I remember taking a field trip in 4th grade to the local telephone central office. We toured the entire facility. I don't think I would be who/where I am today if I hadn't have taken that field trip. I had never seen so many different wires and connections and lights, and I wanted to know what they all did.
I had one of the most amazing nerd-childhoods in the 1970s growing up as a free range kid in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. A total microcosm of modern infrastructure in a small area. My after-school jaunts might take me to the telephone exchange, a radio station where I could use the production room if it was free and the chief engineer would let me know if he was going to do work on the transmitter, the (self contained no grid) power plant, a central monitoring alarm company that also broadcast Muzak, there's an old timer memory test, the newspaper from editorial to pressroom, an old-school watch repairman who'd hand me a magnifier so I could see what he was working on. Some of these people knew my parents but most just knew me, because I had shown up one day and introduced myself. During the same time period things in the general US of A were not quite as casual and much more spread out, but I'm sure opportunities like these existed for interested (and polite) young persons.
So I was kind of devastated when my daughter and I found ourselves in Crystal River FL a few years ago and I honestly believed that with a single phone call I might arrange a visit to a shut down/decommissioned nuclear power plant. Surely, I thought, we'd even be able to enter the actual control room or gaze down into the pool at the spent fuel... but all turned out to be a god-forsaken resounding motherfucking no.
Not to skim off the delicious prattle of hackers zooming in on clunky JPGs to reveal passwords written on post-it notes (on CSI they have ways to zoom down to pimple-hair level)... well of course it's possible, no duh... there's a phenomenon I'd like to point out I feel will have a more disastrous effect than terrorism.
Part of it arises from the modern invention of "adolescence", when children have become sentient and somewhat responsible but have years to go before that magic 18th birthday, when it becomes legally possible to drink, vote and be thrown out of the house --- all on the same day. For a good part of the 20th century after school care options were limited but this did not seem to be much of a problem, most suburban kids ran wild and made it home in time for dinner. And those without a stay-at-home parent might go home, but some would check in with or join their parents at work. It was not uncommon to see after-school children hanging around any workplace. Then through the 80s and 90s things changed, as what we now know as the 'helicopter parent' rose to power --- ironically --- children became more segregated from the adult world than ever before. There were now places to go after school where children could be supervised by adults, yet remain wholly disconnected from the adult world. Where the presence of children in the workplace was once considered a polite necessity, children are now all but dis-invited, by concerns of distraction or corporate liability or just plain meanness, take your pick. Late in the game campaigns like Take Your Daughter To Work (Or Your Son Too, Sorry About That) Day came into being as some adults realized that society was being transformed by this segregation, but the novelty of a single day cannot replace the extent that youth had participated, or at least been aware, in the past.
Just as class trips give glimpses of the adult world, we must recall a time not so long ago when families took these trips too. As the world has gotten more paranoid and especially post-9/11, some of the most awesome wonders of the modern world are off-limits to children and adults alike. I recall the remarks of a gent who runs a nuclear power plant in Britain who sadly attributed the rise in irrational fear among the public to the (rather) sudden cessation of tours at the turn of the century, when groups once had been shown all areas and the kids were full of questions. And he is not alone, there has been a general lockdown of the more interesting and inspiring places in the industrial world, which stems from the simple question, "What's the worst thing a terrorist could do? Can we ensure that could never happen?" Not really, but we can lock doors and shut people out. That's a safe thing to do. At what cost though?
If all of your kids want to grow up to become video game designers, and no one seems to have any interest in running a refinery or keeping the power grid energized, and continue to act like children well into their adult years... then at least you should be able to figure out why. It has to do with the forced segregation of children and adults, and general lock-down of the inspiring wonders that the young could once have seen, for the price of a bus ticket.
We should be giving open tours again, not outlawing cameras. The future is at stake.
When you're facing any project that will require creative thought and a bit of narrative at the end such as an essay or presentation, do a bit of deep research early in the cycle so that main points and a crude outline of the objective is apparent, then go about your days keeping the project in mind. Bits and pieces will occur to you at various times and that's when you must take some sort of action: reach into the pocket for notebook and pen or talk into your widget. Every other day gather and consolidate these thoughts to paper or screen. Try to think of the project as 'evolving' rather than a sense of anxiety or dread. Above all, don't try to do it entirely in your mind, there must be some physical recording medium with you at all times. At some point there might be a jotted or spoken note that you'll discover leads to some wry twist of insight, or a novel approach to present the ideas. Like dream images these insights can be fragile, never trust them to memory. Hopefully as the procrastination phase nears its end you'll find a much better outline to fill with detail and polish, and a fine end product.
This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines.
So much of the story is left untold, thank you for telling. No one ever seems to ask: What is good about Fukushima Daiichi?
Fukushima's first reactor went on-line in March 1971 [cite] and 5 others followed up to 1979. Without accounting for cumulative downtime (hard to find), let's keep it simple, cut everything here by a third if you like, I come up with a combined total of ~159.12 Gigawatt-years of electricity. That's ~636.5 million tons of coal [cite] that did not have to be expensively imported and burned to help resource-poor Japan become the industrial giant it is today. Think of it as ~1.8 trillion tons of CO2 [cite] that did not enter the atmosphere, if you like. That's just one nuclear power plant with reactors that are not big by today's standards.More stats, and the interesting observation on how the hysterical press of Japan does not necessarily reflect public opinion,
"A poll taken in February 2015 by the Mizuho Information & Research Institute of Japan asked whether or not the respondent would use nuclear-generated electricity if the costs were the same or less than they were that month, and 67% said âoeyesâ. Only 32% replied in the negative. This contrasts with a number of media polls with voluntary and hence non-representative participation, and the distortion is compounded by a 2012 news media survey finding that 47 of the 50 most popular press outlets in Japan said they were antinuclear."
Japans few nuclear plants have provided as much as ~30% of Japan's electricity and I am confident they will pass that figure once more. Nuclear has contributed greatly to the country's wealth in ways that no other energy source could have, or ever could. There is a great deal of hidden peril facing the entire human species that is a direct result of stalling the Industrial Revolution --- by sweeping nuclear energy under the rug. As Kirk Sorensen says so eloquently,
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."
Well said. The North American power grid was built out as needed, where needed... in every instance adding just enough spare capacity to accommodate Summer or Winter peaks without alarming long-term investors. Few redundant interconnects. There was no Central Planning Committee deciding how much redundancy may be required, and especially no paranoid engineering on what are essentially un-protectable fragile spans of infrastructure. As with most other modern systems its very existence relies on human restraint.
Which is why only the dreariest of personalities are attracted to the "terrorist alarm industry" where people stay up nights brainstorming all the various things terrorists could do... so terrorists don't have to. They share their findings to an excitable tabloid press and hold conferences, tongues lolling and eyes rolling back as they receive a congratulatory 'pat' on the head for proclaiming the latest "thing" that terrorists could do. In the place of the Cold War excess we now have a behemoth DHS arm of the government who considers the US as its enemy. Every penny spent on it has been wasted.
The real problem --- if in fact there is one --- is that so many are engaged in this paranoid (but fun for them!) pastime of pointing out vulnerability to potential social malfeasance and so few have been engaged in advancing technology in ways that may alleviate all kinds of threat. This means the harnessing and producing of more energy, not less.
Sorry! To all of you in the US who are pushing for micro-grids of wind and solar as a 'plus', it is not. It is a drain, a bad idea, and dangerously stupid. You are being isolationist and foolish, advocating the most expensive and ultimately disastrous options a time when half of all Americans have no savings whatsoever. As if the greatest industrial power the world has ever known should scale back to some quasi-medieval level of energy consumption. As if grid would be made 'better' by introducing countless points of failure (foreign made) devices. Yeah, let's take power generation outside shall we. During the first continent wide hard Winter freeze a hundred million might die from this Darwinian experiment. Meanwhile your ridiculous dreams will bankrupt us all. Every penny spent on it has been wasted. What stark clinical madness! Your own children will not forgive you this frankly 'hippie' level of denial, which has persisted for decades.
The only way out of this mess is to create wealth the old fashioned way by the creation of something that did not exist before. A relatively few massive energy sources that are completely self-contained, defensible, protected from the elements, stock enough fuel for weeks or months or years, and help to decrease the corporate and personal cost of living. Some have heard me say it all before: put a national priority on grid scale DC-AC tech, build overlapping HVDC loops across the country to feed the legacy grid, and above all, feed those HVDC loops with nuclear energy --- yes, fission --- in ways that are proven and new ways we already know can be done.
FRANKLY, everything else, including the mass distribution of fragile natural gas pipeline networks, are shit solutions.
You experience a unique feeling of helplessness when you've run through your last roll of thermal paper. Soon into the game you realize that those people on TV who print a little then tear off the printout to show to others are frivolous and wasteful, consigning themselves to this sad fate. So you stop tearing it off, carefully rolling up the output so you can feed it back into the printer upside down and print on what was the (mostly blank) right margin, visually decoding the meshed characters at the center.
Which is why when I managed to turn my original model I TRS-80 with a direct connect Bell 103 Lynx modem into a dumb terminal by talking to the UART with custom written Z80 assembler code and watched those green characters crawl across the screen, it was a great day, like inheriting a warehouse full of thermal paper. The scrolling was so "blindingly fast" that I could even tell the time sharing service to turn off the 2-3 leading NUL characters at the beginning of each line!
