which shows that wind and solar federal subsidies amount to less than 2% of the *retail* price of the electricity produced. If you think that's game-changing amounts of government pork, I've got a Bridge to Nowhere to sell you.
Actually, if you read the table in TFA, you'll see that hydroelectric has been *declining* for the past decade or two, due to dam closures and environmental restrictions on river flow. Most of the increase in the past decade has been an increase in biomass energy -- mostly paper and lumber plants using their wood waste for fuel, plus more homes using wood and pellet stoves.
Wind power has grown from "utterly insignificant" to "barely worth mentioning", and solar power is still at the "cheap parlor trick" stage.
I think "overcapacity" is a useless term when you're dealing with energy. Supply creates demand and vice versa, and too much is never enough. The only important question is *profitability*, but the nuclear industry is such a tangled mess of hidden government subsidies and buried external costs that figuring that out is a nightmare.
Read the table in TFA. Wind outproduces solar by a factor of 10.
The fact that you find this surprising is my point: you're thinking of solar and wind on a residential neighborhood level, but you're not thinking big enough. So far, our only practical, cost-effective wind and solar energy is produced in gigantic industrial wind farms with hundreds of turbines. And even *that's* a drop in the bucket, compared to fossil energy. Those hundreds of turbines need to become tens of thousands, stretching from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam...
This sounds like great news for renewable energy buffs, except for one thing: if you're thinking this represents a success by high tech new power sources like wind, solar, etc., you're wrong.
The two biggest components of "renewable energy" in EIA's report are hydroelectric dams and biomass -- the biomass sector is mostly industrial wood and paper plants which run on waste wood, plus people using wood-fired stoves at home. Good for them, but it's not exactly high tech.
In 1990, before the wind-and-solar revolution, things broke down this way: Nuclear: 6.1 exajoules Hydro+biomass: 5.7 EJ Wind+solar:.09 EJ
In 2000: Nuclear: 7.8 EJ Hydro+biomass: 5.8 EJ Wind+solar: 0.12 EJ
In 2010: Nuclear: 8.4 EJ Hydro+biomass: 6.8 EJ Wind+solar: 1.03 EJ
Or to put it another way: The "wind and solar revolution" that's taken place in the past 20 years now produces 1 EJ of energy per year. The nuclear power industry has managed to increase output by *twice* as much, without building a single new power plant, just running existing plants a little harder.
This isn't intended to support nuclear power or to knock renewables. My only point is that wind and solar are much less significant than people on both sides of the debate think they are, and if we intend to use them as serious industrial power sources, we're going to have to start building them in a serious industrial way. What we're doing now is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Because he actually gave a damn. Information presentation has recently come into vogue, but a couple years ago, it was tough to find people who recognized the value of a good chart. Also, many of the things he links to which are done by other people (example 1example 2) are quite good.
I think we should make a distinction between GE, the company hosting the site, and Stephen McCandless, the rather famous data visualization specialist who created the figures. (Here's his website: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ )
The problem is not that the data presented are not useful, or that they're deliberately intended to deceive, which we could fault GE for. As I see it, the problem is that the graphs themselves are crap. They hide useful information, and they use shape and color in ways that seem to provide information but don't, and in general they focus on the aesthetic appeal of the charts at the expense of the data.
When I first encountered McCandless's site a few years ago, I really loved it, but as time goes on it's begun to piss me off. For example, his chart on relative radiation risks: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/radiation-dosage-chart/ Logarithmic charts are always difficult to explain to the public, but the triangular shape of his graph makes it even worse, suggesting a linear increase in dose. He compares it to XKCD's chart, but his version is inferior in every way. XKCD uses color and shape to provide information; in McCandless's version color and shape have negative information content.
Another example: a graph of time travel plots in film and TV (minus Dr. Who): http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/timelines/ The curvy lines look nice, but all anyone can make out of this is a confusing snarl of lines too tangled to parse. Once again, shape has negative information content in this image.
But the king of the bad visualizations is probably another graph McCandless did for GE: http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/co2/#/flights_London_Tokyo Here, there's no way to intercompare various quantities, and figure out which of two choices is bigger. Shape, color and position are once again meaningless or misleading (things are shown the same size even when they're 8x different), quantities are in incompatible units, and worst of all some of the numbers are flat-out wrong (for instance, fuel usage of aircraft).
