I'll try to re-state Hal-9001's post in a little different form:
Electromagnetic waves consist of oscillating electric and magnetic fields in alignment so as to be self-perpetuating. The changing magnetic field creates an electric field a little further on, and the changing electric field creates a magnetic field still further on, etc.
First consider a radar beam approaching a metal surface. The E-field will cause the free electrons in the metal to move. This transfers the energy of the beam into electron motion. And with several pages of math that I went through once and never want to again, it can be shown that the electrons move so as to create a mirror-image field, re-transmitting the beam at the angle of incidence -- in other words, a reflection.
Due to resistance to electron movement, the reflected beam will be somewhat weaker, the missing energy being absorbed as heat. If the metal is extremely thin there might not be enough free electrons to fully absorb the incident beam, so part of it passes through. In an insulating material, electrons are tightly bound to molecules, and so cannot range far enough for strong interactions with the beam, and so most of the beam will pass through (the material is "transparent" to radar). However, electrons can shift around within the molecules, which causes refraction, partial reflections, and absorption.
Things are different for x-rays, because the individual photons are pretty energetic and the wavelength (size of one photon) is close to the size of an atom. So it's more likely to be the inner electrons still bound to the atoms that wind up trying to capture the x-ray, and only rarely does this succeed -- most of the x-rays get through several inches of all but the densest materials.
Visible light photons are in-between in size, large enough to interact well with the free electrons (reflection), but small enough to also be affected by bound electrons. (Selective absorption by the bound electrons gives copper and gold their color.)
Most insulators are not transparent to visible light, except as very thin films. Most insulators (like metals) consist of irregular aggregations of tiny crystals. The interactions with the electrons bound in molecules will reflect some light, absorb some, and refract all the rest. In most insulators, the interaction varies with the polarization of the photon and the angle of the crystal; since each crystal is oriented differently, each interface between crystals refracts and reflects light in different directions, so the light that isn't reflected from the external surface is scattered and (mostly) bounces around inside the material until absorbed rather than passing through.
Most transparent materials are glasses, with no crystal structure, and so no grain boundaries to scatter the light. Single crystals may also be transparent, although it's pretty hard to grow a single crystal as big as a windowpane. Multi-crystalline insulators can be translucent if sufficiently free of the atoms or molecules that absorb light, that is if the light is scattered but not absorbed eventually it will find it's way back out of the material. Concrete could be translucent if both the aggregate and the cement were free of light-absorbing materials, but I think the price would be extremely high.
Possibly a multi-crystal insulator could be transparent if the refractive index did not depend on orientation of the crystal or polarization of the light, and if all the crystals fit together neatly and had the same refractive index. Or use glass beads for aggregate and somehow make the cement match the glass?
Metals by definition have free electrons, which strongly reflect and absorb visible light. If it's transparent, it's not a metal.
You can form Al2O3 into fairly large crystals, and maybe it could be a glass too. It's stronger and much harder than silica-based glass, so it would make a great windshield, if you didn't mind the cost of using diamonds for cutting and polishing.
The article itself explains that a lot of the optimization is agressive translation of loops into operations on vectors, usng the SIMD (MMX, SSE, SSE2, etc.) opcodes
This sounds like scientific/engineering computations, and maybe 3D graphics computations in games. Anyone know if the Intel compiler does speed up graphics where you notice?
Yes I'd like a speed-up in Spice simulations of electronic circuits, but I don't spend as much time on that in a year as I spend just waiting for Windoze reboots... AFAIK, the only code in OS's or Office suites that could be vectorized to advantage is the graphics processing, and in most things I use at work the graphics processing is already fast enough to be imperceptible.
What was wrong (and should have been downright embarrassing to the Democrats) was that they weren't willing to come right out and say that Reagan was obviously picking nominees by ideology, so the Dems controlling the Senate needed to counterbalance that by rejecting nominees whose ideological tilt outweighed their abilities. By that standard, Bork should have been in, and several other Reagan nominees should have been out. Instead, they sabotaged Bork with dirty tactics, and then embarrassed by that, confirmed several justices who don't have enough brains to be Bork's law clerk, but fudged their way through the questioning leaving no one sure about where they stood...
Outside the judicial area, the worst Borking of all might have been a Secretary of Defense nominee. John Tower? The genuine concern about him was that he was a long-time defense industry executive -- every procurement contract would be a potential conflict of interest. OTOH, a friend who had actually met Tower thought he would have been great at the job, because he _knew_ every trick the contractors knew.
