Trees live longer than "a couple of decades". I'm sure you know this, as do others, that many trees live hundreds of years, and some live thousands.
The carbon stored in the tree trunks lasts a long time, but it's only a small fraction of the total carbon in a forest. The carbon stored in fallen and decaying roots, leaves and branches is much larger, but is converted back into CO2 in a few years. The "few decades" is an average.
But don't take my word for it: let's hear it from someone who actually grew a forest in an artificially high CO2 atmosphere:
"Our results indicate that forest soils such as these will not significantly mitigate anthropogenic C inputs to the atmosphere. The organic matter pools receiving large annual C inputs have short mean residence times, while those with slow turnover rates receive small annual inputs."
"Wood increment increased significantly during the first year of exposure, but subsequently most of the extra C was allocated to production of leaves and fine roots. These pools turn over more rapidly than wood, thereby reducing the potential of the forest stand to sequester additional C in response to atmospheric CO2 enrichment."
See here for my comments on locking tree carbon into housing.
I'm all in favor of CO2 mitigation and have no qualms about reengineering trees: my problem is that the numbers just don't add up.
This is a plug by the biologists for R&D dollars - why should the physicists (solar power and nuclear) and the engineers (wind and hydro) get all the attention?
Are you shitting me? If a biologist wants some R&D dollars, she takes an interest in cancer or alzheimer's research and writes grant proposals to the National Institutes of Health. The NIH's research budget ($32 billion) is five times the *total* budgets of either NSF or NOAA -- and of course, environmental science research makes up only a small fraction of those programs.
And don't even get me started on the amount of *private* R&D money available for biology from the pharmaceutical industry. The idea of a biologist getting into climate mitigation to pad her research budget is ludicrous.
Oh, also, even if your dangerous trees consumed every drop of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, oxygen levels would only rise by a tiny fraction of a percent.
Excessive oxygen produced by a runaway growth of genetically altered trees has resulted in a firestorm that burned up some of the runaway trees, consuming some of the excess oxygen and keeping everything in balance.
Fixed that for ya. Ma Nature is a glorious beast even when you try to beat her at her own game.
Easy with the shouting there, buddy, I'm an environmentalist like yourself, I just care enough to do the math to find solutions that will actually work.
To sequester enough carbon to offset the 7 gigatons of carbon burned annually, you'd have to build an American-sized house for every family on Earth every 4 years or so, and never, ever demolish them. (assumptions: 1.5 billion households, house contains 15 tons of wood.)
That's kind of a little more housing than we need: there's no way housing can suck up the necessary amount of carbon.
But hey, at least we'd solve the housing problem right? No. If you look at all the folks living in hovels in the middle of rainforests, it should be clear that the problem with housing isn't lack of wood, it's the cost of labor and energy to chop down all those trees, move them to where people live, and make houses out of them.
As for burning trees for biomass power, it should be clear from my other posts that I'm in favor of this. But TFA, and my reply, were specifically about *sequestering* tree carbon, not burning it.
That'd work, but you've gone from a mostly hands-off, passive technology to a massive industrial process involving harvesting and processing ten billion tons of trees a year.
And if you're going to harvest 'em, you might as well burn them completely as biomass. After all, mining coal, burning it for energy creating CO2, reclaiming the CO2 in trees, converting the trees *back* into coal and dumping the coal back in the ground is crazy: might as well just skip the coal step.
A simple comparison of the size of the biological carbon reservoir on land (2000 gigatons C) and the rate at which it exchanges carbon with the atmosphere (120 gigatons/year) suggests that growing trees is a terrible way to store carbon in the long term: extra stored carbon will return to the atmosphere in a couple of decades.
You may call a dead tree "sequestered carbon", but there's a whole ecosystem full of organisms that call it "lunch". If you want to get rid of carbon, you need to either store it in a place where organisms can't get to it (for example, in the deep seafloor) or in a form that's not tasty (for example, as CO2 or carbonate rock.).
So wait. You're saying that a group of the people most heavily invested in the status quo believe that the status quo is going to continue? Incredible!
"Cleveland Browns Sure to Win Superbowl", says man who bet his house on the Browns.
There are a few valid reasons to question economic impact forecasts of climate change, but "The Bilderberg Group says it won't happen" is not one of them. Time for my favorite quote again:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." -- Upton Sinclair
If you already know which is WebP and which is JPG, you're unavoidably biased. We're not going to settle this without a blind trial.