In the year 2016 there will be a dozen vague announcements promising some new materials breakthrough (graphene, unicorn crystals, etc.) that lead excitable people to imagine that large scale grid storage is right around the corner. Tesla will introduce a battery the size of a motorcycle that can power a car, a battery the size of a car that can power a house, and one the size of a city that can power a slightly larger city, for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile the tech community will fixate on every disingenuous statistic anyone can come up with about grid-scale wind power as if there had been some new 'tech' breakthrough, and is poised to explode for no earthly reason. To an embarrassingly lesser extent there will be a trickle of topics on solar power which was the big push a few years ago, now mainly a few whiny articles about how big energy companies and short sighted governments are interfering with the peoples' right to push tiny bits of energy onto the grid and make the people around them pay for the infrastructure to do so. California (and now its Eastern colony, Vermont) will generate less electricity and import more grid power and natural gas than ever.
Fusion will be closer than ever before and yet practically speaking on the grid scale, remain as comfortably distant as ever. This will be good news to the folks who advocate fusion as a way to derail discussions about nuclear fission, but have at last realized that both methods involve the use of terrifying radioactivity.
Meanwhile stock-paper energy companies will continue to acquire --- then decommission --- nuclear power plants in acts of staggering corporate vandalism to improve their short-term balance sheets and push grid consumers permanently, irrevocably, into the profitable and seasonally volatile natural gas market. If it were not for a few well positioned math-challenged nuke-scardy faux-environmentalists everyone might have been up in arms about this. If we had a federal government that was not also compromised by faux-environmentalism, there would have been investigations into possible conspiracy of restraint of trade, and a real concern for the stability of the nation's electrical infrastructure.
China will continue to position itself as the third world's most ambitious energy and rail infrastructure provider, making firm promises and forming lasting relationships and securing oil resources in regions of the Middle East, Asia and Africa that the United States CIA had once thought they could 'manage' cheaply just by installing friendly regimes. She will lead the United States and the world in nuclear energy research, forging ahead with the CAP1400 project that leverages Westinghouse technology to a greater extent than Westinghouse itself is able... and meanwhile and not incidentally China is actively making molten salt reactor research and prototype development a national priority, unlike the United States where advocates of LFTR become the brunt of dumb jokes on Slashdot.
but she doesn't have a lot to say Google's a pretty nice girl but she changes from day to day I wanna tell her that I love her a lot but I gotta get a belly full of wine Google's a pretty nice girl someday I'm gonna make her mine, oh yeah someday I'm gonna make her mine
Your driver liability insurance policy has come up for review. We have been recently been acquired by AAAA, the quadruple-A company -- the "Autonomous AAA of the future" and what that means for you as a member is -- it has never been easier to upgrade to an a-car! Financing is available! [link] Due to increasing pressure in the political, legal and underwriters' arenas, we regret to inform you that the cost of your driver policy will be rising this quarter in order to begin collection of fees for the Federal National Driver Insurance Pool, and rising at a steady rate thereafter. It will continue to rise over time despite your [good to excellent] driving record. Now that the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act is law, and blanket liability accident investigation procedures have been approved by Congress, the legal liability of autonomous vehicles is capped nationwide. While this grants the manufactures freedom from risk of direct criminal penalty and potentially unlimited civil liability, it places human drivers in a difficult position. Most a-car accidents will, of historical necessity rather than actual circumstances, be "no-fault". Since human drivers and any victims claiming injury from them are still obliged to use traditional law enforcement and legal means of redress -- and the cost of these continues to rise -- underwriters are pressuring insurance companies to drop human drivers altogether. We do not intend to do this, but we can no longer provide policies for extended periods. Your new maximum policy period is now [one month]. Thank you for insuring with AAAA.
Dear editor: DRIVERS cause accidents. A-CARS prevent them. That's what the billboard says -- and if Howard County Referendum passes this September manually operated cars will soon be a thing of the past here. What started as a discussion at a hearing after last year's tragic accident grew into a full heated debate, and to think it all started with the parents who provide their children with a-cars pinning the blame squarely on other peoples' children. But then, after co-opting the national campaign with its slick literature and canned answers for everything -- NOW the fault is with human drivers themselves. And then in an astounding feat of lunacy they claim that it's only fair to place the blame on everybody. Not just the drunk, the aged or infirm, the inexperienced, the distracted or the just plain stupid. But no one's stupid in their book, we're just behind the times is all. They are like the drum majorettes of some utopian humanist parade. I say, SAVE US from these rich hippies, their weird toys and their broken ideals. Now I know a lot of these people, even like some of 'em, but aside from this national 'sideline the humans' campaign they're pushed at us (and WHO is paying for those TV spots I wonder) let's not forget that this debate started around kids. Kids who need to learn to drive as surely as they need to learn to push a pen and spell their name. It's like swimming, who would discourage their own children from practice in swimming, to become expert swimmers, because water is dangerous?? Every kid will need to drive some day, or suffer harm or hardship by not knowing how. These a-car parents even forbid their kids from riding in cars being driven by folks they've grown up with, trusted for years. At the parent conferences we even sit on opposite sides of the table, we can barely be civilized even, because this crap has gotten so deep. Well I say they are making a big mistake and don't seem
Perl Festivity Level 1: Developers and users have gathered to nibble hors d'oeuvres and chat amiably with each other about the Modern Perl Renaissance. With every sip of their drinks Perl seems ever more striking. Some are gathered around the upright piano improvising songs that proclaim how it is faster, neater, and sharper than ever before with its asynchronous APIs.
Perl Festivity Level 2: Everyone is talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all. Perl seems even better. Perl Monks are patiently explaining syntax and style to potted plants and other nearby objects. Around the piano people are feeling fun and flexible, just as programming in scripting languages used to be. Someone is crooning a bawdy ballad where a couple of inexperienced DOM and CSS selectors encounter a very supportive bundled development server.
Perl Festivity Level 3: Monks are arguing violently and defrocking one another over nested do...until loops that bail on exceptions. People are gulping down other peoples' drinks, placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike as everyone bawls "Got my Mojolicious workin'... but it don't work on Python!" They have lost count of their drinks, and the world is harmonious with blissful adherence to modern interfaces and standards.
Perl Festivity Level 4: All the guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around a burning heap of tables and chairs in celebration of postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations. The piano is missing.
Imagine a whole community of people! Amazing, wonderful people! I can see them now. Welcome to TBA, where the proud stewards of America's spent nuclear fuel keep watch over the future.
Amazingly, these people understand the principles of ionizing radiation, the log scale, the inverse square law, how half-life directly and inversely proportional to danger for a given mass of material. They are aware of the relatively small mass and storage volume that decayed spent nuclear fuel uses. They know that once spent fuel has been cooling in a pool beside a reactor for ten years it is no longer temperature-hot and the only immediate challenge it presents is to safely handle it, shield it, transport it and choose a dry cask method and suitable underground storage area with several layers of containment where it can be monitored properly.
And they watch over it in a place that is the best place that ever could be, because it really exists! Because these people are practical and know how to calculate risk. They do not consult a political oracle, they hire real engineers. They know what they are doing is noble and just, even heroic --- considering the danger posed by the ignorant. They build a place that simple yet supple, perhaps several circular concrete silos several hundred feet deep, with a nested interior section of blast-proof partitioned sections, made from the same concrete we use to build nuclear plants.
No one time unicorn-fart storage solution that is waranteed to last 10,000 years by a corporation that may be dead in 50. A place where folks watch over the old waste and in their spare time, help devise ways to finally use it.
Too many would see spent fuel buried in deep salt domes to become entombed in geologically stable formations that could keep it for as much as 100 million years, though it becomes inaccessible to us because they want to just walk away from this unsolved problem and they wish you would too.. The people of TBA are dismayed by this mindset. They know (because they love science, modern civilization and especially humankind) that there is no real nuclear waste here, only unburnt fuel, and this 'waste' still contains ~99% if its energy. It would be a waste to bury it out of reach.
Too many imagine spent fuel hiding in deep caves, such as mines, the kind you need to drive trucks into then take a lift down into the bowels of the Earth. The deeper the better. These caves are always out there somewhere else. Why do they want this? Because they haven't thought it over --- and just maybe --- some of them are secretly hoping that disaster will strike. They'd like to convince you that really deep is safe and not-so-deep is dangerous even though it is actually the reverse, if you are unafraid to consider ALL the angles. Sooner or later some terrorist is going to blow something up. They always do. And among these potential terrorists, perhaps the ones you should be most concerned about, are the people who'd rather we just walked away from this problem. An explosion in one storage silo of many would be a contained mess but it would just be an expensive and time-consuming cleanup operation. But a single explosion that caps off and collapses a deep cave system, our one and only, ending all waste storage in this single point of failure design --- well gwarsh, who'da thunk it?
The people of TBA are aware that blowing things up makes a mess. But they also know enough physics to laugh at those Arne Gunderson doom scenarios where everything is inexplicably burning and criticality and nuclear explosions arise spontaneously from LEU pools and spent fuel is somehow like an atomic bomb and when disaster strikes everyone should run far away and wait for Denver to kill them dead, because eating that fish certainly won't.