It all depends on whether he would be more loyal to the present job than to the last and the next. Instead of arguing that issue in public, though, the Dems went on a smear campaign. It seems that Tower likes booze and women. (Andy Rooney on 60 minutes did a hilarious skit with a nominee being grilled about "liking women". There are two answers, yes or no, and either one will get you into trouble...) So we had Senators who never appear in public before 11 am asking whether Tower's partying could lead to trouble, for instance if war broke out while he was drunk. (The Sec'y of Defense is NOT in the line of command, and basically oversees procurement and related issues, not military decisions. The President confers with the top generals and admirals, then makes the decisions. And we'd just got through eight years with a senile President, and no problems.)
Without the proprietary formats, all of Microsoft's office software features could be cloned by any midsize software company within 24 months. Except the bugs. They'd have to create their own bugs. 8-)
Seriously, I doubt that any company could put _all_ the alleged features into one program and have it work right. (This includes Microsoft, which demonstrably can't make bloated programs work right.) But I'm pretty sure at least 80% of the users would be quite satisfied with less than 20% of the features, in an non-bloated, reliable program. And you provide hooks so others can write add-ins for the features a few people just have to have. (Open source is a good way to avoid misunderstandings about the interface...)
One argument against the whole Bill of Rights initially was that it was redundant -- people had rights, and the original Constitution protected them (against Federal power only) by quite clearly stating that the Federal gov't could only do certain things in certain ways -- the 10th amendment merely says this again. However, as things have worked out, the damned lawyers in Congress and the courts have shown such ingenuity in stretching the original limited powers, that the explicit statements of things the gov't can't do seem to be insufficient protection also...
#9 just recognizes that the writer's imagination was finite, and that they couldn't provide specific prohibitions against all possible invasions of freedom, just the ones the gov'ts they were familiar with often committed.
Which is the weakness in #2: I think it would have been quite a lot stronger if their newspapers reported, for instance, that the British gov't took farmers' guns away, failed to provide adequate police protection to prevent multiple burglaries of the same rural home, and then locked up an old man for 10 to 20 for shooting a burglar with an illegal gun. It would have stated a right to defend yourself and your property, and to keep the weapons necessary for that. But in the 1880's, no gov't had yet had the nerve to tell it's honest citizens or subjects that they couldn't defend themselves, although some had tried to restrict weaponry so that the gov't itself didn't have to worry about p-o-ed citizens.
To any 18th century liberal, the right to self-defense was so obvious as to be overlooked. On the other side, Hobbes denied every other right in Leviathan, but did explicitly recognize the right to self defense. (Then again, I've always wondered if Hobbes real purpose might have been to state the arguments of absolute monarchy so plainly and baldly as to be ridiculous to everyone except the king's censors.)
The 12th amendment isn't so bad if you break it into parts, but unfortunately the writers didn't. The really badly written one is the 14th -- just try to figure out what the "rights and privileges" guaranteed by it are. No wonder that nearly every new set of Supreme Court justices promulgates a different interpretation.
I've also seen plenty of cases where it turned out later that bug _really_ had to be fixed. If you can't find the previous records, you wind up duplicating several days, possibly even weeks, of work tracking it down...
I quite often have to refer back to projects that were closed out a few years ago. E.g., a few months ago I had a customer saying something like, problems have popped up with this latching SMT relay, costing around $100K in replacement boards and service calls -- why did I ever pick it? I go back to look things up and find a pretty clear trail of checking every SMT relay on the market -- this was the only latching relay available in 1998 that actually withstands SMT process temperatures, although just barely -- the circuit didn't seem entirely trustworthy, so why don't we go to this alternate circuit, that also costs less? -- and the customer turned that change down...
In other words, given the customer's determination to implement a circuit designed in the early 1960's in surface-mount parts, that was the best part available, and probably still is. It wasn't good enough, but they wouldn't let me re-design to avoid it, and I've got their e-mails to prove it. We cranked out my more reliable design based around a 74HC 74 IC real fast, and they ate the cost.
Without e-mails, I barely remembered this particular case out of several others, and the actual decision makers at both companies were gone...
I'll second LMCBoy's post -- saying there's even a controversy over it gives the Jasker much more credibility than any reputable scientist would accord it at this point.
Besides that, the reporting of the demo is way out there. Three 100 watt bulbs is 4.5KW? If you can't run a calculator yourself, ask any engineer, physicist, electronic technician, or high school science teacher. And for all the reporter knew, there was a motor-generator unit chugging away inside that box, although if it was quiet I would bet instead on a battery and a lot of empty space, or hidden power cord.
I could have duplicated those results with one car battery and an inverter -- much smaller than the "dishwasher" sized machine described. What is required to prove this claim is quite simple:
1. Bring the machine in, weigh it, and set it up in someone else's space -- so it can be verified that there are no hidden cables or fuel lines.
