Frilly cover over a miniskirt and heels for the Apocalypse? About as good as a wrapper on a hamburger, and will probably serve the same purpose.
I would envision something like a space suit, with chain mail over Kevlar to resist bladed weapon puctures and bullets. It would not need to be airtight, but would allow a slight overpressure for nuclear/biological/chemical survival, something like armored firefighter turnout gear with SCBA, with an armored helmet with facemask.
Accessorize with melee weapons and big guns...ouila! The fashion statement of the Apocalypse.
I'll be writing in Snowden for U.S. Representative next election cycle. He represents my ideals as an American a hell of a lot better than Joe Kennedy (who voted to keep funding for the NSA the other day).
That's exactly right - most engineers that initially go to see will be landside in 5 years or less. I do agree that the majority of our students know this and are happy to do the degree work. The Coast Guard definitely wants to promote higher engineering skills and knowledge and is stacking the deck in favor of the 4-year academy route to licensure. Hawsepiping is still possible, but you need to be very pro-active about getting your time and endorsements.
But we also have a significant number of students (usually the ones doing poorly academically) that like swinging the wrenches and don't see the need for the math and writing skills. It's shortsighted, but I am afraid that some of the older marine engineering faculty who did hawsepipe ages ago share this view and pass it on to these students. Hopefully with time these attitudes will pass on.
I teach engineering at a maritime academy and it dazzles me that so many students pay through the nose and suffer through 4+ years of regimented academics for a license that they could get by just sailing as a paid vessel assistant for a few years after high school and taking a Coast Guard examination. This is a practice called hawsepiping and used to be the norm for the profession. Marine engineers are really (for the most part) mechanics, and much simpler vocational school would be more than adequate for these jobs.
Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license and many whine and cry about having to read, write, do math, and take engineering coursework. I do think that degree is worth what they pay, but it really a form of insurance so they can remain employed after they come ashore, and getting 20 year old boys who aspire to be sailors to think about what they are going to do later in life (hell, later in the *day*) is hard.
The PC market has reached a point of saturation where, for 99.9% of the folks out there, the hardware in front of them is more than adequate for their needs (email & browsing, docs and spreadsheets). I haven't had a desktop PC for about 8 years, using first a Satellite laptop and now an Asus netbook with XP. Still even runs Word and Excel 97 (installed from CD, both softwares work and are completely adequate for my needs).
Tell me why I need a PC again? And while you're at it, tell me also why in hell I would need Windows 8? Or even Office 2010?
The PC is the wagon wheel of the computing world. It did it's job, but save for niche markets the average non-gamer doesn't need or want one and so it very naturally is fading into history. That's how it goes.
This strikes me as yet another place where today's students, many already low in internal motivation, have that motivation replaced with a Big-Brother-esque all-knowing eye that knows when they haven't conformed. All this does is train the low-motivation students to become mindless robots who just respond to the stick when prodded. We're training away motivated learning and replacing it with a closed loop stimulus-response system where no real learning occurs.
This is the kind of science that will save us from Global warming. I know how grand Solar and wind seem grand, but they aren't powering shit yet.
Wind is powering all sorts of "shit" in Europe. Denmark is pushing about 28% penetration of wind into their power market and many of the surrounding countries have penetrations of 10-20%. And they are building a hell of a lot of offshore wind farms.
Just because the U.S. is slow to get off its ass doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Coal is routinely pulverized in order to get it to flow with preheated air through the burners and to provide a large surface area to volume ratio for efficient heating and combustion. 100 micrometers is 0.1 mm, small but not microscopic. This is a typical grain size produced by the pulverizer mills.
You really don't want any sort of small powder to get in your lungs. Coal is not particularly dangerous.
Coal contains small amounts of mercury, but not much more so than most other natural ores. The problem with mercury in coal is that we are burning coal that took millions of years to accumulate in the space of a few centuries, so it releases mercury back into the environment faster than nature can sequester it.
Sounds nice, except for the 'combusted in a sealed chamber' bit. How is this going to scale up so they can feed 100 tons/hr through the plant cycle? That is the question.
