Re:Top Five reasons why the space program should b
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
Anyone know just how large an initial colony would have to be?
Generation ship
"In order to assure genetic diversity during a centuries-long trip, any generation starship would require on the order of thousands of inhabitants..."
Re:Top Five reasons why the space program should b
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 1
3. We must expand from Earth to escape the threat of civilization-ending natural disasters, like a supervolcano, which could lower global temperatures below freezing for years. The chance of dying in a civilization-ending event is 1/455. Not to be grim, but that's 10 times more likely than dying in an commercial aircraft.
Too many words.
3. Don't keep all our eggs in this one blue basket at the bottom of a gravity well.
Re:Space exploration compared to F1
on
Apollo 12 at 35
·
· Score: 2, Funny
I personally like F1, but see no great societal value in the actual racing.
Without F1 there would be no right turns. U.S. drivers would have to go around the block half the time to get to the right place.
This is not theory; Distributed Proofreaders (http://www.pgdp.net/) has and uses such a post-processor.
Obviously the PG DP method can be modified by not doing OCR and merely making the image of the page available as the starting point. A million primates typing can go through a lot of material...particularly if the alternative is that the material will not be easily available.
Cooperative methods can be used in other ways. Perhaps if you want to access a page, you have to do some typing/editing of another page. You might even be presented with fragments of pages to work on, and you'd better do a good job because you might not know if you're working on the very page which you wanted!
26 years also happened to be about the time of one generation, or about half the lifetime of a person. One-quarter of a century is a lot of time in terms of discovery of knowledge.
Nope, the science is settled. Everyone agrees humans got here not long ago, so obviously this study is wrong. We won't let reality interfere with history.
There might be a burst of interest in the current generation. The previous generation's interest in forensic science was stimulated by Quincy, M.E., a medical examiner with a tendency to investigate further.
More fiber causes more sewage?
More fiber delivers more spam?
More fiber sucks away more time?
Actually, the fiber is being installed underground. When the drilling punctures a water or sewer line, the leaking liquid can cause problems several ways. A puddle of sewage on the surface has several undesirable characteristics. Water or sewage leaking through earth can dissolve various materials and carry them away, creating a space. If this space is on the surface and small, it is a pothole. If this space is under the surface, when the unsupported earth above collapses that is called a sinkhole.
Sinkholes come in various sizes, and since the surface layer and "rock" supporting much of Florida can be dissolved fairly easily, large sinkholes can be created all too easily. A small sinkhole which collapses under a car can cause several dramatic situations.
imagine what they'd accomplish even getting half way there.
Or 1/1000th of the way there.
So make it a distributed project.
Have 1,000 little robots climbing 1,000 feet each.
That's a 1,000,000 foot climb.
Imagine how much they'd accomplish by doing that.
Venus is not Earth. Earth has 1/90th the atmospheric pressure, has a tiny amount of carbon dioxide, has a lot of water, and does not have a lot of sulphur in the atmosphere.
Venus climate is about as similar to the climate of Earth as are the climates of the Moon or Titan. The latter two do have some relevance in other ways; without the impact which created the Moon we might have a thicker atmosphere and a crust too thick to be tectonically active, and Titan's atmosphere shows us how much carbon can exist in planets without having been converted to carbon dioxide.
This won't be public domain for decades to come, and the market for it has long since passed away.
Aren't we looking at it right now?
There is some kind of market, although we don't know how the publisher/author are going to be compensated for the use of these images.
With the greenhouse effect, you can do a simple back-of-the-envelope estimation of the effect of CO2 in the atmosphere. Without CO2, it would be very cold on the earth surface.
Actually it is water vapor which causes the vast majority (perhaps well over 90%) of the natural greenhouse effect. And that "perhaps" means that you need a bigger envelope.
Your BOTE is also assuming that energy from sunlight is constant. It is known to vary by a small amount, and there are hints that solar and interstellar radiation and particles have a significant effect upon the climate, and that perhaps you should be using radiation instead of CO2 on your envelope.
You're probably also assuming that the amount of carbon is constant except for what humans burn. Abiogenic carbon theory demands that new carbon is being added naturally, so you might see fluctuations which are only insignificant at geologic time scales. In this week's news are claims that the Arctic is warming (and counter-claims such as the few submarine ice thickness measurements being skewed by ice blown into Canadian waters where it could not be measured), and thawing of permafrost is expected to release a lot of deep-origin methane which has been recently blocked from reaching the atmosphere. You might want to add short-term methane effects to your calculation.
"if we substract 4% from the model outcome, it matches the experimental data under almost all circumstances, but we don't know which effect accounts for those 4%".
And when they alter the simulation by adding more CO2, they don't know if the results are correct or if what causes the 4% error then causes a 40% error.
