Yes, but in Sweden during the same time we've had a sea change in medicin (both human and veterinary), law, and journalism.
All these areas are now gender imbalanced, but with women being in the majority (sometimes very clear majority; 57% of judges overall, more in younger cohort, about 2/3 of younger doctors. etc. etc.). Even if the imbalance isn't as great as it was in favour of men in the eighties we're getting there.
But while these changed drastically, engineering OTOH is about the same as it always was. No great change.
So, the only conclusion then is that we have a society that "forced" women to take down the male bastions of medicin, media and law, but left engineering untouched? It's OK to decided about life and death in law and medicin, but for the love of God don't design a bridge? (Well, that's a poor example as there were always more women in civil engineering than comp. sci.) It doesn't sound like a realistic argument.
Look, we have our fair share of screwed up policies and notions, but we're not that inconsistent... It's pretty clear to me that the answer has to lie elsewhere.
Perhaps. This woman argues that the differences are self-exaggerating, that fields which fewer women are interested in pursuing tend to be male-dominated, which makes them even less attractive to women, which makes them more male-dominated, in a cycle which leads ultimately to a situation where only the women most devoted to the field stay in it.
But that's taking the argument one step too far already. If the question was why the situation at Google is 80-20 one needs only to look at the graduation statistics from US Comp Sci PhD programmes (if Google hasn't changed their hiring practices recently), where the figures are indeed in that range (and that's counting mostly foreign women, without them I seem to remember that the figure would be closer to 90-10).
Now you're already addressing the question of why women have opted out much earlier in the chain, and while that is interesting, it's not really something that Google can fix with their hiring practices, they can only hire from the candidate pool that is there after all. It takes something else. In another part of society (of which admittedly Google is a part, so they can do something, of course).
Now, I know from first hand experience in the academic teaching field how unpopular it is to (as I've had to do) point out that our targets and goals of increasing comp. sci. female undergraduate admissions were completely unrealistic as we would have to attract (in that case) all qualified girls from high school, not a single one would be left for medicin, law, etc. which we know already attracts a majority of the qualified female students. But like the aspie idiot I am I feel it still needs to be pointed out. (And I have tenure, so I'm harder to fire...:-))
Our answers in both acceptance and hiring to the "WHY DON'T YOU X MORE WOMEN" (where X is hire/accept) is and continues to be, "because they aren't there and they don't apply". We can't fix that at the end of the pipeline. (And I've been exposed to that in both industry and academia for more than twenty years, no come to think of it, it's closer to thirty...)
And being in Scandinavia I'm not sure I buy the "there are too many men there" argument. Thirty years ago that was very much true of medicin, veterinary medicine, and law to mention just a few highly sought after careers, difficult to get into and more importantly almost 100% male. And today Swedish universities have been e.g. fined for instituting "affirmative action" programmes for boys so that the veterinary programme (or was it law?) wouldn't be completely female. (But that's against the law, so no boys in that field...)
For example, in 1992 (Sweden), medical doctors 55-62 were 93% male 7% female. In 2010 in the youngest cohort it's the other way around, with 39% men and 69% women. If the "(old) men scare away women" hypothesis would be true, then this change of affairs is a very clear (data) point against. At the very least it didn't work on doctors.
Or lawyers, 57% of all judges in Sweden are women now. 55% of all judges in criminal matters are women, and that's set to change even more, as their dominance in the younger cohorts are ever more marked. If not even the grumpy old judges managed to scare the dainty young women away, well, that's another pretty hard blow against that hypothesis. (That doctors are wishy washy and can't put their collective foot down is after all somewhat believable, but scary and scarred judges, well they were kind of our last hope!:-))
But of course in comp. sci. the figures are pretty much identical to what they were in the eighties. There are a few more now, but we haven't nearly have the sea change that we've had in medicin (both veterinary and human) and law.
Tell me, when was the last time that you welded a large-diameter zirconium-alloy pipe and X-rayed it for defects, with any possible sign of imperfection meaning having to cut it off and start from scratch? How many people in the world do you think have that skillset? Because that's what's involved in nuclear power plant construction - it is extremely exacting.
That said, the reason that we don't have the necessary skill set readily available today is because NIMBY-ism and regulatory hoops (esp. laws regarding public purchasing - cheapest bidder wins) means that nuclear is a more or less dead industry. When everything you ever build is a once-in-a-lifetime one-off, of course you're not going to reap any benefits from economy of scale, a mature subcontractor market, industry tradition and knowledge etc. etc.
So, the politics mentioned above did manage to kill nuclear, but indirectly, by making it such an uncertain (huge political risk) and unattractive field that the economy to support is isn't there. It's not inherent in the technology itself, we managed to do this (including welding) well enough in the sixties and seventies; as a species we're better at it now...
I know exactly what this is... what I am suggesting could be quite easily layered over top of that by software running on the end point devices...
That's the problem. They're satellite phones, so there's no "easily" in changing the endpoint software. Your solution amounts to "change the cipher to a more secure one". Well, yes, indeed, that's what we need to do.
That you can always run your own crypto on top of the one provided by the carrier is kind of trivially always true, but most often not a realistic option.
Large/mid-scale hog fuel/chip boilers can be extremely efficient and clean.
That said, smaller installations, like in a house, aren't that efficient, even though they've become much more advanced (with fans, lambda sensors and whatnot) in the last couple of decades.
Instead, what is typically meant is CO2. A wood fired boiler will of course have much lower net CO2 emissions as they don't burn fossil fuel.