In fact, the children of TBA are told bedtime stories that make fun of people who believe all this radiation-fear stuff. On Halloween they dress up as fuel casks, which can store a lot of candy. The school curriculum must teach
Just curious... why are people on a coding site declaring "Flash needs to die" instead of something like, Flash needs to be completely deconstructed and rewritten by the open source community using the most conservative style of programming, a system that forces a multi-person review of commits, hit with the best enumeration tools we have, so that arbitrary code execution is not possible? Which might be possible because processor speed has improved since it was first designed and the assembly level hacks that made it possible areno longer necessary? And when we are done, the worst thing that could ever happen is that someone might display goatse.cx inside a Flash window?
Instead of busting into the kitchen, grabbing pans off the wall and showing the chef how steak should be done, we sit at the table banging our forks and knives, shouting, "Down with meat!"
It's easy to make fun of Outlook, where with maliciously crafted embedded binary OLE blobs you can trigger exploits in many versions of Microsoft products. The faults lie in the products themselves not the Blob. But Flash self contained and lives inside a little rectangle. It is cross platform, amply documented and widely used today. Why must it die? So that generations of beloved Internet content can be 'destroyed' overnight? It almost smells like book-burning.
Because we are presently living in a wind-up Universe and its mainspring consists of two fundamental forces that are 10^40 apart. As evidenced by the receding galaxies, we still getting all wound up.
At the end of this cycle the mainspring will snap around and in the next cycle gravity will trump the electromagnetic force by 10^40 to form a battery operated Universe. The charge light will come on and increase of potential (not spatial expansion) will take place.
The whole thing is the result of pulling on String Theory, and when contraction takes place the background remnant (which you could hear now if you play it backwards) is actually a slow voice saying,
Now that the Pope has mounted his Encyclical that has made some scientists uncomfortable (because it disagrees with their views) and has made other scientists uncomfortable (because it agrees with their views) and yet others jubilant (because for them it was never about science, it was only about getting their way)... there will be a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Climate Summit in Paris this week as the final North Pole 'Cold War' barrier between science and religion is ceremoniously cut. Crews are standing by to tear down the wall between faith and empirical evidence that has symbolized the oppression of Great Ideas since the late Renaissance.
Santa Claus will preside over the ceremony, holding out a large golden scissors and when the ribbon is cut, "There will not be a soul left alive who can deny his existence!" said Mrs.Claus, whose role in traditional affairs has been confined to baking cookies. But now as her husband tends to his yearly duties, she has shucked the apron and is teaming up with a Silicon Valley PR agency to launch an Internet and Social Media campaign to shine the spotlight on what she calls The Wall Of Science.
"They call it an age of enlightenment, but it has been bad for us," she lamented. "The average age at which parents tell their children that "Santa doesn't really exist" has been dropping steadily, and there are even households where young children have always believed that their loving parents are behind it all. These children are being deprived of the wonder that arises from a belief in supernatural forces and miracles, and the essential idea that fountains of free money will flow your way if you elect progressively Socialist governments that tax big business and consolidate world governments. While we cannot easily legislate a belief in Santa Claus, we'll have to the next best thing --- get the United Nations involved in the issue, and prove Santa's existence by showing him on TV and Facebook."
The role of the UN is crucial. Santa Claus has long been considered a delegate from the North Pole in ex officio, but now between solstices he will take his new position as head the IMF. "The elves have been a labor problem for over 100 years and heating costs have skyrocketed. We've shut the factories and the elves have applied for 'climate refugee status' to Europe and the Americas. With IMF funds we will be able to out-source toy production to facilities in low-wage countries. Santa's bags will now be full UN investment capital, to be distributed to countries who get with the program. And everybody gets a lump of coal this year, in the form of a hefty Carbon Tax."
But what is this 'Wall of Science' Mrs. Claus has taken such a bead on? "It is the wall that divides us, that is all. In a world of unrestricted travel and electronic communication that crosses borders, we were desperately searching for something to tear down. You cannot start a grassroots campaign without tearing something down. Then some nice folks at the Vatican pointed us to the Wall, which they said separated persons who demand empirical evidence to build their positions from those who place faith and opinion foremost, then go looking for talking points to support their views. It had little to do with toys so at first we were skeptical, until they gave us a >wink< and said, you know, those of little faith do not believe in St. Nicholas... and after we heard that, we were all in."
"As you know," Mrs. Claus continued, "there has been a crisis in the Catholic Church. But at the same time there has been a breakaway group, the Gaians, whose personification an Earth writhing in pain under the threat of Corporate Man attained crucial 'faith' status some time back with the rise of the Algorians, whose scepters were hockey sticks. The Catholic Church has come to the conclusion that if it can draw in the Gaians, the combined numbers can effect real change in the world. Millennials reject symbols of office and velvet costumes, yet they respond well to activist causes, so long as you can wear jean
Spot the clear blub blub trend, Try hard. ~1mm rise per year. Maybe. Meanwhile a typhoon could arrive next year with a 8 foot storm surge that swamps the atolls completely.
DISCLAIMER: Grew up in the Caribbean, nailed doors shut from the inside and held on tight for Hugo and Marilyn. People died. '~1mm/yr climate refugees' on a coral atoll really sound like whiny scammers to me. In terms of threat level it's like that movie, Frogs.
That is where it belongs. Helium-3 is the dumbest, most impractical solution to our energy problems imaginable. Unicorn farts would be a more realistic power source. We don't actual have any helium-3, and even if we did, it is far harder to fuse, with far less energy out, than deuterium, and deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.
Well said. Though you'll find yourself arguing with people who thought you said it's a dumb idea. It's a great idea --- good enough for practical old NASA to drop it into their distant-futurist visions of lunar colonies --- but a dumb solution for Earth right now, even directed research. There's an energy crisis happening down here.
Lunar H3 mining along with the idea of solar energy collected in orbit are 'fails' in my book because both would place Earth society in the grip of the consortium that manages the infrastructure, and that infrastructure (though awesome) would become an absurdly simple single point of failure. These ideas lead directly to One World Government and it's probably not the one you want. Even if it works out it's lights out for mankind when the first Bad Thing, Who'da Thunk It happens.
In order to ensure that nations can maintain their sovereignty, even to ensure there are nations at all, the fossil free energy solution we pursue should comprise power generated directly from elements that can be mined locally with a reasonable footprint, technology that can be manufactured and maintained locally. Mining is a 'given'. If you think wind and PV solar are mining-free solutions, you haven't looked into the process or run the numbers necessary to scale them. Wind and solar and the chemistry necessary for grid storage are environmental disasters waiting to happen.
Grid electricity should become the universal medium of exchange and should be used for almost all ground transportation, and must be available in such abundance that we can use it to manufacture synthetic fuels for air and sea travel. Continental grids should consist of power plants pushing HVDC into regional 'loops' from which tuned HVAC is extracted from several points to power the legacy grids, which can then be separated into smaller islands than are currently used. Efficiently doing DC/AC conversion and the means to better switch and properly utilize HVDC should be a top research priority --- what ever the energy source.
We are also approaching a time when the purification of ocean/waste water and its transport will become a top priority on a scale that exceeds any present oil and gas pipelines. Within fifty to a hundred years' time, additional terawatts of energy will be needed to bring fresh water into regions that are presently depleting water tables faster than they replenish. I'm not just talking tap water. Our food supply relies on massive irrigation. If you think wind and solar could purify and move this much water, let alone power an industrial society, please think again.
It's time to finish taming fire. Nuclear fission and specifically the two fluid molten salt reactor with active processing with it's "safe in 300 years" waste decay profile is the single best and most practical solution yet devised to produce energy on the scale necessary to survive and prosper.
I'm not fond of these so-called "small scale micro-fission reactors" either, where conventional nuclear power manufacturers re trying to trump the safety issue (while aggravating the waste generation problem) by proposing a great many smaller light and heavy water reactors. Yes of course they want to sell one to every town, including yours. It's an absurd notion borne out of the an
I think that someone who doesn't understand the difference between i.e. and e.g. has no business criticising others.
Good catch!;-)
I call bullshit on Pennycook's characterization of randomly generated nonsense as B.S, which he uses as a pivot of his 'study'. Here we have a generalization and judgement, an i.e. if you will, of something that can only be evaluated on an e.g. basis.
Identifying a scrap of apparent nonsense as profound is NOT a final judgement. It is a declaration that something is worthy to remember and consider, a state of unresolved investigation. We strive to find pattern and meaning and when we glimpse something --- a wordless sense on the level of intuition gives us a tug, saying in effect, file that one for later. Now whether we do in fact remember it and get around to pondering it later... depends on the amount of mental discipline and organization.
Sadly, we know how to write and are surrounded by paper but few of us actually write interesting things down anywhere and ponder on them. The hippies who followed Maharishi around in the 60s hanging on his every word mostly didn't keep journals, they had became addicted to the rush of hearing the words being spoken to them, and were sure that somehow somewhen something would click and it would all magically drop into place. Some pretended it did merely so they could leave and get on with their lives.
If you're clever enough and work at it you can eventually find a context where any nonsense makes sense. We see this as a challenge, a game.
In this paragraph imagine that I said something profound about our dreams are a journey along the dividing line between sense and nonsense, and how it is essential for us to do this 'perimeter walk' on a regular basis to shore up the specific neuron pathways along this 'border' and drop breadcrumbs that we use to know when we are crossing the line. Having these marked perimeters being essential to maintaining sanity, something like that. But yet, peoples' reactions to encountering these crumbs in the waking state varies: some may simply turn back, some may feel encouraged to cross over, some may even feel threatened.