Slashdot hackers! Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to write a little website which encodes a series of raw never-been-compressed images as WebP and JPG of equal sizes, presents both side-by-side to the user, and has them click on the one they think is "better". Do not label which image is which: randomize them. Collect statistics and present the data on the site.
Any good php hacker should be able to whip this up in about an hour. I'd do it, but I've got work to do.
This service isn't doing anything your own HR department or company couldn't do themselves. Your rights don't magically change just because some information-gathering process becomes automated or outsourced. If your company was using your public Facebook info ethically or unethically before, using this service to accomplish the same thing is just as ethical or unethical.
Yesterday, before you learned about this service, you knew that being a dick on Facebook was a poor career decision, but the law prevents employers from using certain personal beliefs as a firing excuse, whether you expressed those beliefs on Facebook or on a streetcorner. Today, the same is true.
(This assumes the Facebook skimmer service has no special access privileges. If it somehow gains access to stuff you post with an expectation of privacy, the picture changes.)
Let me put it another way: if the number of possible passwords is X^Y, where X is the number of symbols and Y is the length of the password, using a password system in which Y = 1 is stupid, for any feasible choice of X.
Now, a map password in which the user clicks on *several* locations on a low-res map, in order? *that's* got some entropy behind it. But at that point, you might as well just make your "map" image a photo of a keyboard and reinvent the wheel.
Nope, won't work. You have two options: either store the maps locally, or download them from an online source like Google Earth.
If you get them online, then anyone watching your network traffic can see which map tiles you're requesting, and use that to figure out the approximate location you're clicking on. This limits the possible passkeys to some point on the last map you loaded -- which given image/mouse resolution, means there are only about 100,000 possible passkeys. Not enough.
If you store them locally, then you need to store high-res map data for the whole planet. You're going to need to store at least a gigabyte worth of images in order to be able to distinguish streets from one another: probably closer to a terabyte if the user is to be able to recognize and click on their uncle Joe's summer home.
The basic problem is, in order to allow the user to pick one of N choices on the map, you need to store and present several times N bytes worth of data -- color pixel information for each possible click-location. That means that to match the password security of an 8-character a-z password, you need to store several gigabytes of raw image data -- less if you JPG it.
Far as I can tell, the moderators don't actually touch the submissions at all, they just give them a quick "yes" or "no" vote.
Slashdot would be much more useful if once approved, submissions got some basic editorial work to find original sources, remove biased language, bypass slashvertisement, and so on.
One thing about this study: the laws are only a year or so old in most states. In my experience, people tend to ignore minor laws until they get caught, then change their behavior to avoid repeat offense penalties. There hasn't been enough time for the average texting addict to get busted and possibly break the habit.
Let's look back on this in a year or two before we make a final verdict.
Ugh. A slashdot article linking to some dude's blog post linking to the Christian Science Monitor's discussion. Can't *someone* link to the original study by the Highway Loss Data Institute?
As I understand it, this is the first in a series, and explaining the raw data formats is the place to start. I assume compression algorithms will be covered in a followup. Or many followups.
Did you watch the bits where he demonstrated the difference between 8-bit linear audio vs 8-bit -law by manipulating the audio of his voice Or showed what clipping and Nyquist frequency aliasing sound like? Or showed the content contained in the Y, U, and V video channels by displaying them onscreen?
Try *that* with a book.
In general, I agree with you that a page of text is worth an hour of video, but in this case, the video is worth its weight in gold. And Xiph doesn't waste any time either: that video goes *fast*.
What the hell is the point of DDOSing a company on a weekend? All the people who deserve it are out at their summer houses throwing their last party of the season. The only person who'll actually care is the poor networking flunky who has to come in on his day off or risk being fired.
Slashdot Mirror
Trees live longer than "a couple of decades". I'm sure you know this, as do others, that many trees live hundreds of years, and some live thousands.
The carbon stored in the tree trunks lasts a long time, but it's only a small fraction of the total carbon in a forest. The carbon stored in fallen and decaying roots, leaves and branches is much larger, but is converted back into CO2 in a few years. The "few decades" is an average.
But don't take my word for it: let's hear it from someone who actually grew a forest in an artificially high CO2 atmosphere:
"Our results indicate that forest soils such as these will not significantly mitigate anthropogenic C inputs to the atmosphere. The organic matter pools receiving large annual C inputs have short mean residence times, while those with slow turnover rates receive small annual inputs."