When it comes to particulate matter and a few other nasties, smaller wood installations are actually pretty bad. Esp. in our cities.
Welfare in Norway is good enough that this isn't an issue.
It's not even a question of that, but of cost. Heating oil in Norway is considerably more expensive than electricity, and having travelled and worked in Norway I can't remember when I saw something other than electricity (radiator or under floor heating), though of course wood (often in the form of pellets) is also popular.
Electricity is dirt cheap in Norway, so people even typically don't have a heat pump (like we do in Sweden), but just heat directly with electricity. As an example, for a 600 sq foot apartment with three outside walls, in the "cold" part of the country (two hours north of Oslo) I paid about $50 USD per month for electricity. That includes heating. In winter. Rent was $750 USD/month, so heating/electricity didn't add much.
In the Nordic countries we haven't installed oil fired boilers since before the energy crisis in the seventies. It's only houses with a very old heating system that burns oil these days. A system that should be well past its replacement days.
So that's why the Norwegians make this rule now. Usage is already virtually nil, so banning them won't have any real effect. Furthermore a typical oil fired boiler can be converted to burn wood pellets for, say $1000 USD or so, so even though a cheap conversion like that has it's disadvantages, it's not exactly a deal breaker if you own a house.
Well, while I agree there are problems with the article, in fairness 1kg of "spent" nuclear fuel won't magically develop wings and spread it self out to make a city the size of New York uninhabitable either. (And spent fuel isn't that dangerous to begin with. )
If you leave it alone, it will pretty much leave you alone as well. And a 1kg cube of spent fuel just sitting there won't be that dangerous. We store them in pools in our plants for the shortest lived, most active daughters to decay before sending them on after all.
That's not to say that just leaving it laying about is a good disposal strategy for spent nuclear fuel, of course. Far from it. And, equally obvious, neither does 300kg of solar panels present nearly as much of a hazard as nuclear fuel when dealing with the aftermath.
And it's not because the engineers were careless, stupid or did not care.
Oh, Thomas Midgley was both careless, stupid and did not care. It's not too long a shot to call his work in lead additives to petrol down right evil (check the link).
Now, whether he knew CFCs were bad, is somewhat moot given that it's not difficult to imagine that he would have gone ahead anyway. Like he did with tetra ethyl lead before.
You can basically never design a physical item before you make it and not have to know anything about each material. Doesn't work.
I remember at my first job at an industrial research laboratory with its own small metal working shop (for sample preparation and whatnot). Hence they got all sorts of odd jobs from the rest of the company, such as demo rigs for industry fairs and whatnot.
So I was asking what a guy was doing and he was finishing a small demo rig designed by a bright young recently graduated engineer (like myself) that called for a 17mm thick steel base plate. My colleague pointed out to me that that would cost quite a bit extra, since at those thicknesses the standard sizes from the mill was every other mm of thickness, i.e. 16mm and 18mm respectively. Said he: "Now, ordinarily I would just take an 18mm and grind it down in the surface grinder (machine). That would take about 12-18 hours or so, just about doubling the time allotted. But since this is a rush job, and the thickness isn't structural I'll just call him and ask if he'll be happy with an 18mm base plate...":-)
Industry of course have many such kindly old men; willing and able to teach the snot nosed engineer about the world, one ("costly") mistake at a time. I was told that at least the lesson tends to stick that way.:-)
Arms and armaments was 11B Swedish, i.e. $1B in 2016.
So its large, but not huge.
And ostensibly we're not selling weapons to people who will actually use them, that wouldn't do... (Don't get me started...) But when it comes to larger systems, i.e. JAS Gripen fighter bombers, they're not really "used" in that respect.
It actually all started with the observation that being neutral during WWII no-one would sell us any arms when push came to shove. So in order to defend ourselves we needed our own arms industry. But in order to make that industry large enough to be viable, we had to also export... And that's where we're stuck to this day.
Do you honestly think that Ahmed the grocer and Alia the farmer's wife and the thousands of their colleagues leading simple lives have had any influence on these events? Do they really deserve to be `collateral damage' for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
Now, to what extent Ahmed and Alia are comparable to Helmut and Helga in this particular case, and in this particular time I don't know. I'm just pointing out that for there apparently is clear historical modern precedent.
Nope, "modern" light water reactors currently operating are actually pretty good at load following:
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities.
Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the
primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or
two large power changes per day.
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the
utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to
the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily
load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr
, with a rate of change of electric
output of 3-5% of Pr per minute.
Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility
of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute.
Some designs are capable of extremely fast power modulations in the frequency regulation mode with
ramps of several percent of the rated power per second, but in a narrow band around the rated power level.
That more or less qualifies as "on a dime" as you don't really need more than that given the (large) size of current reactors (and networks). Demand doesn't change that fast on larger networks as the multitude of individual consumers average out.
And as the report says if you're participating in both primary and secondary frequency control and you're (in France's case) 75% of production, you're as "load following" as can be. What you're talking about are older designs that aren't really in operation today. That we're running nuclear as base load is due to economic considerations and that many (like Sweden) have a mix anyway. In Sweden we have ca 50% hydro, and when you have that on tap, it doesn't make sense to run your nuclear as anything but base load. But it's not because we couldn't.
You just probably won't have any company ever actually invent any drugs in your country because there is no money to pay for the development.