2. Run a measured load for long enough that the energy output totals more than the energy in the same weight of hydrogen, so it definitely isn't chemical energy or another known form of stored energy.
Of course, to do #2 you have to be capable of arithmetic. Three 100 watt lightbulbs is 300W, a lot less than the 4.5KW claimed. Possibly he meant 4.5KWHr and the reporters screwed it up, but that would require 300W * 15 hours. Possibly he meant that its maximum capacity is 4.5KW (which is barely enough to run a house, as claimed), but that certainly wasn't demoed. And if it did run his house for a year, I'm 99.99% sure he was pouring more fuel into the tank at least once a day!
Basically, other than anecdotal amateur sociology, the support is that the murder rate has sometimes shown considerably different trends than the other violent crimes; in the 80's murder generally went down while "violent crimes" went up, and if you exclude crack dealers you can probably take that trend back to at at least 1970.
It would be more accurate to say "homicide" rather than "murder" -- I think justified self-defense killing and manslaughter get counted too.
It would be good to look at armed robbery too, but I haven't seen that listed separately. Even Sgt Rock would have complained if he finally returned from killing Nazis and someone took his wallet at gunpoint... (What doesn't get reported is _attempted_ robbery. That's from personal experience.) There are some neighborhoods where people don't expect the cops to do much and might not take the trouble to report it, probably more of them now than in 1950, but I doubt there is enough of an effect there to obscure a trend as strong as the homicide rate.
First off, crime statistics correlate better to the age of the population than to anything else. Most people over 30 have enough self control to not commit serious crimes -- or else they've gotten themselves locked up for long sentences. Most children under about 16 lack the capacity to do serious crimes on their own, (although in the more sociopathic street gangs, young men eligible to be tried as adults will recruit little kids to do the crimes). So males between 16 and 30 are responsible for most crime, and 1950 to 1965 was a relatively low-crime era, because as an aftereffect of the Great Depression and WWII there were few men in that age bracket. 1965-1980 was bound to be a high crime era because of too many teenagers and 20-somethings.
Second, "violent crime" includes everything from murder to assault and battery -- with assault and battery being about 90% of the cases. So the reported rate of "violent crime" probably depends more on how likely the loser of a fist fight is to call the cops than on the actual rate of violence. I suspect WWII vets were unlikely to consider anything that didn't involve loss of body parts, consciousness, or over a pint of blood as serious enough to report, but now a good many men would press charges for a single punch in the snout. In 1960, women were extremely unlikely to call the cops because their husband hit them -- and if the neighbors called before an ambulance was needed, the cops were more likely to tell the guy to keep the noise down than to arrest him. Now women get a lot of encouragement to report any violence at all, and in many states the cops are required by law to follow up on any suspicion of domestic violence. Likewise, rape is much more likely to be reported now. So for everything but murder and possibly armed robbery, the only clear long term trend is that more incidents are reported as crimes.
The most accurate statistics we have are for murder; now and then someone manages to make a murder look like accident or natural death, or to hide a body so it's never found, but these cases have never been more than 10% of the whole. The biggest known inaccuracy is that around 20% of murder cases in local police files aren't reported to the FBI's statistics office. There is no reason to think this ratio has changed much over the years. Murder rates peaked about 1980 and went down nearly every year since. They aren't as low as 1950, but we've got a lot higher percentage of the demographic groups more likely to commit murders.
More significantly, in most demographic groups, the murder rate declined steadily since 1970. I've seen this charted a lot of ways (men vs women, suburbs vs cities, by color, by income, and by age), and whichever way it's figured, the groups that don't include poor urban blacks under 30 or men under 30 have been murdering less since about 1970. In the 1990's, even poor young black men became less murderous.
Off-topic: Geez is it that easy to be moderated "insightful"? I was just making a little joke, based on the anti-pool hall spiel at the beginning of The Music Man.
I imagine you think it's not government's job to tell teenagers that gang violence is not a natural part of life...it's the parents' job, and if they don't get it done, too bad!
If the parents haven't raised the kids right, there is damned little chance anyone else will be able to reach them -- and gov't bureaucrats are the least effective of all. In fact, they are probably a big part of the problem.
Movie theaters were probably thought to be similar breeding grounds for dissoluteness back in the 1920s when the problem was really that the parents didn't care enough about what their children were doing. And pool halls! 8-)
I am not 100% sure about who was giving it away first, but I was running a free Netscape browser (and almost good enough to be worth 1 cent) in 1993 or 4, before I ever heard of a microsoft browser.
I used to think that when the judge finally called up Microsoft to announce the final decision breaking them up, they'd answer the phone "Microsoft-AOL-TimeWarner-Disney-RCA-CBS-Fox-GE-GM -Boeing-UnitedStatesofAmerica..."