Not all Goo Goo Goo Joob is either scripture or blather. That one's purpose was to deliberately confound those who were deeply analyzing Beatles lyrics for hidden meaning. Even Horse ebooks is not 'nonsense'. Though it was mechanically produced it is not the result of monkeys and typewriters. Its coder gathered volumes of text in which people were expressing ideas and sentiment, so the result makes new connections. Like round blue tailights on a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
What this has to do with gullibility I have not a clue.
Meet Cortana!! What's new in Cortana!! Where's Cortana?? Start using Cortana!! What can I say to Cortana?? What can Cortana help me with?? Cortana's Notebook!! Cortana's settings!! Favorite places and Cortana!! Find music with Cortana!! My inner circle and Cortana!! Quiet hours and Cortana!! My interests and Cortana!! Add interests in Cortana's Notebook!! Remind me, Cortana!! Play music with Cortana!! Use Cortana in my car!! Solutions to Cortana issues!! Why didn't I get a reminder when I was supposed to?? Cortana alpha!!
[hides phone] Where's Cortana?? [counts loudly] Ready or not here I come! [finds phone] Here you are!! Peekboo I see you!! [covers camera] Gues who?? Cortana: "It's you, [your name]. He he that was fun. Let's play again!!" Play dress-up with Cortana!! Welcome to my Inner Circle Cortana. I'll light the candles and you summon the demons. One fish!! Two fish!! Red fish!! Blue fish!! I do not like them Sam I Am. I do not like Egghead Speaky Glam. I will not speak into a box. I will not summon clips from Fox. I will not use it on a train. I will not plant it in my brain.
Cortana is your personal assistant on your Windows Phone. She's there to help make things easier for you and keep you up to date on the things that matter to you. Whether it's to keep you looped in with your world or help you manage your everyday life, Cortana is there for you.
Keeping up to date with Cortana!! Quiet hours and Cortana!! Pillow fights with Cortana!! Having a blast with Cortana!! Explore My Secret Places with Cortana!! Having a cigarette with Cortana!! How high can I toss Cortana?? Cortana summon World's Most Expensive Flashlight[tm]!! Does Cortana sleep in the Cloud?? Am I being sucked into the Cloud?? When I die, Cortana, will the Cloud remember me??
There are just a few things to do to get going with Cortana --- like making sure she's on.
Things to do!! Doing things!! Doing the doing-things thing. Let's get going Cortana!! Are you on?? "Yes I am on." Are you on?? "Yes I am on." Are you on?? "Yes I am on. Battery low." Are you on?? "Shut the fuck up meatbag."
No longer am I held down by hypnotic toad rays, devious Italian subversion, or the enemies of Laura! They fall before me and I squash the toads effortlessly with one foot after another!
Obligatory Hypnotoad 10 Hours to test your resolve to continue with the starvation diet. As you gaze into those flippy-floppy eyes you will realize that you have been deceived. It is the common toads that you are squashing to clear the ecological niche for Hypnotoad progeny. You will not mind this. Your noddle-starved noodle will revel in it.
If you also eat the Styrofoam cups you'll be able to swim like Aquaman.
I guess what I'm saying is that within the law enforcement community, Woolsey's views may not be that unusual.
Clinton and Gore are merely political animals and (particularly) gullible individuals who were unable to see past the bullshit when they were briefed by their own intelligence agencies. During the Clinton Administration --- when the fate of non-escrow non-backdoor encryption seemed to be in the balance --- there was a steady stream of leaked stories that claimed that terrorists were using absurdly elaborate methods of communication, on a routine basis (anyone remember the Great Steganography Scare?).
But the real eye-opener for me was Louis Freeh, director of FBI under Clinton, a man I had great respect for, until then. Despite his tenure as judge he seemed incapable of seeing secure encryption as an essential Constitutionally protected right, subject only to due process. He sided with those who wanted to back-door everything.
Shortwave listening was a staple of my childhood. In the 70s and early 80s roughly a third all portable radios were shortwave-capable and a great many people listened to programmes from other countries on a regular basis. Of course you were listening to the raw output of world governments, but you knew this and they made no bones about it. Shortwave is expensive and power-intensive, and yet the airwaves were crowded. People were listening. James Careless has also written this informative shortwave lament which gives much needed backstory for the younger generations.
When I surf US news sources today I can spot the bias from a mile away, and even when they strive for balance of viewpoint the result often comes off clumsily, buried in hedge-words and apologetic disclaimers as if the commentator is, well, feeling a bit insecure. I miss the clarity of sifting world news as portrayed by world governments, assembled and delivered for an English speaking audience in five minutes.
For example, one of my daily listens was Vladimir Posner on Radio Moscow World Service with his daily talk. At a time when US News networks portrayed Russia as a cold-hearted military threat intent on world conquest and our own President Reagan seemed incapable of anything beyond an infantile level of Cowboys 'n Indians... Posner's commentaries were thoughtful and reflective viewpoints on our cultural differences and similarities. You could even 'read' between the lines and glimpse the areas in which Russian society would later reform.
I was lucky to grow up in a time of sunspot activity. Then you could bop over to the BBC for world news (they still cover it best) and then tune at random. You'd hear pan pipes, Romanian lover's laments and even classical music --- tortured as it was by AM bandwidth and fade --- had a certain magic to it, especially at 3 O'clock in the morning.
Tie a long thin wire to a rock and toss the end over a tree or your neighbor's roof, pull it tight and connect it. You're listening to Tokyo, broadcasting from Tokyo. No infrastructure in between except for the ionosphere.
Of course the Internet --- that incredibly, almost laughably fragile construct that relies on stable grid power between you and your 'station', with its hidden single points of failure like DNS and relies on an awesome amount of cooperation and due diligence of faceless corporations and governments to ensure that every little packet will arrive safely and unfiltered... is better, for everything, right?
Sure it is. Until the very day and moment it is not better any more. Any number of things could happen. It could all be over in minutes. It would be wise to acquire at least one good shortwave radio. If something goes wrong with the world, you might be the only one who knows what's going on. While you're at it, go ahead and toss that rock and give a listen. We're past the heyday of shortwave broadcasting but there are still voices out there.
Ya, especially since the attackers were communicating on an unencrypted cell network. This is a purely political statement to move their surveillance agenda along.
You're spot on. There's a cadre of retired intel who, like aging Hollywood actors providing voice talent, get 'tapped' to emerge from retirement and give an press interview or two to drop 'venerable old spook' seed quotes that Opinion columns can churn. I really do believe these people are called up and someone says, "We have an assignment for you. Plant this idea."
Retirees can emerge from the fog, drop their seeds and retreat, there is no unscripted follow-up. Politicians could not do this without having to field questions about their remarks at future press conferences. It is a bug in the human psyche that retired politicians are ascribed more credibility than those in power. They also become 'nonpartisan' in retirement and Opinion columnists of either party can pick up their remarks and without appearing to cross the line.
Crisis: Snowden brand is becoming too popular, achieving folk hero status. Mission: Tie Snowden to Paris attacks, disingenuously if necessary. Be emotional, tactless and tearful. Target demographic: People who believe a retiree is 'leaking' old secrets for the betterment of man. Assigned to: R. James Woolsey, Jr., Director CIA under Clinton
Remember the Clinton Administration and his hatchet-man Al Gore, who made the rounds to Congress trying to sell the idea that it was time to outlaw all non-escrow encryption and impose a single government standard? It's that Woolsey, trying to pull the Woolsey over our eyes again.
There are others. Remember in the early days after 9/11, when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz used practiced 'aggrieved old man scowls' to shut down questions they didn't like to hear at press conferences, leave them unanswered? And how the fawning press stopped asking those questions? The aggrieved old man bit really works, especially with young reporters.
Slashdot Mirror
The book *does* target general consumption
I look forward to devouring it!
I, for one, also saw "Trump" in the title.
That makes two.
I remember taking a field trip in 4th grade to the local telephone central office. We toured the entire facility. I don't think I would be who/where I am today if I hadn't have taken that field trip. I had never seen so many different wires and connections and lights, and I wanted to know what they all did.
I had one of the most amazing nerd-childhoods in the 1970s growing up as a free range kid in St. Thomas in the US Virgin Islands. A total microcosm of modern infrastructure in a small area. My after-school jaunts might take me to the telephone exchange, a radio station where I could use the production room if it was free and the chief engineer would let me know if he was going to do work on the transmitter, the (self contained no grid) power plant, a central monitoring alarm company that also broadcast Muzak, there's an old timer memory test, the newspaper from editorial to pressroom, an old-school watch repairman who'd hand me a magnifier so I could see what he was working on. Some of these people knew my parents but most just knew me, because I had shown up one day and introduced myself. During the same time period things in the general US of A were not quite as casual and much more spread out, but I'm sure opportunities like these existed for interested (and polite) young persons.
So I was kind of devastated when my daughter and I found ourselves in Crystal River FL a few years ago and I honestly believed that with a single phone call I might arrange a visit to a shut down/decommissioned nuclear power plant. Surely, I thought, we'd even be able to enter the actual control room or gaze down into the pool at the spent fuel... but all turned out to be a god-forsaken resounding motherfucking no.