But the one thing these all have in common is McCandless, not GE. So let's not fault megacorporations who're trying to communicate a message: let's fault information presentation gurus who care more about appearances than on information presentation.
Your average Clovis point arrowhead is a pretty advanced bit of stoneworking too: see what I did there? But the point is that if something's been around as long as flint arrows or boot sector viruses, we've usually come up with a good defense against it.
Agree. "Says Who". The most important sentence in this article is the following:
The Corps began to utilize the dam system to mimic the previous flow cycles of the original river, holding back large amounts of water upstream during the winter and early spring in order to release them rapidly as a "spring pulse."
There is no evidence presented that this is true, no citation, no quotes, nothing.
... yeah. It's like tap water, which claims to be safe but actually contains small amounts of chemicals and microorganisms that, who knows, might make you sick. Better to drink Drano, at least you *know* what that will do to you.
In my not-a-doctor, not-a-lawyer opinion, the defense of "diminished responsibility" is a very good idea in general, but it should not apply to people with Asperger's. While it's a serious condition, I don't think affects your ability to judge right from wrong severely enough to be a legal defense.
Part of the reason for this is that a classic symptom of Asperger's is the person's strict adherence to and insistence upon rules. Asperger's folks will freak out at you for jaywalking: if anything, they're *less* likely to walk blindly past the law than your average Joe.
Your colleague's experience matches my own: I have a student who wanders into my office without a word to look at my books and toys as well. But I'll note that despite your fears, your student didn't *actually* take anything, and neither has mine: while the idea of "personal space" and "polite greeting" are kinda alien to her, she knows that stealing is wrong.
Not the same thing. You get an iPhone or iPad in *addition* to your main computer, not as a replacement.
Obligatory car analogy: you're saying that buying a Harley to go alongside your VW Jetta is the same as setting fire to your Jetta and replacing it with a camel.
The issue is not whether you can create good new video with it, or whether you have to learn something new. It's the fact that the existing FCP data files out there are worth millions -- or more likely billions -- of dollars, and unless backward compatibility is maintained, those files are *worthless*.
You do video editing for a local advertiser. Your client wants to rebroadcast last year's Memorial Day sale ad with this year's dates and times. You're screwed. You're the editor/director for a small but successful art film that showed at Cannes last year. A studio asks you to make a few changes so they can show it in theaters worldwide. You're screwed. You did a TV biography of a famous person three years ago. That person has just died, and your channel wants to do a retrospective using your footage. You're screwed. You're a senior film major applying for work at a major studio. They ask you to send them a sample of your most recent work so they can look at your technical skills. You're screwed.
I can't think of another major piece of software that broke backward compatibility with data files from the previous version. When OS X came out, they had Classic Environment so you could run OS 9 apps, and they supported that for about a decade. When Intel macs arrived, they provided Rosetta so PowerPC apps would still work, and they supported that for six years. Word 2010 will still read Word '97 documents. I'm not sure, but I think Adobe Illustrator CS5 can open Illustrator '86 documents.
This is not a case of stick-in-the-mud thinking. It's simply the case that for every experienced professional user of a piece of software, the value of the software is insignificant compared to the value of the files they've created using it.
I can see Apple trimming features and re-thinking the UI in ways that people aren't used to: they do that constantly.
But making a new version of a software that can't load files created by last month's version? That's insane. These are professional quality video files: advertisements, short films, TV shows, movies... these things have far more value to their creators than any features the new version might have.
Ensuring backward compatibility with existing data files for at least a couple of years, or at the bare minimum providing a translator, is probably the first rule of software design. What were they thinking?
EVE is the most cut-throatedly capitalist MMO I've come across. The philosophy of most games is focused around fair play, balance, and looking out for the little guy, but EVE has always been about "may the richest man win" and "money equals power".
At first, this philosophy was just confined to the game world, but I've found that game designers build their personal values into their games. Nobody should be surprised that EVE's developers turn out to be just as mercenary in real life as they expect their players to be in game.