Normally, a company to company lawsuit over unfair competition will ask for damages due to lost sales. Just what are those damages when the price was $0.00?
I forgot the "on the other hand." There used to be houses priced within reach of a minimum wage worker who was sufficiently frugal with other spending. I actually could have bought a house for $5,000 in 1979, if I'd needed to save money badly enough to do all the work it needed. I think that's $15-20,000 in 2002 dollars; a vacant lot goes for far more than that now in a good many counties.
Now, it seems like any housing at all is priced pretty much out of the reach of minimum wage, unless they are assisted by the welfare department. This is bad not just because it effectively raises the real price of unskilled labor (much of it shifted to others by taxes), but because regardless of the ostensible policies set by legislatures, the welfare department's actions tend to maximize the number of clients so their bureaucracy has to grow too...
And of course, Ricardo expected the less foresightful of the unskilled workers to starve to death, along with their presumably genetically inferior children. We don't let that happen anymore. And we no longer enforce significant societal penalties against those that breed without regard to how the children will be supported and reared. (I know of a man that is in arrears for child support on four or five different children by as many women, mostly not from marriage. How many more children weren't tracked to him? The courts can enter all sorts of judgements for non-support, but there is no money or assets to sieze, they don't sterilize him or keep him in jail forever, and as soon as he's out he's finding a new girlfriend to support him.)
Or a couple of pounds of rice, peas, mushrooms in sauce, tuna or meat, boil it up in a big pot, it will feed a dozen. I haven't priced all the ingredients in a couple of decades, but in 1978 it was under $5; it's probably still under $10 and tastes pretty good. If you know how to buy it and cook it, food in 21st century america is as cheap as it's ever been since manna stopped raining from heaven. But cooking takes planning, work, and a little knowledge, 3 things that seem to be lacking in the people that actually _need_ to keep costs down. Back when I was working at minimum + $0.50, my wife had a friend whose kids would get hungry at the end of every month -- their foodstamps gave them a bigger grocery budget per person than us, but they bought TV dinners and soda pop...
And cigarettes, of course. I've seen people get the heat turned off in mid-winter, who are burning up more than the heat bill every month in cigarettes. If you _really_ want to get the welfare cases back to work, find a way to cut off their tobacco.
As for subsistence living... My first year in the Air Force, 4 people living on E2 pay, was probably way below the poverty line but it wasn't subsistence living the way we handled it. Closer: when I was five in 1958, 4 people in married student housing at Arizona State, Flagstaff, a two room stone cottage and living primarily off Dad's GI bill and 10% disability. (There was some damage to his lungs in the Army -- he gets sick _every_ time he tries mountain climbing.) Real subsistence living: Dad learned to sneak up on rabbits and woodchucks with a rock to put meat on the table, as a kid in the Ozarks in the 30's. But I doubt that corner of the world is much different when the economy is booming, either...
And not everyone was suffering that badly in the 30's. Mom's grandparents had to lay off most of the servants...
Re:Another article in the stark raving obvious....
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AFAIK, the major force moving people out of Lord Fotheringay's farms was most likely Lord Fotheringay. The industrial revolution began with textile equipment, and one immediate result was that raising sheep for wool often became much more profitable than parceling your land out to sharecroppers to farm. That took something like 1/10 to 1/100th the labor force, and the rest had to go. They could emigrate to America (if they could buy a ticket), or move to the new industrial cities and work in the wool mills, find other jobs, or starve -- Lord Fotheringay didn't worry which, unless they turned to thievery, then it was Australia or hanging...
Re:Ahh yes. More newsbites
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There is a second point to Katz's diatribes -- that people are separating themselves into different communities and not talking to each other. E.g., "conservatives" watch Russ Limbaugh, and set their filters to exclude anything liberal, "liberals" watch only liberal commentators and set their filters... The danger is, if those filters ever get reasonably effective, people may separate into groups that no longer even comprehend the other groups positions.
What sets me to giggling is that every few years someone new notices this process for the first time and gets all worried. Really folks, it was pretty much the same in the 80's, the 70's, and the 60's. (It's probably been like that right back to 1776, but my awareness of such things goes back only to 1964. Although I do vaguely remember a Goldwater rally that must have been pre-1960...) The liberals read their magazines, and the conservatives read theirs, and rarely did the twain meet.
Re:blogging and the death of the commons
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If the blogger is that bad, why is anyone reading it?
For a decent blog/heavily moderated discussion group, check out www.jerrypournelle.com
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I'll try to re-state Hal-9001's post in a little different form:
Electromagnetic waves consist of oscillating electric and magnetic fields in alignment so as to be self-perpetuating. The changing magnetic field creates an electric field a little further on, and the changing electric field creates a magnetic field still further on, etc.