Ever heard of Beta blockers, or Losec? Just to name a few. Invented and developed by Swedish industry. A country that is very much single payer, with centralised purchasing of all drugs at set prices.
You could of course hire some public scientists, but it's very hard to say who is doing anything productive.
No, not even remotely true. I'm working much harder and under much higher scrutiny as a publicly funded researcher than I ever did in industry (where I spent ten years of my life).
The public can afford to take cheap (relatively speaking) risks that nothing will result. Corporations won't. They'll play it safe. (Just witness Hollywood...)
No, that's not really true. Nuclear can and is operated in a load following manner in e.g. France and even Germany... You can really ramp up and down on a dime, as it were, i.e. there's no technical reason not to.
The reason it isn't too popular is instead that nuclear is a capital expense heavy operation, with low (relatively speaking) operating costs. So if you've built a nuclear plant you want to run it as close to 24/7 as possible, as anything else would be uneconomical.
And that's the problem with renewals, they're eating nuclear's lunch. That is, they're happy to skim the cream off the top, delivering when they can and selling dearly then, while not being able to deliver when it counts. In doing so having taken a big chunk of the money we need to make nuclear financially viable.
P.S. Smart grids are a canard. In Sweden we use our electricity for industry, and we should use a lot more for transportation. Switching water heaters on and off on a whim doesn't make one iota worth of difference.
If you remove the separation, though, the influence will flow both ways. I wonder how many of these Church-State Separation opponents would want government officials forming a committee to decide how Baptism should be performed or which prayers should be included in the service.
That's a good point and one I haven't mulled on before. It's actually exactly what happened here in Sweden.
We didn't actually have formal separation of church and state until 2000. But even if the church is now officially separate from the state it is still governed by law. That law says that the church should remain evangelical-lutheran, democratically based, and national. How the governing bodies are set up is also legislated. To this day, they're elected mainly from the political parties, or closely related to them.
So did the church really affect politics when it was the state church? No, not in Sweden, not by a long shot. Not with social democrats in more or less continuous power. But was the church affected by the state? You bet. One fairly recent issue is on female priests. There was strong opposition in the church itself, there was open opposition within the church itself. But society and politics would have it no other way. The church and priesthood was basically told "This is what you believe now and if you don't there's the door". Priests were defrocked for being against. We now have a female arch bishop...
Now, that's not saying that the US situation is the same, or even similar, but it is at least one data point that influence definitely runs both ways. In the case of the state church of Sweden, such a powerful (back in the day) entity clearly wasn't going to be left to run around unchecked by political governance. That's probably a universal.
My favorite part of my naivety is when people tell me I don't see what I can plainly see.
Well, first it's of course a situation of diminishing returns. Our eyes aren't getting any better, so there is a limit of where it's "good enough".
And of course there's a difference between SD and HD. It's clear here in PAL-land even though we had significantly better resolution than NTSC from the get go. But when it comes to 1080p I'm not convinced that better resolution is the next useful step. I'd much rather see higher refresh rates (60Hz makes a difference), and less compression. More resolution with more vissible compression artefacts from even more cramming into the available bandwidth, isn't something I'm looking forward to.
P.S. And I know of no married man that's allowed to sit close enough to the TV to take full advantage of 1080p, let alone 2k or 4k. If you buy a bigger set, the sofa get's moved. Every time.:-)
Yepp. The very best people I have ever met where still in university. They never left...
And I worked with some top notch people in industry, people with internationally recognised names. But they were after all, with the odd exception, not quite in the same league as the best in university. They were generally much better, and there were many more of them as well. I guess that's why they gravitate there.
I find it interesting that many pooh-poohers have suddenly switched from no, not true, not happening to nothing can be done. I mean, this is something like the fourth or fifth one in this thread, whereas even a week ago this was an unusual response. Was there a focus group somewhere that said this is more effective? Didn't your marketing people think this message is a bit too dark for the average mark?
No, its simply that everyone is following more or less the same script. But as they're not coordinated completely, they're slightly out of sync.
It's straight from the playbook of the tobacco lobby. Seem like you're having a debate, but it's just a carefully scripted set of talking points designed to give as little ground as possible and only when you have to, while wearing your opponent out. Much like a military "defence in depth" is. It's the same principle.
How can Britain be getting 2/3 off and still paying more money than every other country bar Germany?
Because it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and currently the fifth largest economy. Also you're not "paying more money than every country bar Germany". In one measure you're third, but correcting for GNI you're in ninth place, after Belgium, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Luxenbourg, and frigging Italy. The latest of which has an economy in shit state.
So you're only paying a large sum, in absolute terms because you're a large country. One would expect a large country to pay more. Corrected for the size of you're economy, you're not in the top five, and just barely squeeze in the top ten.
And yes, the UK rebate is a thing. Most definitely.
I have no idea how old you are, but it does not matter. When you were young there were people complaining about the feckless youth of that day. Heck, archeologists have found clay tablets
with such rants.
The problem with that argument is that it's always right.
By that token nothing could ever take a turn for the worse, as someone of age will point it out, and your argument will come into play.
OTOH my kids don't learn the rules of the language (not English, but we have a grammar also), they don't learn their multiplication tables, and they don't study long division any more.
As far as I can tell, this is not counter balanced by learning something else it its stead. This is also born out by our slumping ranking in e.g. the Pisa studies. (Or the diagnostic maths test all engineering students have taken at my Alma mater for the last close to forty years.)