Sorry, Lulzsec. Too late to change ideologies now. You set out to hack "just for the lulz". Now that some very serious people don't find you all that funny, it's a little late to start making a play for the "oppressed political dissidents" card.
I think it's a combination of two things: 1) the contacts look like they're gold-plated. Gold may be corrosion-resistant enough to not need wiping. 2) It's a low voltage circuit, so arcing is less of a problem than with powerline AC contacts.
Spoken like someone who's never used one. Call me a fanboy if you like, but the magsafe adapter is *far* better than anything else I've seen.
(1) "Strong magnets": my Macbook Pro has *lots* of strong magnets in it: two to close the lid latch, another one to activate the lid position sensor. Adding another one makes no difference. (2) "Highly unreliable": My previous Macbook Pro was the last of the "ordinary power plug" generation. In three years of ownership, I repaired and/or replaced the power supply plug at least four times. On one occasion the power cord actually started melting and smoking at the power socket's strain relief. As for the laptop itself, the power socket got so much abuse that the titanium (!) case was bent and twisted next to the socket. My current Magsafe-equipped Macbook Pro has lasted four years, and has never once had a problem with the power cord or socket. (3) "Small pieces of metal": The socket's pretty carefully designed with an inset magnet and projecting power contacts, so while metal fragments will on rare occasions get in and stick to the magnet, it's very hard for them to bridge the contacts. But honestly, in four years the only stuff that's gotten stuck in my Magsafe socket is lint, bits of paper, and the occasional grain of sand -- stuff you could find in any power jack.
Slashdot Mirror
You should read the article you linked to, it's really quite good. In particular, this figure:
http://www.eia.gov/energy_in_brief/images/charts/subsidies_production_large.gif
which shows that wind and solar federal subsidies amount to less than 2% of the *retail* price of the electricity produced. If you think that's game-changing amounts of government pork, I've got a Bridge to Nowhere to sell you.
mdsolar has it right. Nuclear is 20% of electricity generation, and electricity is about 40% of total energy use, so ... do the math.
For more details, see here:
https://flowcharts.llnl.gov/content/energy/energy_archive/energy_flow_2009/LLNL_US_Energy_Flow_2009.png
Actually, if you read the table in TFA, you'll see that hydroelectric has been *declining* for the past decade or two, due to dam closures and environmental restrictions on river flow. Most of the increase in the past decade has been an increase in biomass energy -- mostly paper and lumber plants using their wood waste for fuel, plus more homes using wood and pellet stoves.
Wind power has grown from "utterly insignificant" to "barely worth mentioning", and solar power is still at the "cheap parlor trick" stage.
Handy conversion fact: 1 quadrillion BTUs (the units in TFA) is almost exactly equal to 1 exajoule.
I think "overcapacity" is a useless term when you're dealing with energy. Supply creates demand and vice versa, and too much is never enough. The only important question is *profitability*, but the nuclear industry is such a tangled mess of hidden government subsidies and buried external costs that figuring that out is a nightmare.
Read the table in TFA. Wind outproduces solar by a factor of 10.
The fact that you find this surprising is my point: you're thinking of solar and wind on a residential neighborhood level, but you're not thinking big enough. So far, our only practical, cost-effective wind and solar energy is produced in gigantic industrial wind farms with hundreds of turbines. And even *that's* a drop in the bucket, compared to fossil energy. Those hundreds of turbines need to become tens of thousands, stretching from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam...
This sounds like great news for renewable energy buffs, except for one thing: if you're thinking this represents a success by high tech new power sources like wind, solar, etc., you're wrong.
The two biggest components of "renewable energy" in EIA's report are hydroelectric dams and biomass -- the biomass sector is mostly industrial wood and paper plants which run on waste wood, plus people using wood-fired stoves at home. Good for them, but it's not exactly high tech.
In 1990, before the wind-and-solar revolution, things broke down this way: .09 EJ
Nuclear: 6.1 exajoules
Hydro+biomass: 5.7 EJ
Wind+solar:
In 2000:
Nuclear: 7.8 EJ
Hydro+biomass: 5.8 EJ
Wind+solar: 0.12 EJ
In 2010:
Nuclear: 8.4 EJ
Hydro+biomass: 6.8 EJ
Wind+solar: 1.03 EJ
Or to put it another way: The "wind and solar revolution" that's taken place in the past 20 years now produces 1 EJ of energy per year. The nuclear power industry has managed to increase output by *twice* as much, without building a single new power plant, just running existing plants a little harder.