First consider a radar beam approaching a metal surface. The E-field will cause the free electrons in the metal to move. This transfers the energy of the beam into electron motion. And with several pages of math that I went through once and never want to again, it can be shown that the electrons move so as to create a mirror-image field, re-transmitting the beam at the angle of incidence -- in other words, a reflection.
Due to resistance to electron movement, the reflected beam will be somewhat weaker, the missing energy being absorbed as heat. If the metal is extremely thin there might not be enough free electrons to fully absorb the incident beam, so part of it passes through. In an insulating material, electrons are tightly bound to molecules, and so cannot range far enough for strong interactions with the beam, and so most of the beam will pass through (the material is "transparent" to radar). However, electrons can shift around within the molecules, which causes refraction, partial reflections, and absorption.
Things are different for x-rays, because the individual photons are pretty energetic and the wavelength (size of one photon) is close to the size of an atom. So it's more likely to be the inner electrons still bound to the atoms that wind up trying to capture the x-ray, and only rarely does this succeed -- most of the x-rays get through several inches of all but the densest materials.
Visible light photons are in-between in size, large enough to interact well with the free electrons (reflection), but small enough to also be affected by bound electrons. (Selective absorption by the bound electrons gives copper and gold their color.)
Most insulators are not transparent to visible light, except as very thin films. Most insulators (like metals) consist of irregular aggregations of tiny crystals. The interactions with the electrons bound in molecules will reflect some light, absorb some, and refract all the rest. In most insulators, the interaction varies with the polarization of the photon and the angle of the crystal; since each crystal is oriented differently, each interface between crystals refracts and reflects light in different directions, so the light that isn't reflected from the external surface is scattered and (mostly) bounces around inside the material until absorbed rather than passing through.
Most transparent materials are glasses, with no crystal structure, and so no grain boundaries to scatter the light. Single crystals may also be transparent, although it's pretty hard to grow a single crystal as big as a windowpane. Multi-crystalline insulators can be translucent if sufficiently free of the atoms or molecules that absorb light, that is if the light is scattered but not absorbed eventually it will find it's way back out of the material. Concrete could be translucent if both the aggregate and the cement were free of light-absorbing materials, but I think the price would be extremely high.
Possibly a multi-crystal insulator could be transparent if the refractive index did not depend on orientation of the crystal or polarization of the light, and if all the crystals fit together neatly and had the same refractive index. Or use glass beads for aggregate and somehow make the cement match the glass?
Metals by definition have free electrons, which strongly reflect and absorb visible light. If it's transparent, it's not a metal.
You can form Al2O3 into fairly large crystals, and maybe it could be a glass too. It's stronger and much harder than silica-based glass, so it would make a great windshield, if you didn't mind the cost of using diamonds for cutting and polishing.
The article itself explains that a lot of the optimization is agressive translation of loops into operations on vectors, usng the SIMD (MMX, SSE, SSE2, etc.) opcodes
This sounds like scientific/engineering computations, and maybe 3D graphics computations in games. Anyone know if the Intel compiler does speed up graphics where you notice?
Yes I'd like a speed-up in Spice simulations of electronic circuits, but I don't spend as much time on that in a year as I spend just waiting for Windoze reboots... AFAIK, the only code in OS's or Office suites that could be vectorized to advantage is the graphics processing, and in most things I use at work the graphics processing is already fast enough to be imperceptible.
It's hard to take someone seriously who doesn't know the difference between "flaunt" (display conspicuously) and "flout"
What was wrong (and should have been downright embarrassing to the Democrats) was that they weren't willing to come right out and say that Reagan was obviously picking nominees by ideology, so the Dems controlling the Senate needed to counterbalance that by rejecting nominees whose ideological tilt outweighed their abilities. By that standard, Bork should have been in, and several other Reagan nominees should have been out. Instead, they sabotaged Bork with dirty tactics, and then embarrassed by that, confirmed several justices who don't have enough brains to be Bork's law clerk, but fudged their way through the questioning leaving no one sure about where they stood...
Outside the judicial area, the worst Borking of all might have been a Secretary of Defense nominee. John Tower? The genuine concern about him was that he was a long-time defense industry executive -- every procurement contract would be a potential conflict of interest. OTOH, a friend who had actually met Tower thought he would have been great at the job, because he _knew_ every trick the contractors knew.