So yes, I'm old, and kids today can't do X worth a damn, but in many areas my judgement is supported by international studies and comparisons. Kids today do a lot worse in many respects/subjects than we did. Demonstrably so.
Anyone telling you radio waves are proven safe is a fucking idiot, including you. Radio waves have been studied until recently for health effects, and the studies so far have shown a mix of results. The only people who think it's been "proven" safe.. are fucking idiots, like you.
Bzzt. Nothing is of course ever "proven" safe. You can't in the real world prove the null hypothesis. The best you can do is asymptotically approach it.
Now, "radio waves" are of course many different things, so they can't be "proven safe" anyhow. If you stick your head in the micro wave oven you'll manage to hurt yourself seriously using "radio waves", so of course there is EM-radiation in certain bands with certain power that are unsafe. Goes almost without saying.
What people typically mean though is the question of whether there is any biological effect appart from heating when being exposed to low power radiation in the low GHz range from e.g. cell phones.
And there the science is pretty clear, i.e. there is no "mix of results". Yes there have been single studies that claim to show one thing or another, but that's true in any biological research, when revisited either the protocol is unrealistic, there have been errors or the effect can't be reproduced. So we haven't found any real effect, we don't have any theory or model that could explain it if we found it (i.e. there's no "smoke" to make us go searching for a fire to begin with) and we don't see anything epidemiologically either. And we've being doing these phones for a couple of decades now at a grand scale, so they should have shown up by now.
So while we can't say that it's "safe" we can with some confidence say that if there is an effect its so small as to be completely dominated by other effects, from a risk standpoint that is. Your inattentiveness with increased risk (to take one example) probably completely swamps any risk from EM.
There are a lot of things to dislike about Unions. But thinking you can stand up as a single individual and negotiate on an even footing with an organization which is stocked with cash, "Human Resources", lawyers, and the patience to starve you out is pitiably naive.
Yes, the simplest of game theoretic economic analysis shows that you as an individual employee cannot "negotiate" with your employer. Even for very small companies.
Say that your boss has ten employees. So you go to negotiate. The only thing when it comes down to brass tacks you can negotiate with is walking away. I.e. quitting. That means that your boss will lose 10% of their productivity, while you will lose 100% of your income stream.
That's not even close to equal. Your risk and hassle is much greater in that situation than that of your counterpart and any negotiation of course reflects that basic truth.
So as an independent contractor with many diverse income streams your of course much better off, and that's why law often reflects that, in that if you "contract" but only have one client for long periods of time, then you are an employee and should be entitled to all benefits thereof. Benefits that have been collectively bargained (even through the political system) as its only when ten of you threaten to quit working together that the situation above balances out.
Well, judging from their tactics in "fighting terrorism", they would produce child pornography themselves, if they legally could. They have been producing "terrorists" for a while now.
Yes. And I was troubled by what seemed like ineptitude in addition to all other moral problems that that approach entails.
But then I dug a bit deeper and found Al Queda training material that explicitly warned would be home made jihadists from seeking like minded and forming a cell with the motivation that any like minded you find will most likely be law enforcement or an informant.
That puts the tactic of trying to trap everyone and his brother and doing so very publicly in another, more effective light. While the moral and ethical problems with such an approach remain, it suddenly looks both effective and down right sneaky. Denying your enemy the well known effectiveness of organising and acting in a group, having him commit his forces piecemeal is good for your effort, and hinders his. (Its not for nothing that the military always fight in teams or groups, and almost all of the training is devoted to how to work as a team and part of a team.)
From that perspective you can almost see the powers that be thinking that finding and stopping "black swan" self radicalised terrorists is almost impossible, so the second best thing is to limit their effectiveness by denying them the advantage of organising. And this is something that has been borne out in e.g. in France. The Charlie Hebdo terrorists were brothers, and hence difficult to isolate with such a strategy. They'll trust each other implicitly. The other organised attacks were by groups that had been put together and trained abroad. Those are more dangerous but also much more vulnerable to traditional police and intelligence efforts (even though they obviously failed here).
So, from that perspective, i.e. pure effectiveness without trying western sensibilities too much (they even follow established law and everything), there could be something well thought out behind this approach. And Al Queda and its ilk has obviously taken notice themselves, so whether thought out in advanced and executed, or just a haphazard happy accident, it has had effect.
And isn't that a scary thought? They may not be wholly incompetent, but actually good at their jobs...:-)
And who said you couldn't have a reasoned and polite conversation on Slashdot anymore!:-)
Yes, much of it is arbitrary, and even in SI-land we do cheat from time to time with specialised units for special purposes; I still hear about the odd Angstrom, even though its on the way out.
However, I do prefer a system where the conversion factor is almost always "ten" rather than arbitrary and any "fudging" is hidden in the constants that you're not getting rid of anyway. (And no having more divisors in your unit itself doesn't make it easier to build a kitchen. That's why the standard European kitchen module is 600mm...)
But of course using one system is vastly preferable. I shudder to think if you had your own imperial units for all things electrical as well... That would be worse, even though the Henry and Coulomb are awkwardly large.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but in Sweden during the same time we've had a sea change in medicin (both human and veterinary), law, and journalism.
All these areas are now gender imbalanced, but with women being in the majority (sometimes very clear majority; 57% of judges overall, more in younger cohort, about 2/3 of younger doctors. etc. etc.). Even if the imbalance isn't as great as it was in favour of men in the eighties we're getting there.
But while these changed drastically, engineering OTOH is about the same as it always was. No great change.