Not to skim off the delicious prattle of hackers zooming in on clunky JPGs to reveal passwords written on post-it notes (on CSI they have ways to zoom down to pimple-hair level)... well of course it's possible, no duh... there's a phenomenon I'd like to point out I feel will have a more disastrous effect than terrorism.
Part of it arises from the modern invention of "adolescence", when children have become sentient and somewhat responsible but have years to go before that magic 18th birthday, when it becomes legally possible to drink, vote and be thrown out of the house --- all on the same day. For a good part of the 20th century after school care options were limited but this did not seem to be much of a problem, most suburban kids ran wild and made it home in time for dinner. And those without a stay-at-home parent might go home, but some would check in with or join their parents at work. It was not uncommon to see after-school children hanging around any workplace. Then through the 80s and 90s things changed, as what we now know as the 'helicopter parent' rose to power --- ironically --- children became more segregated from the adult world than ever before. There were now places to go after school where children could be supervised by adults, yet remain wholly disconnected from the adult world. Where the presence of children in the workplace was once considered a polite necessity, children are now all but dis-invited, by concerns of distraction or corporate liability or just plain meanness, take your pick. Late in the game campaigns like Take Your Daughter To Work (Or Your Son Too, Sorry About That) Day came into being as some adults realized that society was being transformed by this segregation, but the novelty of a single day cannot replace the extent that youth had participated, or at least been aware, in the past.
Just as class trips give glimpses of the adult world, we must recall a time not so long ago when families took these trips too. As the world has gotten more paranoid and especially post-9/11, some of the most awesome wonders of the modern world are off-limits to children and adults alike. I recall the remarks of a gent who runs a nuclear power plant in Britain who sadly attributed the rise in irrational fear among the public to the (rather) sudden cessation of tours at the turn of the century, when groups once had been shown all areas and the kids were full of questions. And he is not alone, there has been a general lockdown of the more interesting and inspiring places in the industrial world, which stems from the simple question, "What's the worst thing a terrorist could do? Can we ensure that could never happen?" Not really, but we can lock doors and shut people out. That's a safe thing to do. At what cost though?
If all of your kids want to grow up to become video game designers, and no one seems to have any interest in running a refinery or keeping the power grid energized, and continue to act like children well into their adult years... then at least you should be able to figure out why. It has to do with the forced segregation of children and adults, and general lock-down of the inspiring wonders that the young could once have seen, for the price of a bus ticket.
We should be giving open tours again, not outlawing cameras. The future is at stake.
When you're facing any project that will require creative thought and a bit of narrative at the end such as an essay or presentation, do a bit of deep research early in the cycle so that main points and a crude outline of the objective is apparent, then go about your days keeping the project in mind. Bits and pieces will occur to you at various times and that's when you must take some sort of action: reach into the pocket for notebook and pen or talk into your widget. Every other day gather and consolidate these thoughts to paper or screen. Try to think of the project as 'evolving' rather than a sense of anxiety or dread. Above all, don't try to do it entirely in your mind, there must be some physical recording medium with you at all times. At some point there might be a jotted or spoken note that you'll discover leads to some wry twist of insight, or a novel approach to present the ideas. Like dream images these insights can be fragile, never trust them to memory. Hopefully as the procrastination phase nears its end you'll find a much better outline to fill with detail and polish, and a fine end product.
This is what people don't seem to get. They compare Fukushima to a single wind turbine failure and proclaim wind is safer. Um no, Fukushima's generation capacity was equivalent to about 7,000-10,000 wind turbines.
So much of the story is left untold, thank you for telling. No one ever seems to ask: What is good about Fukushima Daiichi?
Fukushima's first reactor went on-line in March 1971 [cite] and 5 others followed up to 1979. Without accounting for cumulative downtime (hard to find), let's keep it simple, cut everything here by a third if you like, I come up with a combined total of ~159.12 Gigawatt-years of electricity. That's ~636.5 million tons of coal [cite] that did not have to be expensively imported and burned to help resource-poor Japan become the industrial giant it is today. Think of it as ~1.8 trillion tons of CO2 [cite] that did not enter the atmosphere, if you like. That's just one nuclear power plant with reactors that are not big by today's standards. More stats, and the interesting observation on how the hysterical press of Japan does not necessarily reflect public opinion,
"A poll taken in February 2015 by the Mizuho Information & Research Institute of Japan asked whether or not the respondent would use nuclear-generated electricity if the costs were the same or less than they were that month, and 67% said âoeyesâ. Only 32% replied in the negative. This contrasts with a number of media polls with voluntary and hence non-representative participation, and the distortion is compounded by a 2012 news media survey finding that 47 of the 50 most popular press outlets in Japan said they were antinuclear."
Japans few nuclear plants have provided as much as ~30% of Japan's electricity and I am confident they will pass that figure once more. Nuclear has contributed greatly to the country's wealth in ways that no other energy source could have, or ever could. There is a great deal of hidden peril facing the entire human species that is a direct result of stalling the Industrial Revolution --- by sweeping nuclear energy under the rug. As Kirk Sorensen says so eloquently,
"Every time mankind has been able to access a new source of energy it has led to profound societal implications. Human beings had slaves for thousands of years, and when we learned how to make carbon our slave instead of other human beings, we started to learn how to be civilized people. Thorium has a million times the energy density of a cabon-hydrogen bond. What could that mean for human civilization? Once we've learned how to use it at this kind of efficiency, we will never run out. It is simply too common."
Well said. The North American power grid was built out as needed, where needed... in every instance adding just enough spare capacity to accommodate Summer or Winter peaks without alarming long-term investors. Few redundant interconnects. There was no Central Planning Committee deciding how much redundancy may be required, and especially no paranoid engineering on what are essentially un-protectable fragile spans of infrastructure. As with most other modern systems its very existence relies on human restraint.
Which is why only the dreariest of personalities are attracted to the "terrorist alarm industry" where people stay up nights brainstorming all the various things terrorists could do... so terrorists don't have to. They share their findings to an excitable tabloid press and hold conferences, tongues lolling and eyes rolling back as they receive a congratulatory 'pat' on the head for proclaiming the latest "thing" that terrorists could do. In the place of the Cold War excess we now have a behemoth DHS arm of the government who considers the US as its enemy. Every penny spent on it has been wasted.
The real problem --- if in fact there is one --- is that so many are engaged in this paranoid (but fun for them!) pastime of pointing out vulnerability to potential social malfeasance and so few have been engaged in advancing technology in ways that may alleviate all kinds of threat. This means the harnessing and producing of more energy, not less.
Sorry! To all of you in the US who are pushing for micro-grids of wind and solar as a 'plus', it is not. It is a drain, a bad idea, and dangerously stupid. You are being isolationist and foolish, advocating the most expensive and ultimately disastrous options a time when half of all Americans have no savings whatsoever. As if the greatest industrial power the world has ever known should scale back to some quasi-medieval level of energy consumption. As if grid would be made 'better' by introducing countless points of failure (foreign made) devices. Yeah, let's take power generation outside shall we. During the first continent wide hard Winter freeze a hundred million might die from this Darwinian experiment. Meanwhile your ridiculous dreams will bankrupt us all. Every penny spent on it has been wasted. What stark clinical madness! Your own children will not forgive you this frankly 'hippie' level of denial, which has persisted for decades.
The only way out of this mess is to create wealth the old fashioned way by the creation of something that did not exist before. A relatively few massive energy sources that are completely self-contained, defensible, protected from the elements, stock enough fuel for weeks or months or years, and help to decrease the corporate and personal cost of living. Some have heard me say it all before: put a national priority on grid scale DC-AC tech, build overlapping HVDC loops across the country to feed the legacy grid, and above all, feed those HVDC loops with nuclear energy --- yes, fission --- in ways that are proven and new ways we already know can be done.
FRANKLY, everything else, including the mass distribution of fragile natural gas pipeline networks, are shit solutions.
(the following is a repost but relevant to this discussion)
Take a moment to review NERC EOP-005-2: System Restoration from Blackstart Resources. If you live in North America, plans described in this document are your only real line of defense from the chaos and harm that may arise from grid-down disaster. Here is a peek at some software tools used by the industry and Black Start specific enhancements in prog
Texas Instruments Silent 700
You experience a unique feeling of helplessness when you've run through your last roll of thermal paper. Soon into the game you realize that those people on TV who print a little then tear off the printout to show to others are frivolous and wasteful, consigning themselves to this sad fate. So you stop tearing it off, carefully rolling up the output so you can feed it back into the printer upside down and print on what was the (mostly blank) right margin, visually decoding the meshed characters at the center.
Which is why when I managed to turn my original model I TRS-80 with a direct connect Bell 103 Lynx modem into a dumb terminal by talking to the UART with custom written Z80 assembler code and watched those green characters crawl across the screen, it was a great day, like inheriting a warehouse full of thermal paper. The scrolling was so "blindingly fast" that I could even tell the time sharing service to turn off the 2-3 leading NUL characters at the beginning of each line!
2016: The Year In Energy
In the year 2016 there will be a dozen vague announcements promising some new materials breakthrough (graphene, unicorn crystals, etc.) that lead excitable people to imagine that large scale grid storage is right around the corner. Tesla will introduce a battery the size of a motorcycle that can power a car, a battery the size of a car that can power a house, and one the size of a city that can power a slightly larger city, for 30 minutes.