It all depends on whether he would be more loyal to the present job than to the last and the next. Instead of arguing that issue in public, though, the Dems went on a smear campaign. It seems that Tower likes booze and women. (Andy Rooney on 60 minutes did a hilarious skit with a nominee being grilled about "liking women". There are two answers, yes or no, and either one will get you into trouble...) So we had Senators who never appear in public before 11 am asking whether Tower's partying could lead to trouble, for instance if war broke out while he was drunk. (The Sec'y of Defense is NOT in the line of command, and basically oversees procurement and related issues, not military decisions. The President confers with the top generals and admirals, then makes the decisions. And we'd just got through eight years with a senile President, and no problems.)
Without the proprietary formats, all of Microsoft's office software features could be cloned by any midsize software company within 24 months. Except the bugs. They'd have to create their own bugs. 8-)
Seriously, I doubt that any company could put _all_ the alleged features into one program and have it work right. (This includes Microsoft, which demonstrably can't make bloated programs work right.) But I'm pretty sure at least 80% of the users would be quite satisfied with less than 20% of the features, in an non-bloated, reliable program. And you provide hooks so others can write add-ins for the features a few people just have to have. (Open source is a good way to avoid misunderstandings about the interface...)
One argument against the whole Bill of Rights initially was that it was redundant -- people had rights, and the original Constitution protected them (against Federal power only) by quite clearly stating that the Federal gov't could only do certain things in certain ways -- the 10th amendment merely says this again. However, as things have worked out, the damned lawyers in Congress and the courts have shown such ingenuity in stretching the original limited powers, that the explicit statements of things the gov't can't do seem to be insufficient protection also...
#9 just recognizes that the writer's imagination was finite, and that they couldn't provide specific prohibitions against all possible invasions of freedom, just the ones the gov'ts they were familiar with often committed.
Which is the weakness in #2: I think it would have been quite a lot stronger if their newspapers reported, for instance, that the British gov't took farmers' guns away, failed to provide adequate police protection to prevent multiple burglaries of the same rural home, and then locked up an old man for 10 to 20 for shooting a burglar with an illegal gun. It would have stated a right to defend yourself and your property, and to keep the weapons necessary for that. But in the 1880's, no gov't had yet had the nerve to tell it's honest citizens or subjects that they couldn't defend themselves, although some had tried to restrict weaponry so that the gov't itself didn't have to worry about p-o-ed citizens.
To any 18th century liberal, the right to self-defense was so obvious as to be overlooked. On the other side, Hobbes denied every other right in Leviathan, but did explicitly recognize the right to self defense. (Then again, I've always wondered if Hobbes real purpose might have been to state the arguments of absolute monarchy so plainly and baldly as to be ridiculous to everyone except the king's censors.)
The 12th amendment isn't so bad if you break it into parts, but unfortunately the writers didn't. The really badly written one is the 14th -- just try to figure out what the "rights and privileges" guaranteed by it are. No wonder that nearly every new set of Supreme Court justices promulgates a different interpretation.
I've also seen plenty of cases where it turned out later that bug _really_ had to be fixed. If you can't find the previous records, you wind up duplicating several days, possibly even weeks, of work tracking it down...
I quite often have to refer back to projects that were closed out a few years ago. E.g., a few months ago I had a customer saying something like, problems have popped up with this latching SMT relay, costing around $100K in replacement boards and service calls -- why did I ever pick it? I go back to look things up and find a pretty clear trail of checking every SMT relay on the market -- this was the only latching relay available in 1998 that actually withstands SMT process temperatures, although just barely -- the circuit didn't seem entirely trustworthy, so why don't we go to this alternate circuit, that also costs less? -- and the customer turned that change down...
In other words, given the customer's determination to implement a circuit designed in the early 1960's in surface-mount parts, that was the best part available, and probably still is. It wasn't good enough, but they wouldn't let me re-design to avoid it, and I've got their e-mails to prove it. We cranked out my more reliable design based around a 74HC 74 IC real fast, and they ate the cost.
Without e-mails, I barely remembered this particular case out of several others, and the actual decision makers at both companies were gone...
Run your business honestly, and keep the docs forever to prove it!
I'll second LMCBoy's post -- saying there's even a controversy over it gives the Jasker much more credibility than any reputable scientist would accord it at this point.
Besides that, the reporting of the demo is way out there. Three 100 watt bulbs is 4.5KW? If you can't run a calculator yourself, ask any engineer, physicist, electronic technician, or high school science teacher. And for all the reporter knew, there was a motor-generator unit chugging away inside that box, although if it was quiet I would bet instead on a battery and a lot of empty space, or hidden power cord.
I could have duplicated those results with one car battery and an inverter -- much smaller than the "dishwasher" sized machine described. What is required to prove this claim is quite simple:
1. Bring the machine in, weigh it, and set it up in someone else's space -- so it can be verified that there are no hidden cables or fuel lines.