So, the only conclusion then is that we have a society that "forced" women to take down the male bastions of medicin, media and law, but left engineering untouched? It's OK to decided about life and death in law and medicin, but for the love of God don't design a bridge? (Well, that's a poor example as there were always more women in civil engineering than comp. sci.) It doesn't sound like a realistic argument.
Look, we have our fair share of screwed up policies and notions, but we're not that inconsistent... It's pretty clear to me that the answer has to lie elsewhere.
Perhaps. This woman argues that the differences are self-exaggerating, that fields which fewer women are interested in pursuing tend to be male-dominated, which makes them even less attractive to women, which makes them more male-dominated, in a cycle which leads ultimately to a situation where only the women most devoted to the field stay in it.
But that's taking the argument one step too far already. If the question was why the situation at Google is 80-20 one needs only to look at the graduation statistics from US Comp Sci PhD programmes (if Google hasn't changed their hiring practices recently), where the figures are indeed in that range (and that's counting mostly foreign women, without them I seem to remember that the figure would be closer to 90-10).
Now you're already addressing the question of why women have opted out much earlier in the chain, and while that is interesting, it's not really something that Google can fix with their hiring practices, they can only hire from the candidate pool that is there after all. It takes something else. In another part of society (of which admittedly Google is a part, so they can do something, of course).
Now, I know from first hand experience in the academic teaching field how unpopular it is to (as I've had to do) point out that our targets and goals of increasing comp. sci. female undergraduate admissions were completely unrealistic as we would have to attract (in that case) all qualified girls from high school, not a single one would be left for medicin, law, etc. which we know already attracts a majority of the qualified female students. But like the aspie idiot I am I feel it still needs to be pointed out. (And I have tenure, so I'm harder to fire... :-))
Our answers in both acceptance and hiring to the "WHY DON'T YOU X MORE WOMEN" (where X is hire/accept) is and continues to be, "because they aren't there and they don't apply". We can't fix that at the end of the pipeline. (And I've been exposed to that in both industry and academia for more than twenty years, no come to think of it, it's closer to thirty...)
And being in Scandinavia I'm not sure I buy the "there are too many men there" argument. Thirty years ago that was very much true of medicin, veterinary medicine, and law to mention just a few highly sought after careers, difficult to get into and more importantly almost 100% male. And today Swedish universities have been e.g. fined for instituting "affirmative action" programmes for boys so that the veterinary programme (or was it law?) wouldn't be completely female. (But that's against the law, so no boys in that field...)
For example, in 1992 (Sweden), medical doctors 55-62 were 93% male 7% female. In 2010 in the youngest cohort it's the other way around, with 39% men and 69% women. If the "(old) men scare away women" hypothesis would be true, then this change of affairs is a very clear (data) point against. At the very least it didn't work on doctors.
Or lawyers, 57% of all judges in Sweden are women now. 55% of all judges in criminal matters are women, and that's set to change even more, as their dominance in the younger cohorts are ever more marked. If not even the grumpy old judges managed to scare the dainty young women away, well, that's another pretty hard blow against that hypothesis. (That doctors are wishy washy and can't put their collective foot down is after all somewhat believable, but scary and scarred judges, well they were kind of our last hope! :-))
But of course in comp. sci. the figures are pretty much identical to what they were in the eighties. There are a few more now, but we haven't nearly have the sea change that we've had in medicin (both veterinary and human) and law.
Tell me, when was the last time that you welded a large-diameter zirconium-alloy pipe and X-rayed it for defects, with any possible sign of imperfection meaning having to cut it off and start from scratch? How many people in the world do you think have that skillset? Because that's what's involved in nuclear power plant construction - it is extremely exacting.
That said, the reason that we don't have the necessary skill set readily available today is because NIMBY-ism and regulatory hoops (esp. laws regarding public purchasing - cheapest bidder wins) means that nuclear is a more or less dead industry. When everything you ever build is a once-in-a-lifetime one-off, of course you're not going to reap any benefits from economy of scale, a mature subcontractor market, industry tradition and knowledge etc. etc.
So, the politics mentioned above did manage to kill nuclear, but indirectly, by making it such an uncertain (huge political risk) and unattractive field that the economy to support is isn't there. It's not inherent in the technology itself, we managed to do this (including welding) well enough in the sixties and seventies; as a species we're better at it now...
I know exactly what this is... what I am suggesting could be quite easily layered over top of that by software running on the end point devices...
That's the problem. They're satellite phones, so there's no "easily" in changing the endpoint software. Your solution amounts to "change the cipher to a more secure one". Well, yes, indeed, that's what we need to do.
That you can always run your own crypto on top of the one provided by the carrier is kind of trivially always true, but most often not a realistic option.
Large/mid-scale hog fuel/chip boilers can be extremely efficient and clean.
That said, smaller installations, like in a house, aren't that efficient, even though they've become much more advanced (with fans, lambda sensors and whatnot) in the last couple of decades.
Instead, what is typically meant is CO2. A wood fired boiler will of course have much lower net CO2 emissions as they don't burn fossil fuel.
When it comes to particulate matter and a few other nasties, smaller wood installations are actually pretty bad. Esp. in our cities.
Welfare in Norway is good enough that this isn't an issue.
It's not even a question of that, but of cost. Heating oil in Norway is considerably more expensive than electricity, and having travelled and worked in Norway I can't remember when I saw something other than electricity (radiator or under floor heating), though of course wood (often in the form of pellets) is also popular.