Something to consider is that, from a business perspective, poorly performing students that keep failing and coming back are very lucrative as far as the school is concerned. Doubly so if they take online courses as the overhead to the school is (generally) much less.
The real problem is the relatively easy access these poor students have to educational financing. If they can limp along with a 2.00001 GPA they can pull more loans to retake half of their classes next semester. Federal loans are so lax that there is hardly any pressure for the student to pay them back this century. Mommy and Daddy may also be funding them and forcing them to continue on with an education that they do not want or appreciate.
Schools win with a steady base of poor students that keep paying, banks win with more loans, students lose with a mountain of debt and nothing to show for it in the end.
I served 6 years in the Air Force - no heroics, didn't dodge any bullets, but I did my job to the best of my ability. I left with a box full of of medals and citations that promptly went into the dumpster. Why? Because they were awarded every time I sneezed into a hanky and not into someone's face, for showing up to work on time sober...things that I was duty-bound to do anyway.
The military has joined the rest of American society in giving out awards for everything, for everyone, because we are all special.
If someone did a really good job, great - give them a pay bump or something. If someone did something truly exceptional, honor them by not giving the least competent slob in the unit the same award just because he bothered to show up two days in a row.
Agreed. Blackboard in particular is worse than useless. My first year teaching I attempted to upload videos and other materials to Blackboard. It took hours of my time because of the clunky interface. At the end of the semester, I checked the view statistics - 2 whole students bothered to look in on it, presumably because the interface was just as clunky on their end. What a waste. Never again.
IT for IT's sake in the classroom is ridiculous. Like all other technologies, it needs to be examined for its utility in a certain application.
I teach engineering thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics. All of these courses involve using basic fundamental equations to solve real world problems (sizing pumps and heat exchangers properly, etc.). I do example problems in class on the board and walk through them step-by-step so the students can follow the *procedure*. Then I throw a modified problem at them, set it up on the board, and prompt the class what the steps are to solving this problem.
If they had to solve these problems in the field they would have to pull out a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a book of property tables, so that is how we roll in class. There *are* some computer programs that will automate many of these calculations in the field, but I want them to understand what those programs are doing and to be able to verify the answers. I tell the students this - the good students understand why I am making them do it the long way, the poor students whine that it is a waste of their time.
I do utilize Powerpoint to show photos and videos of real-world applications. Showing engineering students how things can blow up and fall apart when they don't understand the fundamentals is a great motivator, provides an entertaining break for the student from the number crunching, yet is still educational in the "big picture" sense. A few of my classes are amenable to demonstrations where I can get a student or two to come up and make something go *BANG* using some apparatus.
I am working on digitizing my lectures using PDFs produced by a LiveScribe pen, which essentially produces an electronic lecture. My handwritten notes become visible at the rate I would normally write them during a lecture, and a simultaneous recording of my voice plays along with the text. A student could sit down at a computer, open this PDF and have an experience similar to following the lecture (unfortunately without real-time ability to ask questions). I consider this a fall back for students who for whatever reason cannot attend class.For everything else, there is email, phone, or my office hours.
I generally try teach to the "B and C" students in the crowd - the ones that are putting their shoulder to it but are struggling with a concept or two. Exposing these students to these problems showing a basic procedure, then graphical illustrations of the importance, prodding them to think through the problem seems to work very well for these students. The feedback that I get from my students indicates that they like the flow of my classroom.
"A" students generally could be handed a poorly-written subject text at the start of the semester, told when the exam dates are, and would still find a way to do well. "D" students might physically get their bodies to class occasionally, but their minds aren't there. All of the IT in the world won't change these outcomes, though it does probably improve the A student's understanding of the topic.
The kid is in the prime of his youth with testosterone pouring out of his ears. Give him a 24 pack of condoms and let him play in the sun with all the nice girls that distracted him in science class. If he wants to tinker with coding, let him follow his passions in the direction of his own choosing. Let him be bored now and again and allow him to daydream a bit. It may give him more focus and direction than you realize.
The title of the summary "Will Renewable Energy Ever Meet All Our Energy Needs?" needs a definition of the group associated with "Our".