Meanwhile the tech community will fixate on every disingenuous statistic anyone can come up with about grid-scale wind power as if there had been some new 'tech' breakthrough, and is poised to explode for no earthly reason. To an embarrassingly lesser extent there will be a trickle of topics on solar power which was the big push a few years ago, now mainly a few whiny articles about how big energy companies and short sighted governments are interfering with the peoples' right to push tiny bits of energy onto the grid and make the people around them pay for the infrastructure to do so. California (and now its Eastern colony, Vermont) will generate less electricity and import more grid power and natural gas than ever.
Fusion will be closer than ever before and yet practically speaking on the grid scale, remain as comfortably distant as ever. This will be good news to the folks who advocate fusion as a way to derail discussions about nuclear fission, but have at last realized that both methods involve the use of terrifying radioactivity.
Meanwhile stock-paper energy companies will continue to acquire --- then decommission --- nuclear power plants in acts of staggering corporate vandalism to improve their short-term balance sheets and push grid consumers permanently, irrevocably, into the profitable and seasonally volatile natural gas market. If it were not for a few well positioned math-challenged nuke-scardy faux-environmentalists everyone might have been up in arms about this. If we had a federal government that was not also compromised by faux-environmentalism, there would have been investigations into possible conspiracy of restraint of trade, and a real concern for the stability of the nation's electrical infrastructure.
China will continue to position itself as the third world's most ambitious energy and rail infrastructure provider, making firm promises and forming lasting relationships and securing oil resources in regions of the Middle East, Asia and Africa that the United States CIA had once thought they could 'manage' cheaply just by installing friendly regimes. She will lead the United States and the world in nuclear energy research, forging ahead with the CAP1400 project that leverages Westinghouse technology to a greater extent than Westinghouse itself is able... and meanwhile and not incidentally China is actively making molten salt reactor research and prototype development a national priority, unlike the United States where advocates of LFTR become the brunt of dumb jokes on Slashdot.
In other words, same as last year.
but she doesn't have a lot to say
Google's a pretty nice girl
but she changes from day to day
I wanna tell her that I love her a lot
but I gotta get a belly full of wine
Google's a pretty nice girl
someday I'm gonna make her mine, oh yeah
someday I'm gonna make her mine
repost (Herblock is on vacation)
I know autonomous cars will be "oh so safe". At the moment I'm just as worried about what these things will make people do to people.
[OPENING OVERTURE ]
Your driver liability insurance policy has come up for review. We have been recently been acquired by AAAA, the quadruple-A company -- the "Autonomous AAA of the future" and what that means for you as a member is -- it has never been easier to upgrade to an a-car! Financing is available! [link] Due to increasing pressure in the political, legal and underwriters' arenas, we regret to inform you that the cost of your driver policy will be rising this quarter in order to begin collection of fees for the Federal National Driver Insurance Pool, and rising at a steady rate thereafter. It will continue to rise over time despite your [good to excellent] driving record. Now that the Autonomous Vehicle Safety Act is law, and blanket liability accident investigation procedures have been approved by Congress, the legal liability of autonomous vehicles is capped nationwide. While this grants the manufactures freedom from risk of direct criminal penalty and potentially unlimited civil liability, it places human drivers in a difficult position. Most a-car accidents will, of historical necessity rather than actual circumstances, be "no-fault". Since human drivers and any victims claiming injury from them are still obliged to use traditional law enforcement and legal means of redress -- and the cost of these continues to rise -- underwriters are pressuring insurance companies to drop human drivers altogether. We do not intend to do this, but we can no longer provide policies for extended periods. Your new maximum policy period is now [one month]. Thank you for insuring with AAAA.
[INTERMISSION \]
Meanwhile...
Dear editor: DRIVERS cause accidents. A-CARS prevent them. That's what the billboard says -- and if Howard County Referendum passes this September manually operated cars will soon be a thing of the past here. What started as a discussion at a hearing after last year's tragic accident grew into a full heated debate, and to think it all started with the parents who provide their children with a-cars pinning the blame squarely on other peoples' children. But then, after co-opting the national campaign with its slick literature and canned answers for everything -- NOW the fault is with human drivers themselves. And then in an astounding feat of lunacy they claim that it's only fair to place the blame on everybody. Not just the drunk, the aged or infirm, the inexperienced, the distracted or the just plain stupid. But no one's stupid in their book, we're just behind the times is all. They are like the drum majorettes of some utopian humanist parade. I say, SAVE US from these rich hippies, their weird toys and their broken ideals. Now I know a lot of these people, even like some of 'em, but aside from this national 'sideline the humans' campaign they're pushed at us (and WHO is paying for those TV spots I wonder) let's not forget that this debate started around kids. Kids who need to learn to drive as surely as they need to learn to push a pen and spell their name. It's like swimming, who would discourage their own children from practice in swimming, to become expert swimmers, because water is dangerous?? Every kid will need to drive some day, or suffer harm or hardship by not knowing how. These a-car parents even forbid their kids from riding in cars being driven by folks they've grown up with, trusted for years. At the parent conferences we even sit on opposite sides of the table, we can barely be civilized even, because this crap has gotten so deep. Well I say they are making a big mistake and don't seem
return(CleanBillOfHealth);
repost
Perl Festivity Level 1: Developers and users have gathered to nibble hors d'oeuvres and chat amiably with each other about the Modern Perl Renaissance. With every sip of their drinks Perl seems ever more striking. Some are gathered around the upright piano improvising songs that proclaim how it is faster, neater, and sharper than ever before with its asynchronous APIs.
Perl Festivity Level 2: Everyone is talking loudly -- sometimes to each other, and sometimes to nobody at all. Perl seems even better. Perl Monks are patiently explaining syntax and style to potted plants and other nearby objects. Around the piano people are feeling fun and flexible, just as programming in scripting languages used to be. Someone is crooning a bawdy ballad where a couple of inexperienced DOM and CSS selectors encounter a very supportive bundled development server.
Perl Festivity Level 3: Monks are arguing violently and defrocking one another over nested do...until loops that bail on exceptions. People are gulping down other peoples' drinks, placing hors d'oeuvres in the upright piano to see what happens when the little hammers strike as everyone bawls "Got my Mojolicious workin' ... but it don't work on Python!" They have lost count of their drinks, and the world is harmonious with blissful adherence to modern interfaces and standards.
Perl Festivity Level 4: All the guests, hors d'oeuvres smeared all over their naked bodies are performing a ritual dance around a burning heap of tables and chairs in celebration of postfix dereference syntax, subroutine signatures, new slice syntax and numerous optimizations. The piano is missing.
~~ with apology and deference to Dave Barry
Imagine a whole community of people!
Amazing, wonderful people! I can see them now.
Welcome to TBA, where the proud stewards of America's spent nuclear fuel keep watch over the future.
Amazingly, these people understand the principles of ionizing radiation, the log scale, the inverse square law, how half-life directly and inversely proportional to danger for a given mass of material. They are aware of the relatively small mass and storage volume that decayed spent nuclear fuel uses. They know that once spent fuel has been cooling in a pool beside a reactor for ten years it is no longer temperature-hot and the only immediate challenge it presents is to safely handle it, shield it, transport it and choose a dry cask method and suitable underground storage area with several layers of containment where it can be monitored properly.
And they watch over it in a place that is the best place that ever could be, because it really exists! Because these people are practical and know how to calculate risk. They do not consult a political oracle, they hire real engineers. They know what they are doing is noble and just, even heroic --- considering the danger posed by the ignorant. They build a place that simple yet supple, perhaps several circular concrete silos several hundred feet deep, with a nested interior section of blast-proof partitioned sections, made from the same concrete we use to build nuclear plants.
No one time unicorn-fart storage solution that is waranteed to last 10,000 years by a corporation that may be dead in 50. A place where folks watch over the old waste and in their spare time, help devise ways to finally use it.
Too many would see spent fuel buried in deep salt domes to become entombed in geologically stable formations that could keep it for as much as 100 million years, though it becomes inaccessible to us because they want to just walk away from this unsolved problem and they wish you would too.. The people of TBA are dismayed by this mindset. They know (because they love science, modern civilization and especially humankind) that there is no real nuclear waste here, only unburnt fuel, and this 'waste' still contains ~99% if its energy. It would be a waste to bury it out of reach.
Too many imagine spent fuel hiding in deep caves, such as mines, the kind you need to drive trucks into then take a lift down into the bowels of the Earth. The deeper the better. These caves are always out there somewhere else. Why do they want this? Because they haven't thought it over --- and just maybe --- some of them are secretly hoping that disaster will strike. They'd like to convince you that really deep is safe and not-so-deep is dangerous even though it is actually the reverse, if you are unafraid to consider ALL the angles. Sooner or later some terrorist is going to blow something up. They always do. And among these potential terrorists, perhaps the ones you should be most concerned about, are the people who'd rather we just walked away from this problem. An explosion in one storage silo of many would be a contained mess but it would just be an expensive and time-consuming cleanup operation. But a single explosion that caps off and collapses a deep cave system, our one and only, ending all waste storage in this single point of failure design --- well gwarsh, who'da thunk it?