2. Run a measured load for long enough that the energy output totals more than the energy in the same weight of hydrogen, so it definitely isn't chemical energy or another known form of stored energy.
Of course, to do #2 you have to be capable of arithmetic. Three 100 watt lightbulbs is 300W, a lot less than the 4.5KW claimed. Possibly he meant 4.5KWHr and the reporters screwed it up, but that would require 300W * 15 hours. Possibly he meant that its maximum capacity is 4.5KW (which is barely enough to run a house, as claimed), but that certainly wasn't demoed. And if it did run his house for a year, I'm 99.99% sure he was pouring more fuel into the tank at least once a day!
Basically, other than anecdotal amateur sociology, the support is that the murder rate has sometimes shown considerably different trends than the other violent crimes; in the 80's murder generally went down while "violent crimes" went up, and if you exclude crack dealers you can probably take that trend back to at at least 1970.
It would be more accurate to say "homicide" rather than "murder" -- I think justified self-defense killing and manslaughter get counted too.
It would be good to look at armed robbery too, but I haven't seen that listed separately. Even Sgt Rock would have complained if he finally returned from killing Nazis and someone took his wallet at gunpoint... (What doesn't get reported is _attempted_ robbery. That's from personal experience.) There are some neighborhoods where people don't expect the cops to do much and might not take the trouble to report it, probably more of them now than in 1950, but I doubt there is enough of an effect there to obscure a trend as strong as the homicide rate.
First off, crime statistics correlate better to the age of the population than to anything else. Most people over 30 have enough self control to not commit serious crimes -- or else they've gotten themselves locked up for long sentences. Most children under about 16 lack the capacity to do serious crimes on their own, (although in the more sociopathic street gangs, young men eligible to be tried as adults will recruit little kids to do the crimes). So males between 16 and 30 are responsible for most crime, and 1950 to 1965 was a relatively low-crime era, because as an aftereffect of the Great Depression and WWII there were few men in that age bracket. 1965-1980 was bound to be a high crime era because of too many teenagers and 20-somethings.
Second, "violent crime" includes everything from murder to assault and battery -- with assault and battery being about 90% of the cases. So the reported rate of "violent crime" probably depends more on how likely the loser of a fist fight is to call the cops than on the actual rate of violence. I suspect WWII vets were unlikely to consider anything that didn't involve loss of body parts, consciousness, or over a pint of blood as serious enough to report, but now a good many men would press charges for a single punch in the snout. In 1960, women were extremely unlikely to call the cops because their husband hit them -- and if the neighbors called before an ambulance was needed, the cops were more likely to tell the guy to keep the noise down than to arrest him. Now women get a lot of encouragement to report any violence at all, and in many states the cops are required by law to follow up on any suspicion of domestic violence. Likewise, rape is much more likely to be reported now. So for everything but murder and possibly armed robbery, the only clear long term trend is that more incidents are reported as crimes.
The most accurate statistics we have are for murder; now and then someone manages to make a murder look like accident or natural death, or to hide a body so it's never found, but these cases have never been more than 10% of the whole. The biggest known inaccuracy is that around 20% of murder cases in local police files aren't reported to the FBI's statistics office. There is no reason to think this ratio has changed much over the years. Murder rates peaked about 1980 and went down nearly every year since. They aren't as low as 1950, but we've got a lot higher percentage of the demographic groups more likely to commit murders.
More significantly, in most demographic groups, the murder rate declined steadily since 1970. I've seen this charted a lot of ways (men vs women, suburbs vs cities, by color, by income, and by age), and whichever way it's figured, the groups that don't include poor urban blacks under 30 or men under 30 have been murdering less since about 1970. In the 1990's, even poor young black men became less murderous.
Off-topic: Geez is it that easy to be moderated "insightful"? I was just making a little joke, based on the anti-pool hall spiel at the beginning of The Music Man.
I imagine you think it's not government's job to tell teenagers that gang violence is not a natural part of life...it's the parents' job, and if they don't get it done, too bad!
If the parents haven't raised the kids right, there is damned little chance anyone else will be able to reach them -- and gov't bureaucrats are the least effective of all. In fact, they are probably a big part of the problem.
Movie theaters were probably thought to be similar breeding grounds for dissoluteness back in the 1920s when the problem was really that the parents didn't care enough about what their children were doing. And pool halls! 8-)
To be honest when all of the News corporations congeal into one entity, my money is on the name "Ministry of Truth."
Ouch!! And all history will be kept on-line, to be rewritten as needed.
I am not 100% sure about who was giving it away first, but I was running a free Netscape browser (and almost good enough to be worth 1 cent) in 1993 or 4, before I ever heard of a microsoft browser.