However, it could very well be that the greenhouse effect of additional CO2 is actually stronger than predicted thus far. For some reasons, skeptics tend to believe that all errors in the models add up to overestimating the effect of CO2 on climate.
Actually, if you look at only the effects of CO2 you find that the consensus is that direct effects of CO2 are considered near the limit. Adding more CO2 can't cause much more warming. The simulations used by the IPCC depend upon positive feedbacks, such as warming causing more evaporation of water and the resulting increase in water vapor causing even more warming. Such assumptions run into areas where a lot is simply not known -- does more water vapor cause more clear-sky warming, does it cause more heat-trapping clouds, does it cause more heat-reflecting clouds...or does it trigger an "iris effect" which forces clear sky through which heat is dumped out to space? It is not known if clouds would heat or cool: "The sign of the net cloud feedback is still a matter of uncertainty"
Why the focus on core memory, punch cards, and magnetic drum storage?
Back then you may have had to write your code to squeeze more performance out of the hardware. Knowing the relative speeds and delays of the hardware was sometimes useful. Knowing how punch cards worked was helpful when using them...particularly if you edited a card. It was also helpful for everyone near magnetic tapes and exposed magnetic disk packs to know why it was important to keep the air clean, and at least put the cigarette in the ashtray.
The theory of global warming is one century old, it has been predicted, and it is measured.
Maybe you mean the "enhanced greenhouse effect", the radiative forcing effects due to human activities. Notice that of the 12 agents, 9 are marked as having a "low" (L) or "very low" (VL) level of scientific understanding (LOSU).
Or you're referring to more general climate science?
That may be the climate processes and feedbacks where the "consensus" of the group which supports the UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol science presently mentions:
Water vapor: "..major improvements have occurred in the treatment of water vapour in models, although detrainment of moisture from clouds remains quite uncertain and discrepancies exist..."
Clouds: "...probably the greatest uncertainty in future projections of climate arises from clouds..."
Stratosphere: "...relatively poor representation of some stratospheric processes..."
There are simply major gaps in understanding of climate. 50-99% of the natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor; that is why the planet is not an iceball. But the behavior of water vapor and clouds (ever see a picture of Earth?) are not well understood.
Oh, and the link above is to the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR). The Kyoto Protocol is based on the Second one. Browse the TAR for references to "significant progress" for clues to things which were even less well understood when used as the basis for Kyoto.
Then there is the problem that much of the "measured" warming in the past century happened before the 1945-1975 cooling period. Before most of the oil was burned...ain't science wonderful?
The fringe scientists in question tend to be anti-abortion, anti-climate-change... So are most scientists pro-climate-change?
Most scientists know that climate changes.
The noisy ones talk as if we're doing something about climate.
The fringe ones talk as if we can do something to climate.
Journalists like to pick at the interesting bits. There's a limit to how much news can be made of friendly puppies.
Slashdot Mirror
Generation ship
"In order to assure genetic diversity during a centuries-long trip, any generation starship would require on the order of thousands of inhabitants..."
Too many words.
3. Don't keep all our eggs in this one blue basket at the bottom of a gravity well.
Without F1 there would be no right turns. U.S. drivers would have to go around the block half the time to get to the right place.
Obviously the PG DP method can be modified by not doing OCR and merely making the image of the page available as the starting point. A million primates typing can go through a lot of material...particularly if the alternative is that the material will not be easily available.
Cooperative methods can be used in other ways. Perhaps if you want to access a page, you have to do some typing/editing of another page. You might even be presented with fragments of pages to work on, and you'd better do a good job because you might not know if you're working on the very page which you wanted!
26 years also happened to be about the time of one generation, or about half the lifetime of a person. One-quarter of a century is a lot of time in terms of discovery of knowledge.
Let's build our own.
Nope, the science is settled. Everyone agrees humans got here not long ago, so obviously this study is wrong. We won't let reality interfere with history.
Ping!
I mean, pling!
Before that, there was Sherlock Holmes...
You mean that you are not willing to use any sense other than smell for the task.
But it sure makes a mess when a bird pecks through the overhead sewage lines.
More fiber causes more sewage?
More fiber delivers more spam?
More fiber sucks away more time?
Actually, the fiber is being installed underground. When the drilling punctures a water or sewer line, the leaking liquid can cause problems several ways. A puddle of sewage on the surface has several undesirable characteristics. Water or sewage leaking through earth can dissolve various materials and carry them away, creating a space. If this space is on the surface and small, it is a pothole. If this space is under the surface, when the unsupported earth above collapses that is called a sinkhole.
Sinkholes come in various sizes, and since the surface layer and "rock" supporting much of Florida can be dissolved fairly easily, large sinkholes can be created all too easily. A small sinkhole which collapses under a car can cause several dramatic situations.
First Sinkhole.
"This is your Holub on Patterns"
Any questions?