The people of TBA are aware that blowing things up makes a mess. But they also know enough physics to laugh at those Arne Gunderson doom scenarios where everything is inexplicably burning and criticality and nuclear explosions arise spontaneously from LEU pools and spent fuel is somehow like an atomic bomb and when disaster strikes everyone should run far away and wait for Denver to kill them dead, because eating that fish certainly won't.
In fact, the children of TBA are told bedtime stories that make fun of people who believe all this radiation-fear stuff. On Halloween they dress up as fuel casks, which can store a lot of candy. The school curriculum must teach
Lastly, Flash needs to die
Just curious... why are people on a coding site declaring "Flash needs to die" instead of something like, Flash needs to be completely deconstructed and rewritten by the open source community using the most conservative style of programming, a system that forces a multi-person review of commits, hit with the best enumeration tools we have, so that arbitrary code execution is not possible? Which might be possible because processor speed has improved since it was first designed and the assembly level hacks that made it possible areno longer necessary? And when we are done, the worst thing that could ever happen is that someone might display goatse.cx inside a Flash window?
Instead of busting into the kitchen, grabbing pans off the wall and showing the chef how steak should be done, we sit at the table banging our forks and knives, shouting, "Down with meat!"
It's easy to make fun of Outlook, where with maliciously crafted embedded binary OLE blobs you can trigger exploits in many versions of Microsoft products. The faults lie in the products themselves not the Blob. But Flash self contained and lives inside a little rectangle. It is cross platform, amply documented and widely used today. Why must it die? So that generations of beloved Internet content can be 'destroyed' overnight? It almost smells like book-burning.
But throw gravity in there, and it turns out to be weaker by some 40 orders of magnitude.
Elbow room ?
Because we are presently living in a wind-up Universe and its mainspring consists of two fundamental forces that are 10^40 apart. As evidenced by the receding galaxies, we still getting all wound up.
At the end of this cycle the mainspring will snap around and in the next cycle gravity will trump the electromagnetic force by 10^40 to form a battery operated Universe. The charge light will come on and increase of potential (not spatial expansion) will take place.
The whole thing is the result of pulling on String Theory, and when contraction takes place the background remnant (which you could hear now if you play it backwards) is actually a slow voice saying,
"There's a snake in my boot!"
Now that the Pope has mounted his Encyclical that has made some scientists uncomfortable (because it disagrees with their views) and has made other scientists uncomfortable (because it agrees with their views) and yet others jubilant (because for them it was never about science, it was only about getting their way)... there will be a ribbon cutting ceremony at the Climate Summit in Paris this week as the final North Pole 'Cold War' barrier between science and religion is ceremoniously cut. Crews are standing by to tear down the wall between faith and empirical evidence that has symbolized the oppression of Great Ideas since the late Renaissance.
Santa Claus will preside over the ceremony, holding out a large golden scissors and when the ribbon is cut, "There will not be a soul left alive who can deny his existence!" said Mrs.Claus, whose role in traditional affairs has been confined to baking cookies. But now as her husband tends to his yearly duties, she has shucked the apron and is teaming up with a Silicon Valley PR agency to launch an Internet and Social Media campaign to shine the spotlight on what she calls The Wall Of Science.
"They call it an age of enlightenment, but it has been bad for us," she lamented. "The average age at which parents tell their children that "Santa doesn't really exist" has been dropping steadily, and there are even households where young children have always believed that their loving parents are behind it all. These children are being deprived of the wonder that arises from a belief in supernatural forces and miracles, and the essential idea that fountains of free money will flow your way if you elect progressively Socialist governments that tax big business and consolidate world governments. While we cannot easily legislate a belief in Santa Claus, we'll have to the next best thing --- get the United Nations involved in the issue, and prove Santa's existence by showing him on TV and Facebook."
The role of the UN is crucial. Santa Claus has long been considered a delegate from the North Pole in ex officio, but now between solstices he will take his new position as head the IMF. "The elves have been a labor problem for over 100 years and heating costs have skyrocketed. We've shut the factories and the elves have applied for 'climate refugee status' to Europe and the Americas. With IMF funds we will be able to out-source toy production to facilities in low-wage countries. Santa's bags will now be full UN investment capital, to be distributed to countries who get with the program. And everybody gets a lump of coal this year, in the form of a hefty Carbon Tax."
But what is this 'Wall of Science' Mrs. Claus has taken such a bead on? "It is the wall that divides us, that is all. In a world of unrestricted travel and electronic communication that crosses borders, we were desperately searching for something to tear down. You cannot start a grassroots campaign without tearing something down. Then some nice folks at the Vatican pointed us to the Wall, which they said separated persons who demand empirical evidence to build their positions from those who place faith and opinion foremost, then go looking for talking points to support their views. It had little to do with toys so at first we were skeptical, until they gave us a >wink< and said, you know, those of little faith do not believe in St. Nicholas... and after we heard that, we were all in."
"As you know," Mrs. Claus continued, "there has been a crisis in the Catholic Church. But at the same time there has been a breakaway group, the Gaians, whose personification an Earth writhing in pain under the threat of Corporate Man attained crucial 'faith' status some time back with the rise of the Algorians, whose scepters were hockey sticks. The Catholic Church has come to the conclusion that if it can draw in the Gaians, the combined numbers can effect real change in the world. Millennials reject symbols of office and velvet costumes, yet they respond well to activist causes, so long as you can wear jean
Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level: Christmas Island I
Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level: Christmas Island II
Spot the clear blub blub trend, Try hard. ~1mm rise per year. Maybe.
Meanwhile a typhoon could arrive next year with a 8 foot storm surge that swamps the atolls completely.
DISCLAIMER: Grew up in the Caribbean, nailed doors shut from the inside and held on tight for Hugo and Marilyn. People died. '~1mm/yr climate refugees' on a coral atoll really sound like whiny scammers to me. In terms of threat level it's like that movie, Frogs.
Tief tiefin' from a tief make God laugh.
Beggah from a beggah make Him cry.
Cockroach 'ain ga no business in fowl cob.
Patent troll issa like a pile a goat dung sittin' on top of hill...
waitin' fo wind to blow.
That is where it belongs. Helium-3 is the dumbest, most impractical solution to our energy problems imaginable. Unicorn farts would be a more realistic power source. We don't actual have any helium-3, and even if we did, it is far harder to fuse, with far less energy out, than deuterium, and deuterium fusion still isn't anywhere near breakeven after 60 years of effort.
Well said. Though you'll find yourself arguing with people who thought you said it's a dumb idea. It's a great idea --- good enough for practical old NASA to drop it into their distant-futurist visions of lunar colonies --- but a dumb solution for Earth right now, even directed research. There's an energy crisis happening down here.
Lunar H3 mining along with the idea of solar energy collected in orbit are 'fails' in my book because both would place Earth society in the grip of the consortium that manages the infrastructure, and that infrastructure (though awesome) would become an absurdly simple single point of failure. These ideas lead directly to One World Government and it's probably not the one you want. Even if it works out it's lights out for mankind when the first Bad Thing, Who'da Thunk It happens.
In order to ensure that nations can maintain their sovereignty, even to ensure there are nations at all, the fossil free energy solution we pursue should comprise power generated directly from elements that can be mined locally with a reasonable footprint, technology that can be manufactured and maintained locally. Mining is a 'given'. If you think wind and PV solar are mining-free solutions, you haven't looked into the process or run the numbers necessary to scale them. Wind and solar and the chemistry necessary for grid storage are environmental disasters waiting to happen.
Grid electricity should become the universal medium of exchange and should be used for almost all ground transportation, and must be available in such abundance that we can use it to manufacture synthetic fuels for air and sea travel. Continental grids should consist of power plants pushing HVDC into regional 'loops' from which tuned HVAC is extracted from several points to power the legacy grids, which can then be separated into smaller islands than are currently used. Efficiently doing DC/AC conversion and the means to better switch and properly utilize HVDC should be a top research priority --- what ever the energy source.
We are also approaching a time when the purification of ocean/waste water and its transport will become a top priority on a scale that exceeds any present oil and gas pipelines. Within fifty to a hundred years' time, additional terawatts of energy will be needed to bring fresh water into regions that are presently depleting water tables faster than they replenish. I'm not just talking tap water. Our food supply relies on massive irrigation. If you think wind and solar could purify and move this much water, let alone power an industrial society, please think again.
It's time to finish taming fire. Nuclear fission and specifically the two fluid molten salt reactor with active processing with it's "safe in 300 years" waste decay profile is the single best and most practical solution yet devised to produce energy on the scale necessary to survive and prosper.
I'm not fond of these so-called "small scale micro-fission reactors" either, where conventional nuclear power manufacturers re trying to trump the safety issue (while aggravating the waste generation problem) by proposing a great many smaller light and heavy water reactors. Yes of course they want to sell one to every town, including yours. It's an absurd notion borne out of the an
I think that someone who doesn't understand the difference between i.e. and e.g. has no business criticising others.
Good catch! ;-)
I call bullshit on Pennycook's characterization of randomly generated nonsense as B.S, which he uses as a pivot of his 'study'. Here we have a generalization and judgement, an i.e. if you will, of something that can only be evaluated on an e.g. basis.
Identifying a scrap of apparent nonsense as profound is NOT a final judgement. It is a declaration that something is worthy to remember and consider, a state of unresolved investigation. We strive to find pattern and meaning and when we glimpse something --- a wordless sense on the level of intuition gives us a tug, saying in effect, file that one for later. Now whether we do in fact remember it and get around to pondering it later... depends on the amount of mental discipline and organization.