Here's another:
"Wood increment increased significantly during the first year of exposure, but subsequently most of the extra C was allocated to production of leaves and fine roots. These pools turn over more rapidly than wood, thereby reducing the potential of the forest stand to sequester additional C in response to atmospheric CO2 enrichment."
See here for my comments on locking tree carbon into housing.
I'm all in favor of CO2 mitigation and have no qualms about reengineering trees: my problem is that the numbers just don't add up.
This is a plug by the biologists for R&D dollars - why should the physicists (solar power and nuclear) and the engineers (wind and hydro) get all the attention?
Are you shitting me? If a biologist wants some R&D dollars, she takes an interest in cancer or alzheimer's research and writes grant proposals to the National Institutes of Health. The NIH's research budget ($32 billion) is five times the *total* budgets of either NSF or NOAA -- and of course, environmental science research makes up only a small fraction of those programs.
And don't even get me started on the amount of *private* R&D money available for biology from the pharmaceutical industry. The idea of a biologist getting into climate mitigation to pad her research budget is ludicrous.
Oh, also, even if your dangerous trees consumed every drop of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere, oxygen levels would only rise by a tiny fraction of a percent.
Excessive oxygen produced by a runaway growth of genetically altered trees has resulted in a firestorm that burned up some of the runaway trees, consuming some of the excess oxygen and keeping everything in balance.
Fixed that for ya. Ma Nature is a glorious beast even when you try to beat her at her own game.
(assumptions: 1.5 billion households, house contains 15 tons of wood.)
Correction: I assumed 30 tons of wood, which is about 15 tons of carbon.
Easy with the shouting there, buddy, I'm an environmentalist like yourself, I just care enough to do the math to find solutions that will actually work.
To sequester enough carbon to offset the 7 gigatons of carbon burned annually, you'd have to build an American-sized house for every family on Earth every 4 years or so, and never, ever demolish them. (assumptions: 1.5 billion households, house contains 15 tons of wood.)
That's kind of a little more housing than we need: there's no way housing can suck up the necessary amount of carbon.
But hey, at least we'd solve the housing problem right? No. If you look at all the folks living in hovels in the middle of rainforests, it should be clear that the problem with housing isn't lack of wood, it's the cost of labor and energy to chop down all those trees, move them to where people live, and make houses out of them.
As for burning trees for biomass power, it should be clear from my other posts that I'm in favor of this. But TFA, and my reply, were specifically about *sequestering* tree carbon, not burning it.
That'd work, but you've gone from a mostly hands-off, passive technology to a massive industrial process involving harvesting and processing ten billion tons of trees a year.
And if you're going to harvest 'em, you might as well burn them completely as biomass. After all, mining coal, burning it for energy creating CO2, reclaiming the CO2 in trees, converting the trees *back* into coal and dumping the coal back in the ground is crazy: might as well just skip the coal step.
A simple comparison of the size of the biological carbon reservoir on land (2000 gigatons C) and the rate at which it exchanges carbon with the atmosphere (120 gigatons/year) suggests that growing trees is a terrible way to store carbon in the long term: extra stored carbon will return to the atmosphere in a couple of decades.
This is confirmed by a variety of real-world experiments in forest artificially enriched with CO2 and in naturally growing forests.
You may call a dead tree "sequestered carbon", but there's a whole ecosystem full of organisms that call it "lunch". If you want to get rid of carbon, you need to either store it in a place where organisms can't get to it (for example, in the deep seafloor) or in a form that's not tasty (for example, as CO2 or carbonate rock.).
So wait. You're saying that a group of the people most heavily invested in the status quo believe that the status quo is going to continue? Incredible!
"Cleveland Browns Sure to Win Superbowl", says man who bet his house on the Browns.
There are a few valid reasons to question economic impact forecasts of climate change, but "The Bilderberg Group says it won't happen" is not one of them. Time for my favorite quote again:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
-- Upton Sinclair
Dude, I've got a Lich King to kill!
If you already know which is WebP and which is JPG, you're unavoidably biased. We're not going to settle this without a blind trial.
Slashdot hackers! Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to write a little website which encodes a series of raw never-been-compressed images as WebP and JPG of equal sizes, presents both side-by-side to the user, and has them click on the one they think is "better". Do not label which image is which: randomize them. Collect statistics and present the data on the site.