Electricity is dirt cheap in Norway, so people even typically don't have a heat pump (like we do in Sweden), but just heat directly with electricity. As an example, for a 600 sq foot apartment with three outside walls, in the "cold" part of the country (two hours north of Oslo) I paid about $50 USD per month for electricity. That includes heating. In winter. Rent was $750 USD/month, so heating/electricity didn't add much.
In the Nordic countries we haven't installed oil fired boilers since before the energy crisis in the seventies. It's only houses with a very old heating system that burns oil these days. A system that should be well past its replacement days.
So that's why the Norwegians make this rule now. Usage is already virtually nil, so banning them won't have any real effect. Furthermore a typical oil fired boiler can be converted to burn wood pellets for, say $1000 USD or so, so even though a cheap conversion like that has it's disadvantages, it's not exactly a deal breaker if you own a house.
Well, while I agree there are problems with the article, in fairness 1kg of "spent" nuclear fuel won't magically develop wings and spread it self out to make a city the size of New York uninhabitable either. (And spent fuel isn't that dangerous to begin with. )
If you leave it alone, it will pretty much leave you alone as well. And a 1kg cube of spent fuel just sitting there won't be that dangerous. We store them in pools in our plants for the shortest lived, most active daughters to decay before sending them on after all.
That's not to say that just leaving it laying about is a good disposal strategy for spent nuclear fuel, of course. Far from it. And, equally obvious, neither does 300kg of solar panels present nearly as much of a hazard as nuclear fuel when dealing with the aftermath.
And it's not because the engineers were careless, stupid or did not care.
Oh, Thomas Midgley was both careless, stupid and did not care. It's not too long a shot to call his work in lead additives to petrol down right evil (check the link).
Now, whether he knew CFCs were bad, is somewhat moot given that it's not difficult to imagine that he would have gone ahead anyway. Like he did with tetra ethyl lead before.
You can basically never design a physical item before you make it and not have to know anything about each material. Doesn't work.
I remember at my first job at an industrial research laboratory with its own small metal working shop (for sample preparation and whatnot). Hence they got all sorts of odd jobs from the rest of the company, such as demo rigs for industry fairs and whatnot.
So I was asking what a guy was doing and he was finishing a small demo rig designed by a bright young recently graduated engineer (like myself) that called for a 17mm thick steel base plate. My colleague pointed out to me that that would cost quite a bit extra, since at those thicknesses the standard sizes from the mill was every other mm of thickness, i.e. 16mm and 18mm respectively. Said he: "Now, ordinarily I would just take an 18mm and grind it down in the surface grinder (machine). That would take about 12-18 hours or so, just about doubling the time allotted. But since this is a rush job, and the thickness isn't structural I'll just call him and ask if he'll be happy with an 18mm base plate..." :-)
Industry of course have many such kindly old men; willing and able to teach the snot nosed engineer about the world, one ("costly") mistake at a time. I was told that at least the lesson tends to stick that way. :-)
Arms and armaments was 11B Swedish, i.e. $1B in 2016.
So its large, but not huge.
And ostensibly we're not selling weapons to people who will actually use them, that wouldn't do... (Don't get me started...) But when it comes to larger systems, i.e. JAS Gripen fighter bombers, they're not really "used" in that respect.
It actually all started with the observation that being neutral during WWII no-one would sell us any arms when push came to shove. So in order to defend ourselves we needed our own arms industry. But in order to make that industry large enough to be viable, we had to also export... And that's where we're stuck to this day.
Do you honestly think that Ahmed the grocer and Alia the farmer's wife and the thousands of their colleagues leading simple lives have had any influence on these events? Do they really deserve to be `collateral damage' for being in the wrong place at the wrong time?
The problem with that argument is that it applies equally to Helmut the grocer and Helga the farmer's wife.
There were very few cows had.
Now, to what extent Ahmed and Alia are comparable to Helmut and Helga in this particular case, and in this particular time I don't know. I'm just pointing out that for there apparently is clear historical modern precedent.
Nope, "modern" light water reactors currently operating are actually pretty good at load following:
Modern nuclear plans with light water reactors are designed to have strong manoeuvring capabilities. Nuclear power plants in France and in Germany operate in load-following mode, i.e. they participate in the primary and secondary frequency control, and some units follow a variable load programme with one or two large power changes per day.
The minimum requirements for the manoeuvrability capabilities of modern reactors are defined by the utilities requirements that are based on the requirements of the grid operators. For example, according to the current version of the European Utilities Requirements (EUR) the NPP must at least be capable of daily load cycling operation between 50% and 100 % of its rated power Pr , with a rate of change of electric output of 3-5% of Pr per minute. Most of the modern designs implement even higher manoeuvrability capabilities, with the possibility of planned and unplanned load-following in a wide power range and with ramps of 5% Pr per minute.
Some designs are capable of extremely fast power modulations in the frequency regulation mode with ramps of several percent of the rated power per second, but in a narrow band around the rated power level.
That more or less qualifies as "on a dime" as you don't really need more than that given the (large) size of current reactors (and networks). Demand doesn't change that fast on larger networks as the multitude of individual consumers average out.
And as the report says if you're participating in both primary and secondary frequency control and you're (in France's case) 75% of production, you're as "load following" as can be. What you're talking about are older designs that aren't really in operation today. That we're running nuclear as base load is due to economic considerations and that many (like Sweden) have a mix anyway. In Sweden we have ca 50% hydro, and when you have that on tap, it doesn't make sense to run your nuclear as anything but base load. But it's not because we couldn't.