Some countries with good local wind, hydro, geothermal, and solar resources and with stable population and industry might very well be able to balance energy consumption with renewable energy sources.
Hilly countries near the equator, ideally with shorelines with sea breezes have great potential to close their energy loops. Frigid, flat countries near the poles - unless you're sitting on a geothermal hotspot, that probably isn't going to work out.
If "Our" refers to "The whole of humankind", the answer to the question in the title is "Hell, no".
You're completely correct. There currently are too many trees for this to work. We'll just wait until a sufficient number of trees are illegally harvested before we put the plan into effect!
This is an example of the social headwinds nuclear engineering (actually any engineering) faces all the time.
Engineers identify a problem, usually during routine inspections (inspections that take place in order to find any problems!), and take an action such as shutting down in a controlled manner to remedy the problem.
The tabloid title of the summary of the event invariably reads "Nuclear Plant X Forced to Shut Down Due to Safety Fears" and is followed by an article which lists the last N times the plant had to shut down, possibly followed by a comment about TMI/Chernobyl/Fukushima just to keep the drama up.
Yes, accidents happen, but the fact that many problems are identified, investigated, and remedied as part of a engineered safety response program seems lost on the public. The battery problems on the Boeing 787 are another similar example - correct actions are being taken to remedy a problem, but journalists are branding the Dreamliner as a potentially unsafe lemon.
He plots lifetime in days to entity mass in grams on a log-log plot and slaps a line on it. Note that some of the scatter in the vertical axis is up to 3 *orders of magnitude*. Had this been plotted on linear scale it would have looked like Jackson Pollock sneezed on the page.
All that can be extracted is that big critters tend to live longer than small critters. So what is new here?
Slashdot Mirror
Math lies like a dog.
Frilly cover over a miniskirt and heels for the Apocalypse? About as good as a wrapper on a hamburger, and will probably serve the same purpose.
I would envision something like a space suit, with chain mail over Kevlar to resist bladed weapon puctures and bullets. It would not need to be airtight, but would allow a slight overpressure for nuclear/biological/chemical survival, something like armored firefighter turnout gear with SCBA, with an armored helmet with facemask.
Accessorize with melee weapons and big guns...ouila! The fashion statement of the Apocalypse.
I'll be writing in Snowden for U.S. Representative next election cycle. He represents my ideals as an American a hell of a lot better than Joe Kennedy (who voted to keep funding for the NSA the other day).
That's exactly right - most engineers that initially go to see will be landside in 5 years or less. I do agree that the majority of our students know this and are happy to do the degree work. The Coast Guard definitely wants to promote higher engineering skills and knowledge and is stacking the deck in favor of the 4-year academy route to licensure. Hawsepiping is still possible, but you need to be very pro-active about getting your time and endorsements.
But we also have a significant number of students (usually the ones doing poorly academically) that like swinging the wrenches and don't see the need for the math and writing skills. It's shortsighted, but I am afraid that some of the older marine engineering faculty who did hawsepipe ages ago share this view and pass it on to these students. Hopefully with time these attitudes will pass on.
I teach engineering at a maritime academy and it dazzles me that so many students pay through the nose and suffer through 4+ years of regimented academics for a license that they could get by just sailing as a paid vessel assistant for a few years after high school and taking a Coast Guard examination. This is a practice called hawsepiping and used to be the norm for the profession. Marine engineers are really (for the most part) mechanics, and much simpler vocational school would be more than adequate for these jobs.
Admittedly the students also get a "marine engineering degree" over and above the training for the license that is transferrable to a lot of shore-side professions, but most of that is lost on the students. All they care about is getting the license and many whine and cry about having to read, write, do math, and take engineering coursework. I do think that degree is worth what they pay, but it really a form of insurance so they can remain employed after they come ashore, and getting 20 year old boys who aspire to be sailors to think about what they are going to do later in life (hell, later in the *day*) is hard.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jVsQToSfag
The PC market has reached a point of saturation where, for 99.9% of the folks out there, the hardware in front of them is more than adequate for their needs (email & browsing, docs and spreadsheets). I haven't had a desktop PC for about 8 years, using first a Satellite laptop and now an Asus netbook with XP. Still even runs Word and Excel 97 (installed from CD, both softwares work and are completely adequate for my needs).