I used to think that when the judge finally called up Microsoft to announce the final decision breaking them up, they'd answer the phone "Microsoft-AOL-TimeWarner-Disney-RCA-CBS-Fox-GE-GM -Boeing-UnitedStatesofAmerica..."
Normally, a company to company lawsuit over unfair competition will ask for damages due to lost sales. Just what are those damages when the price was $0.00?
I forgot the "on the other hand." There used to be houses priced within reach of a minimum wage worker who was sufficiently frugal with other spending. I actually could have bought a house for $5,000 in 1979, if I'd needed to save money badly enough to do all the work it needed. I think that's $15-20,000 in 2002 dollars; a vacant lot goes for far more than that now in a good many counties.
Now, it seems like any housing at all is priced pretty much out of the reach of minimum wage, unless they are assisted by the welfare department. This is bad not just because it effectively raises the real price of unskilled labor (much of it shifted to others by taxes), but because regardless of the ostensible policies set by legislatures, the welfare department's actions tend to maximize the number of clients so their bureaucracy has to grow too...
And of course, Ricardo expected the less foresightful of the unskilled workers to starve to death, along with their presumably genetically inferior children. We don't let that happen anymore. And we no longer enforce significant societal penalties against those that breed without regard to how the children will be supported and reared. (I know of a man that is in arrears for child support on four or five different children by as many women, mostly not from marriage. How many more children weren't tracked to him? The courts can enter all sorts of judgements for non-support, but there is no money or assets to sieze, they don't sterilize him or keep him in jail forever, and as soon as he's out he's finding a new girlfriend to support him.)
Or a couple of pounds of rice, peas, mushrooms in sauce, tuna or meat, boil it up in a big pot, it will feed a dozen. I haven't priced all the ingredients in a couple of decades, but in 1978 it was under $5; it's probably still under $10 and tastes pretty good. If you know how to buy it and cook it, food in 21st century america is as cheap as it's ever been since manna stopped raining from heaven. But cooking takes planning, work, and a little knowledge, 3 things that seem to be lacking in the people that actually _need_ to keep costs down. Back when I was working at minimum + $0.50, my wife had a friend whose kids would get hungry at the end of every month -- their foodstamps gave them a bigger grocery budget per person than us, but they bought TV dinners and soda pop...
And cigarettes, of course. I've seen people get the heat turned off in mid-winter, who are burning up more than the heat bill every month in cigarettes. If you _really_ want to get the welfare cases back to work, find a way to cut off their tobacco.
As for subsistence living... My first year in the Air Force, 4 people living on E2 pay, was probably way below the poverty line but it wasn't subsistence living the way we handled it. Closer: when I was five in 1958, 4 people in married student housing at Arizona State, Flagstaff, a two room stone cottage and living primarily off Dad's GI bill and 10% disability. (There was some damage to his lungs in the Army -- he gets sick _every_ time he tries mountain climbing.) Real subsistence living: Dad learned to sneak up on rabbits and woodchucks with a rock to put meat on the table, as a kid in the Ozarks in the 30's. But I doubt that corner of the world is much different when the economy is booming, either...
And not everyone was suffering that badly in the 30's. Mom's grandparents had to lay off most of the servants...
AFAIK, the major force moving people out of Lord Fotheringay's farms was most likely Lord Fotheringay. The industrial revolution began with textile equipment, and one immediate result was that raising sheep for wool often became much more profitable than parceling your land out to sharecroppers to farm. That took something like 1/10 to 1/100th the labor force, and the rest had to go. They could emigrate to America (if they could buy a ticket), or move to the new industrial cities and work in the wool mills, find other jobs, or starve -- Lord Fotheringay didn't worry which, unless they turned to thievery, then it was Australia or hanging...
There is a second point to Katz's diatribes -- that people are separating themselves into different communities and not talking to each other. E.g., "conservatives" watch Russ Limbaugh, and set their filters to exclude anything liberal, "liberals" watch only liberal commentators and set their filters... The danger is, if those filters ever get reasonably effective, people may separate into groups that no longer even comprehend the other groups positions.
What sets me to giggling is that every few years someone new notices this process for the first time and gets all worried. Really folks, it was pretty much the same in the 80's, the 70's, and the 60's. (It's probably been like that right back to 1776, but my awareness of such things goes back only to 1964. Although I do vaguely remember a Goldwater rally that must have been pre-1960...) The liberals read their magazines, and the conservatives read theirs, and rarely did the twain meet.
If the blogger is that bad, why is anyone reading it?
For a decent blog/heavily moderated discussion group, check out www.jerrypournelle.com