You just probably won't have any company ever actually invent any drugs in your country because there is no money to pay for the development.
Ever heard of Beta blockers, or Losec? Just to name a few. Invented and developed by Swedish industry. A country that is very much single payer, with centralised purchasing of all drugs at set prices.
And yet, there's plenty of money to be made...
You could of course hire some public scientists, but it's very hard to say who is doing anything productive.
No, not even remotely true. I'm working much harder and under much higher scrutiny as a publicly funded researcher than I ever did in industry (where I spent ten years of my life).
This is especially true in medicin. Most new drugs are from publicly funded research in the US. While private industry spend a lot of money it's later in the game, commercialising public results.
The public can afford to take cheap (relatively speaking) risks that nothing will result. Corporations won't. They'll play it safe. (Just witness Hollywood...)
No, that's not really true. Nuclear can and is operated in a load following manner in e.g. France and even Germany... You can really ramp up and down on a dime, as it were, i.e. there's no technical reason not to.
The reason it isn't too popular is instead that nuclear is a capital expense heavy operation, with low (relatively speaking) operating costs. So if you've built a nuclear plant you want to run it as close to 24/7 as possible, as anything else would be uneconomical.
And that's the problem with renewals, they're eating nuclear's lunch. That is, they're happy to skim the cream off the top, delivering when they can and selling dearly then, while not being able to deliver when it counts. In doing so having taken a big chunk of the money we need to make nuclear financially viable.
P.S. Smart grids are a canard. In Sweden we use our electricity for industry, and we should use a lot more for transportation. Switching water heaters on and off on a whim doesn't make one iota worth of difference.
If you remove the separation, though, the influence will flow both ways. I wonder how many of these Church-State Separation opponents would want government officials forming a committee to decide how Baptism should be performed or which prayers should be included in the service.
That's a good point and one I haven't mulled on before. It's actually exactly what happened here in Sweden.
We didn't actually have formal separation of church and state until 2000. But even if the church is now officially separate from the state it is still governed by law. That law says that the church should remain evangelical-lutheran, democratically based, and national. How the governing bodies are set up is also legislated. To this day, they're elected mainly from the political parties, or closely related to them.
So did the church really affect politics when it was the state church? No, not in Sweden, not by a long shot. Not with social democrats in more or less continuous power. But was the church affected by the state? You bet. One fairly recent issue is on female priests. There was strong opposition in the church itself, there was open opposition within the church itself. But society and politics would have it no other way. The church and priesthood was basically told "This is what you believe now and if you don't there's the door". Priests were defrocked for being against. We now have a female arch bishop...
Now, that's not saying that the US situation is the same, or even similar, but it is at least one data point that influence definitely runs both ways. In the case of the state church of Sweden, such a powerful (back in the day) entity clearly wasn't going to be left to run around unchecked by political governance. That's probably a universal.
My favorite part of my naivety is when people tell me I don't see what I can plainly see.
Well, first it's of course a situation of diminishing returns. Our eyes aren't getting any better, so there is a limit of where it's "good enough".
And of course there's a difference between SD and HD. It's clear here in PAL-land even though we had significantly better resolution than NTSC from the get go. But when it comes to 1080p I'm not convinced that better resolution is the next useful step. I'd much rather see higher refresh rates (60Hz makes a difference), and less compression. More resolution with more vissible compression artefacts from even more cramming into the available bandwidth, isn't something I'm looking forward to.
P.S. And I know of no married man that's allowed to sit close enough to the TV to take full advantage of 1080p, let alone 2k or 4k. If you buy a bigger set, the sofa get's moved. Every time. :-)
Yepp. The very best people I have ever met where still in university. They never left...
And I worked with some top notch people in industry, people with internationally recognised names. But they were after all, with the odd exception, not quite in the same league as the best in university. They were generally much better, and there were many more of them as well. I guess that's why they gravitate there.
I find it interesting that many pooh-poohers have suddenly switched from no, not true, not happening to nothing can be done. I mean, this is something like the fourth or fifth one in this thread, whereas even a week ago this was an unusual response. Was there a focus group somewhere that said this is more effective? Didn't your marketing people think this message is a bit too dark for the average mark?
No, its simply that everyone is following more or less the same script. But as they're not coordinated completely, they're slightly out of sync.
It's straight from the playbook of the tobacco lobby. Seem like you're having a debate, but it's just a carefully scripted set of talking points designed to give as little ground as possible and only when you have to, while wearing your opponent out. Much like a military "defence in depth" is. It's the same principle.
How can Britain be getting 2/3 off and still paying more money than every other country bar Germany?
Because it's one of the wealthiest countries in the world, and currently the fifth largest economy. Also you're not "paying more money than every country bar Germany". In one measure you're third, but correcting for GNI you're in ninth place, after Belgium, Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, France, Luxenbourg, and frigging Italy. The latest of which has an economy in shit state.
So you're only paying a large sum, in absolute terms because you're a large country. One would expect a large country to pay more. Corrected for the size of you're economy, you're not in the top five, and just barely squeeze in the top ten.
And yes, the UK rebate is a thing. Most definitely.
I have no idea how old you are, but it does not matter. When you were young there were people complaining about the feckless youth of that day. Heck, archeologists have found clay tablets with such rants.
The problem with that argument is that it's always right.
By that token nothing could ever take a turn for the worse, as someone of age will point it out, and your argument will come into play.