Tell me why I need a PC again? And while you're at it, tell me also why in hell I would need Windows 8? Or even Office 2010?
The PC is the wagon wheel of the computing world. It did it's job, but save for niche markets the average non-gamer doesn't need or want one and so it very naturally is fading into history. That's how it goes.
This strikes me as yet another place where today's students, many already low in internal motivation, have that motivation replaced with a Big-Brother-esque all-knowing eye that knows when they haven't conformed. All this does is train the low-motivation students to become mindless robots who just respond to the stick when prodded. We're training away motivated learning and replacing it with a closed loop stimulus-response system where no real learning occurs.
Just sweep it all into the Trash Bin, breathe deep, and move on with your life confident in the impermanence of all things.
Namaste!
This is the kind of science that will save us from Global warming. I know how grand Solar and wind seem grand, but they aren't powering shit yet.
Wind is powering all sorts of "shit" in Europe. Denmark is pushing about 28% penetration of wind into their power market and many of the surrounding countries have penetrations of 10-20%. And they are building a hell of a lot of offshore wind farms.
Just because the U.S. is slow to get off its ass doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Coal is routinely pulverized in order to get it to flow with preheated air through the burners and to provide a large surface area to volume ratio for efficient heating and combustion. 100 micrometers is 0.1 mm, small but not microscopic. This is a typical grain size produced by the pulverizer mills.
You really don't want any sort of small powder to get in your lungs. Coal is not particularly dangerous.
Coal contains small amounts of mercury, but not much more so than most other natural ores. The problem with mercury in coal is that we are burning coal that took millions of years to accumulate in the space of a few centuries, so it releases mercury back into the environment faster than nature can sequester it.
Sounds nice, except for the 'combusted in a sealed chamber' bit. How is this going to scale up so they can feed 100 tons/hr through the plant cycle? That is the question.
Something to consider is that, from a business perspective, poorly performing students that keep failing and coming back are very lucrative as far as the school is concerned. Doubly so if they take online courses as the overhead to the school is (generally) much less.
The real problem is the relatively easy access these poor students have to educational financing. If they can limp along with a 2.00001 GPA they can pull more loans to retake half of their classes next semester. Federal loans are so lax that there is hardly any pressure for the student to pay them back this century. Mommy and Daddy may also be funding them and forcing them to continue on with an education that they do not want or appreciate.
Schools win with a steady base of poor students that keep paying, banks win with more loans, students lose with a mountain of debt and nothing to show for it in the end.
This is capitalism in action folks. Nothing to see here, move along.
I served 6 years in the Air Force - no heroics, didn't dodge any bullets, but I did my job to the best of my ability. I left with a box full of of medals and citations that promptly went into the dumpster. Why? Because they were awarded every time I sneezed into a hanky and not into someone's face, for showing up to work on time sober...things that I was duty-bound to do anyway.
The military has joined the rest of American society in giving out awards for everything, for everyone, because we are all special.
If someone did a really good job, great - give them a pay bump or something. If someone did something truly exceptional, honor them by not giving the least competent slob in the unit the same award just because he bothered to show up two days in a row.
Agreed. Blackboard in particular is worse than useless. My first year teaching I attempted to upload videos and other materials to Blackboard. It took hours of my time because of the clunky interface. At the end of the semester, I checked the view statistics - 2 whole students bothered to look in on it, presumably because the interface was just as clunky on their end. What a waste. Never again.
IT for IT's sake in the classroom is ridiculous. Like all other technologies, it needs to be examined for its utility in a certain application.
I teach engineering thermodynamics, heat transfer, and fluid dynamics. All of these courses involve using basic fundamental equations to solve real world problems (sizing pumps and heat exchangers properly, etc.). I do example problems in class on the board and walk through them step-by-step so the students can follow the *procedure*. Then I throw a modified problem at them, set it up on the board, and prompt the class what the steps are to solving this problem.
