important thing if you use it. I feel I can afford to dedicate 32 pixels on the side of my 16:9 display to having my apps visible at a glance.
I am not a biologist and I don't know how it works, but I think I can answer your question on a conceptual level. Whenever you see persistent large-scale organization it is a good idea to assume that there is some sort of feedback mechanism involved. I guess there is some sort of inter-cell communication scheme where cells that grow in the wrong place (or misbehave in some other way) are discouraged and cells that grow in the right place (and behave) are encouraged.
I wondered the same thing as you and I was recommended the book Endless Forms Most Beautiful by Sean B. Carroll as the best way for a layman to learn more about the current understanding of how it works. It is essentially a book that tries to explain how genes, cells and embryos are connected physically and conceptually. I found the book quite challenging, but I think I that I understand some of it. Many of the results are quite mind-blowing. I don't regret having forced myself through about half of the book, painstakingly googling and wikipediaing biology terms as I went along.
It's not the first tablet to do that. Microsoft tried the same idea back in 2004-2005 with Windows XP Tablet PC Edition. The technology was immature, the implementation sucked and the market was not ready.
As someone noted in the comments above there may be a business-user, business-app market this time around. I'm thinking about a user who realizes he needs to make some minor last minute edits to an Excel file and then update his Power point presentation to reflect those changes. That sort of stuff.
Almost nobody cares when something was "invented", whatever that means (first thought of? first described in detail? first prototype? first series production?). New inventions begin to matter when they become useful and affordable to a large number of users in the wealthy parts of the world.
If the things I listed have not dramatically changed the way that you consume media and tele-communicate then you're probably someone who doesn't consume a lot of newly produced media and someone who prefers to communicate by means that were in common use before 1997. As I said, narrow fields.
Maybe you're thinking of large mechanical stuff? I guess the last time people saw dramatic change thanks to such things must have been around the time when the B707 went into series production and satellites arguably brought important improvements in things like communications and weather forecasting. Approximately 0% of the population flew into space...