This isn't intended to support nuclear power or to knock renewables. My only point is that wind and solar are much less significant than people on both sides of the debate think they are, and if we intend to use them as serious industrial power sources, we're going to have to start building them in a serious industrial way. What we're doing now is making a mountain out of a molehill.
Because he actually gave a damn. Information presentation has recently come into vogue, but a couple years ago, it was tough to find people who recognized the value of a good chart. Also, many of the things he links to which are done by other people (example 1 example 2) are quite good.
Uh, that was Union Carbide, which is now owned by Dow Chemical, which has nothing to do with GE, other than that they're both industrial companies.
I think we should make a distinction between GE, the company hosting the site, and Stephen McCandless, the rather famous data visualization specialist who created the figures. (Here's his website: http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/ )
The problem is not that the data presented are not useful, or that they're deliberately intended to deceive, which we could fault GE for. As I see it, the problem is that the graphs themselves are crap. They hide useful information, and they use shape and color in ways that seem to provide information but don't, and in general they focus on the aesthetic appeal of the charts at the expense of the data.
When I first encountered McCandless's site a few years ago, I really loved it, but as time goes on it's begun to piss me off. For example, his chart on relative radiation risks:
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/radiation-dosage-chart/
Logarithmic charts are always difficult to explain to the public, but the triangular shape of his graph makes it even worse, suggesting a linear increase in dose. He compares it to XKCD's chart, but his version is inferior in every way. XKCD uses color and shape to provide information; in McCandless's version color and shape have negative information content.
Another example: a graph of time travel plots in film and TV (minus Dr. Who):
http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/timelines/
The curvy lines look nice, but all anyone can make out of this is a confusing snarl of lines too tangled to parse. Once again, shape has negative information content in this image.
But the king of the bad visualizations is probably another graph McCandless did for GE:
http://visualization.geblogs.com/visualization/co2/#/flights_London_Tokyo
Here, there's no way to intercompare various quantities, and figure out which of two choices is bigger. Shape, color and position are once again meaningless or misleading (things are shown the same size even when they're 8x different), quantities are in incompatible units, and worst of all some of the numbers are flat-out wrong (for instance, fuel usage of aircraft).
But the one thing these all have in common is McCandless, not GE. So let's not fault megacorporations who're trying to communicate a message: let's fault information presentation gurus who care more about appearances than on information presentation.
Maybe because your post reads like the ravings on the label of Dr. Bronner's soap.
http://web.mit.edu/afs/athena.mit.edu/user/d/r/dryfoo/www/Spritz-yule/bronner.html
Your average Clovis point arrowhead is a pretty advanced bit of stoneworking too: see what I did there? But the point is that if something's been around as long as flint arrows or boot sector viruses, we've usually come up with a good defense against it.
So advanced, it's been around for 25 years. Boot sector manipulation is like the flint arrowhead of virus tech.
http://www.f-secure.com/v-descs/brain.shtml
Yes, but many "normal" criminals believe that. It's not a legit legal defense.
Agree. "Says Who". The most important sentence in this article is the following:
There is no evidence presented that this is true, no citation, no quotes, nothing.
... yeah. It's like tap water, which claims to be safe but actually contains small amounts of chemicals and microorganisms that, who knows, might make you sick. Better to drink Drano, at least you *know* what that will do to you.
In my not-a-doctor, not-a-lawyer opinion, the defense of "diminished responsibility" is a very good idea in general, but it should not apply to people with Asperger's. While it's a serious condition, I don't think affects your ability to judge right from wrong severely enough to be a legal defense.
Part of the reason for this is that a classic symptom of Asperger's is the person's strict adherence to and insistence upon rules. Asperger's folks will freak out at you for jaywalking: if anything, they're *less* likely to walk blindly past the law than your average Joe.