If they had to solve these problems in the field they would have to pull out a sheet of paper, a pencil, and a book of property tables, so that is how we roll in class. There *are* some computer programs that will automate many of these calculations in the field, but I want them to understand what those programs are doing and to be able to verify the answers. I tell the students this - the good students understand why I am making them do it the long way, the poor students whine that it is a waste of their time.
I do utilize Powerpoint to show photos and videos of real-world applications. Showing engineering students how things can blow up and fall apart when they don't understand the fundamentals is a great motivator, provides an entertaining break for the student from the number crunching, yet is still educational in the "big picture" sense. A few of my classes are amenable to demonstrations where I can get a student or two to come up and make something go *BANG* using some apparatus.
I am working on digitizing my lectures using PDFs produced by a LiveScribe pen, which essentially produces an electronic lecture. My handwritten notes become visible at the rate I would normally write them during a lecture, and a simultaneous recording of my voice plays along with the text. A student could sit down at a computer, open this PDF and have an experience similar to following the lecture (unfortunately without real-time ability to ask questions). I consider this a fall back for students who for whatever reason cannot attend class.For everything else, there is email, phone, or my office hours.
I generally try teach to the "B and C" students in the crowd - the ones that are putting their shoulder to it but are struggling with a concept or two. Exposing these students to these problems showing a basic procedure, then graphical illustrations of the importance, prodding them to think through the problem seems to work very well for these students. The feedback that I get from my students indicates that they like the flow of my classroom.
"A" students generally could be handed a poorly-written subject text at the start of the semester, told when the exam dates are, and would still find a way to do well. "D" students might physically get their bodies to class occasionally, but their minds aren't there. All of the IT in the world won't change these outcomes, though it does probably improve the A student's understanding of the topic.
The kid is in the prime of his youth with testosterone pouring out of his ears. Give him a 24 pack of condoms and let him play in the sun with all the nice girls that distracted him in science class. If he wants to tinker with coding, let him follow his passions in the direction of his own choosing. Let him be bored now and again and allow him to daydream a bit. It may give him more focus and direction than you realize.
The title of the summary "Will Renewable Energy Ever Meet All Our Energy Needs?" needs a definition of the group associated with "Our". Some countries with good local wind, hydro, geothermal, and solar resources and with stable population and industry might very well be able to balance energy consumption with renewable energy sources. Hilly countries near the equator, ideally with shorelines with sea breezes have great potential to close their energy loops. Frigid, flat countries near the poles - unless you're sitting on a geothermal hotspot, that probably isn't going to work out. If "Our" refers to "The whole of humankind", the answer to the question in the title is "Hell, no".
You're completely correct. There currently are too many trees for this to work. We'll just wait until a sufficient number of trees are illegally harvested before we put the plan into effect!
Is it possible that these warheads can reach the USA?
Maybe. We'll have to strike pre-emptively.
This is an example of the social headwinds nuclear engineering (actually any engineering) faces all the time. Engineers identify a problem, usually during routine inspections (inspections that take place in order to find any problems!), and take an action such as shutting down in a controlled manner to remedy the problem. The tabloid title of the summary of the event invariably reads "Nuclear Plant X Forced to Shut Down Due to Safety Fears" and is followed by an article which lists the last N times the plant had to shut down, possibly followed by a comment about TMI/Chernobyl/Fukushima just to keep the drama up. Yes, accidents happen, but the fact that many problems are identified, investigated, and remedied as part of a engineered safety response program seems lost on the public. The battery problems on the Boeing 787 are another similar example - correct actions are being taken to remedy a problem, but journalists are branding the Dreamliner as a potentially unsafe lemon.
Six second video bites - This is another example of "Idiocracy" come to reality. Let me summarize the content: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_4jrMwvZ2A
At least we won't confuse them in technical engineer conversations anymore.
He plots lifetime in days to entity mass in grams on a log-log plot and slaps a line on it. Note that some of the scatter in the vertical axis is up to 3 *orders of magnitude*. Had this been plotted on linear scale it would have looked like Jackson Pollock sneezed on the page. All that can be extracted is that big critters tend to live longer than small critters. So what is new here?