Sadly, we know how to write and are surrounded by paper but few of us actually write interesting things down anywhere and ponder on them. The hippies who followed Maharishi around in the 60s hanging on his every word mostly didn't keep journals, they had became addicted to the rush of hearing the words being spoken to them, and were sure that somehow somewhen something would click and it would all magically drop into place. Some pretended it did merely so they could leave and get on with their lives.
If you're clever enough and work at it you can eventually find a context where any nonsense makes sense. We see this as a challenge, a game.
In this paragraph imagine that I said something profound about our dreams are a journey along the dividing line between sense and nonsense, and how it is essential for us to do this 'perimeter walk' on a regular basis to shore up the specific neuron pathways along this 'border' and drop breadcrumbs that we use to know when we are crossing the line. Having these marked perimeters being essential to maintaining sanity, something like that. But yet, peoples' reactions to encountering these crumbs in the waking state varies: some may simply turn back, some may feel encouraged to cross over, some may even feel threatened.
Not all Goo Goo Goo Joob is either scripture or blather. That one's purpose was to deliberately confound those who were deeply analyzing Beatles lyrics for hidden meaning. Even Horse ebooks is not 'nonsense'. Though it was mechanically produced it is not the result of monkeys and typewriters. Its coder gathered volumes of text in which people were expressing ideas and sentiment, so the result makes new connections. Like round blue tailights on a Tyrannosaurus Rex.
What this has to do with gullibility I have not a clue.
The more serious Microsoft gets, the sillier I become.
Meet Cortana!! What's new in Cortana!! Where's Cortana?? Start using Cortana!! What can I say to Cortana?? What can Cortana help me with?? Cortana's Notebook!! Cortana's settings!! Favorite places and Cortana!! Find music with Cortana!! My inner circle and Cortana!! Quiet hours and Cortana!! My interests and Cortana!! Add interests in Cortana's Notebook!! Remind me, Cortana!! Play music with Cortana!! Use Cortana in my car!! Solutions to Cortana issues!! Why didn't I get a reminder when I was supposed to?? Cortana alpha!!
[hides phone] Where's Cortana?? [counts loudly] Ready or not here I come!
[finds phone] Here you are!! Peekboo I see you!! [covers camera] Gues who??
Cortana: "It's you, [your name]. He he that was fun. Let's play again!!"
Play dress-up with Cortana!!
Welcome to my Inner Circle Cortana. I'll light the candles and you summon the demons.
One fish!! Two fish!! Red fish!! Blue fish!!
I do not like them Sam I Am.
I do not like Egghead Speaky Glam.
I will not speak into a box.
I will not summon clips from Fox.
I will not use it on a train.
I will not plant it in my brain.
Cortana is your personal assistant on your Windows Phone. She's there to help make things easier for you and keep you up to date on the things that matter to you. Whether it's to keep you looped in with your world or help you manage your everyday life, Cortana is there for you.
Keeping up to date with Cortana!!
Quiet hours and Cortana!!
Pillow fights with Cortana!!
Having a blast with Cortana!!
Explore My Secret Places with Cortana!!
Having a cigarette with Cortana!!
How high can I toss Cortana??
Cortana summon World's Most Expensive Flashlight[tm]!!
Does Cortana sleep in the Cloud??
Am I being sucked into the Cloud??
When I die, Cortana, will the Cloud remember me??
There are just a few things to do to get going with Cortana --- like making sure she's on.
Things to do!! Doing things!! Doing the doing-things thing.
Let's get going Cortana!!
Are you on?? "Yes I am on."
Are you on?? "Yes I am on."
Are you on?? "Yes I am on. Battery low."
Are you on?? "Shut the fuck up meatbag."
No longer am I held down by hypnotic toad rays, devious Italian subversion, or the enemies of Laura! They fall before me and I squash the toads effortlessly with one foot after another!
Obligatory Hypnotoad 10 Hours to test your resolve to continue with the starvation diet. As you gaze into those flippy-floppy eyes you will realize that you have been deceived. It is the common toads that you are squashing to clear the ecological niche for Hypnotoad progeny. You will not mind this. Your noddle-starved noodle will revel in it.
If you also eat the Styrofoam cups you'll be able to swim like Aquaman.
I guess what I'm saying is that within the law enforcement community, Woolsey's views may not be that unusual.
Clinton and Gore are merely political animals and (particularly) gullible individuals who were unable to see past the bullshit when they were briefed by their own intelligence agencies. During the Clinton Administration --- when the fate of non-escrow non-backdoor encryption seemed to be in the balance --- there was a steady stream of leaked stories that claimed that terrorists were using absurdly elaborate methods of communication, on a routine basis (anyone remember the Great Steganography Scare?).
But the real eye-opener for me was Louis Freeh, director of FBI under Clinton, a man I had great respect for, until then. Despite his tenure as judge he seemed incapable of seeing secure encryption as an essential Constitutionally protected right, subject only to due process. He sided with those who wanted to back-door everything.
Shortwave listening was a staple of my childhood. In the 70s and early 80s roughly a third all portable radios were shortwave-capable and a great many people listened to programmes from other countries on a regular basis. Of course you were listening to the raw output of world governments, but you knew this and they made no bones about it. Shortwave is expensive and power-intensive, and yet the airwaves were crowded. People were listening. James Careless has also written this informative shortwave lament which gives much needed backstory for the younger generations.
When I surf US news sources today I can spot the bias from a mile away, and even when they strive for balance of viewpoint the result often comes off clumsily, buried in hedge-words and apologetic disclaimers as if the commentator is, well, feeling a bit insecure. I miss the clarity of sifting world news as portrayed by world governments, assembled and delivered for an English speaking audience in five minutes.
For example, one of my daily listens was Vladimir Posner on Radio Moscow World Service with his daily talk. At a time when US News networks portrayed Russia as a cold-hearted military threat intent on world conquest and our own President Reagan seemed incapable of anything beyond an infantile level of Cowboys 'n Indians... Posner's commentaries were thoughtful and reflective viewpoints on our cultural differences and similarities. You could even 'read' between the lines and glimpse the areas in which Russian society would later reform.
I was lucky to grow up in a time of sunspot activity. Then you could bop over to the BBC for world news (they still cover it best) and then tune at random. You'd hear pan pipes, Romanian lover's laments and even classical music --- tortured as it was by AM bandwidth and fade --- had a certain magic to it, especially at 3 O'clock in the morning.
Tie a long thin wire to a rock and toss the end over a tree or your neighbor's roof, pull it tight and connect it. You're listening to Tokyo, broadcasting from Tokyo. No infrastructure in between except for the ionosphere.
Of course the Internet --- that incredibly, almost laughably fragile construct that relies on stable grid power between you and your 'station', with its hidden single points of failure like DNS and relies on an awesome amount of cooperation and due diligence of faceless corporations and governments to ensure that every little packet will arrive safely and unfiltered... is better, for everything, right?
Sure it is. Until the very day and moment it is not better any more.
Any number of things could happen. It could all be over in minutes.
It would be wise to acquire at least one good shortwave radio.
If something goes wrong with the world, you might be the only one who knows what's going on.
While you're at it, go ahead and toss that rock and give a listen.
We're past the heyday of shortwave broadcasting but there are still voices out there.
Ya, especially since the attackers were communicating on an unencrypted cell network. This is a purely political statement to move their surveillance agenda along.
You're spot on. There's a cadre of retired intel who, like aging Hollywood actors providing voice talent, get 'tapped' to emerge from retirement and give an press interview or two to drop 'venerable old spook' seed quotes that Opinion columns can churn. I really do believe these people are called up and someone says, "We have an assignment for you. Plant this idea."
Retirees can emerge from the fog, drop their seeds and retreat, there is no unscripted follow-up. Politicians could not do this without having to field questions about their remarks at future press conferences. It is a bug in the human psyche that retired politicians are ascribed more credibility than those in power. They also become 'nonpartisan' in retirement and Opinion columnists of either party can pick up their remarks and without appearing to cross the line.
Crisis: Snowden brand is becoming too popular, achieving folk hero status.
Mission: Tie Snowden to Paris attacks, disingenuously if necessary. Be emotional, tactless and tearful.
Target demographic: People who believe a retiree is 'leaking' old secrets for the betterment of man.
Assigned to: R. James Woolsey, Jr., Director CIA under Clinton
Remember the Clinton Administration and his hatchet-man Al Gore, who made the rounds to Congress trying to sell the idea that it was time to outlaw all non-escrow encryption and impose a single government standard? It's that Woolsey, trying to pull the Woolsey over our eyes again.
There are others. Remember in the early days after 9/11, when Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz used practiced 'aggrieved old man scowls' to shut down questions they didn't like to hear at press conferences, leave them unanswered? And how the fawning press stopped asking those questions? The aggrieved old man bit really works, especially with young reporters.
It distresses me to see the bumbling neocon idiots who built their entire careers on the Big Lie, disregarding their own CIA intel and deceiving the public about threat level (Documentary: The Power of Nightmares) are now being 'tapped' for Middle East analyst sound bites. Every time Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Chaney or Pearl are quoted the bile rises in my throat. Likewise do old Democrats like Woolsey whose attempted Orwellian schemes I, for one, will never forget.