Then the hard part wasn't climbing the MIT building, it was the crawl across the country.
Or 1/1000th of the way there.
So make it a distributed project.
Have 1,000 little robots climbing 1,000 feet each.
That's a 1,000,000 foot climb.
Imagine how much they'd accomplish by doing that.
Um... oh, yeah:
Never mind Wal-Mart. I want to know if the Pop-Tarts Laboratories have expressed an interest in weather manipulation.
Venus climate is about as similar to the climate of Earth as are the climates of the Moon or Titan. The latter two do have some relevance in other ways; without the impact which created the Moon we might have a thicker atmosphere and a crust too thick to be tectonically active, and Titan's atmosphere shows us how much carbon can exist in planets without having been converted to carbon dioxide.
You might do a little more reading on the so-called "greenhouse effect".
Aren't we looking at it right now?
There is some kind of market, although we don't know how the publisher/author are going to be compensated for the use of these images.
Actually it is water vapor which causes the vast majority (perhaps well over 90%) of the natural greenhouse effect. And that "perhaps" means that you need a bigger envelope.
Your BOTE is also assuming that energy from sunlight is constant. It is known to vary by a small amount, and there are hints that solar and interstellar radiation and particles have a significant effect upon the climate, and that perhaps you should be using radiation instead of CO2 on your envelope.
You're probably also assuming that the amount of carbon is constant except for what humans burn. Abiogenic carbon theory demands that new carbon is being added naturally, so you might see fluctuations which are only insignificant at geologic time scales. In this week's news are claims that the Arctic is warming (and counter-claims such as the few submarine ice thickness measurements being skewed by ice blown into Canadian waters where it could not be measured), and thawing of permafrost is expected to release a lot of deep-origin methane which has been recently blocked from reaching the atmosphere. You might want to add short-term methane effects to your calculation.
And when they alter the simulation by adding more CO2, they don't know if the results are correct or if what causes the 4% error then causes a 40% error.
However, it could very well be that the greenhouse effect of additional CO2 is actually stronger than predicted thus far. For some reasons, skeptics tend to believe that all errors in the models add up to overestimating the effect of CO2 on climate.
Actually, if you look at only the effects of CO2 you find that the consensus is that direct effects of CO2 are considered near the limit. Adding more CO2 can't cause much more warming. The simulations used by the IPCC depend upon positive feedbacks, such as warming causing more evaporation of water and the resulting increase in water vapor causing even more warming. Such assumptions run into areas where a lot is simply not known -- does more water vapor cause more clear-sky warming, does it cause more heat-trapping clouds, does it cause more heat-reflecting clouds...or does it trigger an "iris effect" which forces clear sky through which heat is dumped out to space? It is not known if clouds would heat or cool: "The sign of the net cloud feedback is still a matter of uncertainty"
Back then you may have had to write your code to squeeze more performance out of the hardware. Knowing the relative speeds and delays of the hardware was sometimes useful. Knowing how punch cards worked was helpful when using them...particularly if you edited a card. It was also helpful for everyone near magnetic tapes and exposed magnetic disk packs to know why it was important to keep the air clean, and at least put the cigarette in the ashtray.
Maybe you mean the "enhanced greenhouse effect", the radiative forcing effects due to human activities. Notice that of the 12 agents, 9 are marked as having a "low" (L) or "very low" (VL) level of scientific understanding (LOSU).
Or you're referring to more general climate science? That may be the climate processes and feedbacks where the "consensus" of the group which supports the UNFCCC Kyoto Protocol science presently mentions:
- Water vapor: "..major improvements have occurred in the treatment of water vapour in models, although detrainment of moisture from clouds remains quite uncertain and discrepancies exist..."
- Clouds: "...probably the greatest uncertainty in future projections of climate arises from clouds..."
- Stratosphere: "...relatively poor representation of some stratospheric processes..."
There are simply major gaps in understanding of climate. 50-99% of the natural greenhouse effect is due to water vapor; that is why the planet is not an iceball. But the behavior of water vapor and clouds (ever see a picture of Earth?) are not well understood.Oh, and the link above is to the IPCC Third Assessment Report (TAR). The Kyoto Protocol is based on the Second one. Browse the TAR for references to "significant progress" for clues to things which were even less well understood when used as the basis for Kyoto.
Then there is the problem that much of the "measured" warming in the past century happened before the 1945-1975 cooling period. Before most of the oil was burned...ain't science wonderful?
So are most scientists pro-climate-change?
Most scientists know that climate changes.
The noisy ones talk as if we're doing something about climate.
The fringe ones talk as if we can do something to climate.
Journalists like to pick at the interesting bits. There's a limit to how much news can be made of friendly puppies.
...as well as it demands money and technology from developed nations to be given to other nations. Many "other nations" seem to support the UNFCCC.