Any good php hacker should be able to whip this up in about an hour. I'd do it, but I've got work to do.
Judging from the picture in TFA I'd say it's a Siemens train. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siemens_Velaro .
Hunh, I wonder what sort of industrial control system they use to run it.
*wince*
IwonderifIcangetNASAtotestminetoo,itseemstobebroken.
Oooooh, space *beer*. Nevermind.
This service isn't doing anything your own HR department or company couldn't do themselves. Your rights don't magically change just because some information-gathering process becomes automated or outsourced. If your company was using your public Facebook info ethically or unethically before, using this service to accomplish the same thing is just as ethical or unethical.
Yesterday, before you learned about this service, you knew that being a dick on Facebook was a poor career decision, but the law prevents employers from using certain personal beliefs as a firing excuse, whether you expressed those beliefs on Facebook or on a streetcorner. Today, the same is true.
(This assumes the Facebook skimmer service has no special access privileges. If it somehow gains access to stuff you post with an expectation of privacy, the picture changes.)
Let me put it another way: if the number of possible passwords is X^Y, where X is the number of symbols and Y is the length of the password, using a password system in which Y = 1 is stupid, for any feasible choice of X.
Now, a map password in which the user clicks on *several* locations on a low-res map, in order? *that's* got some entropy behind it. But at that point, you might as well just make your "map" image a photo of a keyboard and reinvent the wheel.
Nope, won't work. You have two options: either store the maps locally, or download them from an online source like Google Earth.
If you get them online, then anyone watching your network traffic can see which map tiles you're requesting, and use that to figure out the approximate location you're clicking on. This limits the possible passkeys to some point on the last map you loaded -- which given image/mouse resolution, means there are only about 100,000 possible passkeys. Not enough.
If you store them locally, then you need to store high-res map data for the whole planet. You're going to need to store at least a gigabyte worth of images in order to be able to distinguish streets from one another: probably closer to a terabyte if the user is to be able to recognize and click on their uncle Joe's summer home.
The basic problem is, in order to allow the user to pick one of N choices on the map, you need to store and present several times N bytes worth of data -- color pixel information for each possible click-location. That means that to match the password security of an 8-character a-z password, you need to store several gigabytes of raw image data -- less if you JPG it.
Far as I can tell, the moderators don't actually touch the submissions at all, they just give them a quick "yes" or "no" vote.
Slashdot would be much more useful if once approved, submissions got some basic editorial work to find original sources, remove biased language, bypass slashvertisement, and so on.
One thing about this study: the laws are only a year or so old in most states. In my experience, people tend to ignore minor laws until they get caught, then change their behavior to avoid repeat offense penalties. There hasn't been enough time for the average texting addict to get busted and possibly break the habit.
Let's look back on this in a year or two before we make a final verdict.
Ugh. A slashdot article linking to some dude's blog post linking to the Christian Science Monitor's discussion. Can't *someone* link to the original study by the Highway Loss Data Institute?
Here's the HLDI's summary, with graphs:
http://www.iihs.org/news/rss/pr092810.html
Links to more details on that page. It's actually a pretty interesting analysis, if you go beyond the lede.
I hear those 35 bullion ATMs will be repaired and maintained by 4 Brazilian technicians.
I meant mu-law. I got fancy in my original post and threw down a Unicode "mu", but Slashdot ate it. Greek slashdot readers should sue.
As I understand it, this is the first in a series, and explaining the raw data formats is the place to start. I assume compression algorithms will be covered in a followup. Or many followups.
I wish they'd just written an ebook
Did you watch the bits where he demonstrated the difference between 8-bit linear audio vs 8-bit -law by manipulating the audio of his voice Or showed what clipping and Nyquist frequency aliasing sound like? Or showed the content contained in the Y, U, and V video channels by displaying them onscreen?
Try *that* with a book.
In general, I agree with you that a page of text is worth an hour of video, but in this case, the video is worth its weight in gold. And Xiph doesn't waste any time either: that video goes *fast*.
What the hell is the point of DDOSing a company on a weekend? All the people who deserve it are out at their summer houses throwing their last party of the season. The only person who'll actually care is the poor networking flunky who has to come in on his day off or risk being fired.
Wow, I think that's the most threatening thing I've ever heard a Canadian say.
So basically, what you're telling us is,
IT REQVIRES ONLY ZE VILL TO DO IT!