OTOH my kids don't learn the rules of the language (not English, but we have a grammar also), they don't learn their multiplication tables, and they don't study long division any more.
As far as I can tell, this is not counter balanced by learning something else it its stead. This is also born out by our slumping ranking in e.g. the Pisa studies. (Or the diagnostic maths test all engineering students have taken at my Alma mater for the last close to forty years.)
So yes, I'm old, and kids today can't do X worth a damn, but in many areas my judgement is supported by international studies and comparisons. Kids today do a lot worse in many respects/subjects than we did. Demonstrably so.
Anyone telling you radio waves are proven safe is a fucking idiot, including you. Radio waves have been studied until recently for health effects, and the studies so far have shown a mix of results. The only people who think it's been "proven" safe.. are fucking idiots, like you.
Bzzt. Nothing is of course ever "proven" safe. You can't in the real world prove the null hypothesis. The best you can do is asymptotically approach it.
Now, "radio waves" are of course many different things, so they can't be "proven safe" anyhow. If you stick your head in the micro wave oven you'll manage to hurt yourself seriously using "radio waves", so of course there is EM-radiation in certain bands with certain power that are unsafe. Goes almost without saying.
What people typically mean though is the question of whether there is any biological effect appart from heating when being exposed to low power radiation in the low GHz range from e.g. cell phones.
And there the science is pretty clear, i.e. there is no "mix of results". Yes there have been single studies that claim to show one thing or another, but that's true in any biological research, when revisited either the protocol is unrealistic, there have been errors or the effect can't be reproduced. So we haven't found any real effect, we don't have any theory or model that could explain it if we found it (i.e. there's no "smoke" to make us go searching for a fire to begin with) and we don't see anything epidemiologically either. And we've being doing these phones for a couple of decades now at a grand scale, so they should have shown up by now.
So while we can't say that it's "safe" we can with some confidence say that if there is an effect its so small as to be completely dominated by other effects, from a risk standpoint that is. Your inattentiveness with increased risk (to take one example) probably completely swamps any risk from EM.
There are a lot of things to dislike about Unions. But thinking you can stand up as a single individual and negotiate on an even footing with an organization which is stocked with cash, "Human Resources", lawyers, and the patience to starve you out is pitiably naive.
Yes, the simplest of game theoretic economic analysis shows that you as an individual employee cannot "negotiate" with your employer. Even for very small companies.
Say that your boss has ten employees. So you go to negotiate. The only thing when it comes down to brass tacks you can negotiate with is walking away. I.e. quitting. That means that your boss will lose 10% of their productivity, while you will lose 100% of your income stream.
That's not even close to equal. Your risk and hassle is much greater in that situation than that of your counterpart and any negotiation of course reflects that basic truth.
So as an independent contractor with many diverse income streams your of course much better off, and that's why law often reflects that, in that if you "contract" but only have one client for long periods of time, then you are an employee and should be entitled to all benefits thereof. Benefits that have been collectively bargained (even through the political system) as its only when ten of you threaten to quit working together that the situation above balances out.
Well, judging from their tactics in "fighting terrorism", they would produce child pornography themselves, if they legally could. They have been producing "terrorists" for a while now.
Yes. And I was troubled by what seemed like ineptitude in addition to all other moral problems that that approach entails.
But then I dug a bit deeper and found Al Queda training material that explicitly warned would be home made jihadists from seeking like minded and forming a cell with the motivation that any like minded you find will most likely be law enforcement or an informant.
That puts the tactic of trying to trap everyone and his brother and doing so very publicly in another, more effective light. While the moral and ethical problems with such an approach remain, it suddenly looks both effective and down right sneaky. Denying your enemy the well known effectiveness of organising and acting in a group, having him commit his forces piecemeal is good for your effort, and hinders his. (Its not for nothing that the military always fight in teams or groups, and almost all of the training is devoted to how to work as a team and part of a team.)
From that perspective you can almost see the powers that be thinking that finding and stopping "black swan" self radicalised terrorists is almost impossible, so the second best thing is to limit their effectiveness by denying them the advantage of organising. And this is something that has been borne out in e.g. in France. The Charlie Hebdo terrorists were brothers, and hence difficult to isolate with such a strategy. They'll trust each other implicitly. The other organised attacks were by groups that had been put together and trained abroad. Those are more dangerous but also much more vulnerable to traditional police and intelligence efforts (even though they obviously failed here).
So, from that perspective, i.e. pure effectiveness without trying western sensibilities too much (they even follow established law and everything), there could be something well thought out behind this approach. And Al Queda and its ilk has obviously taken notice themselves, so whether thought out in advanced and executed, or just a haphazard happy accident, it has had effect.
And isn't that a scary thought? They may not be wholly incompetent, but actually good at their jobs... :-)
And who said you couldn't have a reasoned and polite conversation on Slashdot anymore! :-)
Yes, much of it is arbitrary, and even in SI-land we do cheat from time to time with specialised units for special purposes; I still hear about the odd Angstrom, even though its on the way out.
However, I do prefer a system where the conversion factor is almost always "ten" rather than arbitrary and any "fudging" is hidden in the constants that you're not getting rid of anyway. (And no having more divisors in your unit itself doesn't make it easier to build a kitchen. That's why the standard European kitchen module is 600mm...)
But of course using one system is vastly preferable. I shudder to think if you had your own imperial units for all things electrical as well... That would be worse, even though the Henry and Coulomb are awkwardly large.