Your colleague's experience matches my own: I have a student who wanders into my office without a word to look at my books and toys as well. But I'll note that despite your fears, your student didn't *actually* take anything, and neither has mine: while the idea of "personal space" and "polite greeting" are kinda alien to her, she knows that stealing is wrong.
Not the same thing. You get an iPhone or iPad in *addition* to your main computer, not as a replacement.
Obligatory car analogy: you're saying that buying a Harley to go alongside your VW Jetta is the same as setting fire to your Jetta and replacing it with a camel.
The issue is not whether you can create good new video with it, or whether you have to learn something new. It's the fact that the existing FCP data files out there are worth millions -- or more likely billions -- of dollars, and unless backward compatibility is maintained, those files are *worthless*.
You do video editing for a local advertiser. Your client wants to rebroadcast last year's Memorial Day sale ad with this year's dates and times. You're screwed.
You're the editor/director for a small but successful art film that showed at Cannes last year. A studio asks you to make a few changes so they can show it in theaters worldwide. You're screwed.
You did a TV biography of a famous person three years ago. That person has just died, and your channel wants to do a retrospective using your footage. You're screwed.
You're a senior film major applying for work at a major studio. They ask you to send them a sample of your most recent work so they can look at your technical skills. You're screwed.
I can't think of another major piece of software that broke backward compatibility with data files from the previous version. When OS X came out, they had Classic Environment so you could run OS 9 apps, and they supported that for about a decade. When Intel macs arrived, they provided Rosetta so PowerPC apps would still work, and they supported that for six years. Word 2010 will still read Word '97 documents. I'm not sure, but I think Adobe Illustrator CS5 can open Illustrator '86 documents.
This is not a case of stick-in-the-mud thinking. It's simply the case that for every experienced professional user of a piece of software, the value of the software is insignificant compared to the value of the files they've created using it.
So, loading a file you created last month using the previous version is a "high end feature"?
I can see Apple trimming features and re-thinking the UI in ways that people aren't used to: they do that constantly.
But making a new version of a software that can't load files created by last month's version? That's insane. These are professional quality video files: advertisements, short films, TV shows, movies ... these things have far more value to their creators than any features the new version might have.
Ensuring backward compatibility with existing data files for at least a couple of years, or at the bare minimum providing a translator, is probably the first rule of software design. What were they thinking?
EVE is the most cut-throatedly capitalist MMO I've come across. The philosophy of most games is focused around fair play, balance, and looking out for the little guy, but EVE has always been about "may the richest man win" and "money equals power".
At first, this philosophy was just confined to the game world, but I've found that game designers build their personal values into their games. Nobody should be surprised that EVE's developers turn out to be just as mercenary in real life as they expect their players to be in game.
Sorry, Lulzsec. Too late to change ideologies now. You set out to hack "just for the lulz". Now that some very serious people don't find you all that funny, it's a little late to start making a play for the "oppressed political dissidents" card.
I think it's a combination of two things:
1) the contacts look like they're gold-plated. Gold may be corrosion-resistant enough to not need wiping.
2) It's a low voltage circuit, so arcing is less of a problem than with powerline AC contacts.
Spoken like someone who's never used one. Call me a fanboy if you like, but the magsafe adapter is *far* better than anything else I've seen.
(1) "Strong magnets": my Macbook Pro has *lots* of strong magnets in it: two to close the lid latch, another one to activate the lid position sensor. Adding another one makes no difference.
(2) "Highly unreliable": My previous Macbook Pro was the last of the "ordinary power plug" generation. In three years of ownership, I repaired and/or replaced the power supply plug at least four times. On one occasion the power cord actually started melting and smoking at the power socket's strain relief. As for the laptop itself, the power socket got so much abuse that the titanium (!) case was bent and twisted next to the socket. My current Magsafe-equipped Macbook Pro has lasted four years, and has never once had a problem with the power cord or socket.
(3) "Small pieces of metal": The socket's pretty carefully designed with an inset magnet and projecting power contacts, so while metal fragments will on rare occasions get in and stick to the magnet, it's very hard for them to bridge the contacts. But honestly, in four years the only stuff that's gotten stuck in my Magsafe socket is lint, bits of paper, and the occasional grain of sand -- stuff you could find in any power jack.