I have done 10 to 15 hours straight on a project, and been wiped after that, but the most interesting time I was working with two other guys to redesign/redo a program in Smalltalk. We were essentially doing triples programming and we found that 6 hours was just about all we could handle. 3 hours in the morning, lunch, 3 hours in the afternoon and then we were basically wiped. After that we could do email or other unrelated things, but not programming.
The level of concentration in that effort was as high as I've achieved -- we were in the unusual position of basically knowing everything we needed to know, so we didn't need to spend time investigating this API or that library or what the requirements were -- we could focus on exploring the design space, implementing and testing.
"It is well-known in our community that there is no scientific, firm way of actually completely verifying and validating software."
How wrong can you be? Yes there is. Software is fundamentally the composition of many mathematical functions. Its results can be formally proven if the hardware it is running on is assumed (or preferably also proven) to be error free. Don't get me wrong, it would be incredibly cost, labor and time expensive, and require real computer scientists, but it is certainly possible.
NOT! -- or rather, SO WHAT?
Let's, for the moment, assume you have a combined hardware and software system that have both been mathematically proved correct. Presume the proof was completed at Noon on 1 Jan, 2010. The particular hardware and software so proved is then installed in a vehicle and driven for 50,000 km throughout the USA -- through rain, snow, desert heat, etc -- and is involved in several minor impacts (backed into a tree, jumped a curb)... In that process salted water is splashed throughout the engine compartment, one dog got carsick, a kid dropped a coke and it splashed under the seat, Dad dropped a cup of coffee under the same seat, the windows were accidentally left open during a rainstorm, a total of 10,000 km was driven with a smoker in the car, and the car was taken to the "detailer" 5 times, where they sprayed various cleansers on the vinyl surfaces (and into the air), etc.
A lot of those events can have impacted the hardware that was proved correct before Noon on 1 Jan, 2010. Corrosives in the air, moisture, dust, yukky liquids, etc.
Is that proof relevant to the system at the end of that period?
Fact is, the real world may be modeled by a mathematical system, but it is, itself, not a mathematical system. The mathematical system may be incapable of failure, but the physical system still may fail.
To me it seems bizarre that in 2010 we are using electronic document preparation software -- MS Word, for instance -- to prepare a document. We then [print it,] fax it, [scan it,] and feed it to optical character recognition software in order to get it back into some semblance of the original, probably with a few extra errors caused by the low fidelity of faxes.
Is it really not possible to use email for document transmission?
I agree -- thinking about it, I realized it's probably a problem with almost any control system. Essentially tweaking the speed button is generating an error signal which the system tries to zero, but there's a delay involved (takes time to accelerate). If you keep increasing the error signal, it will keep trying to match. If the error signal gets large enough, the system will downshift and try to accelerate faster. At that point, it's almost certain to overshoot what you requested (and that's probably much more than what you intended) before the system can recover.
It would probably make sense to modify such systems to set a high speed limit -- and also to sense the brakes -- if the brakes come on, shut the throttle.
I'm pretty sure that not buying a product is a strong and clear signal to a corporation that their product sucks. If the corporation is smart, it will listen to the signal and try something else.
No signal is significant if it cannot be distinguished from the background noise. What signal do you suppose Macdonald's sees in the fact that I didn't buy a BigMac yesterday?
There's a basic problem in trying to interpret the lack of something as a strong signal. Last week noone, anywhere in the world, bought an iPad. You can't get a much stronger signal than that, if not buying an iPad is a signal. Of course, I could be wrong, perhaps that's why Apple announced one yesterday?
Do you suppose "They" don't like something we're doing, because, even though SETI has been looking for years, no alien has contacted them? How strong a signal is that?
You buy it to participate in a cultural phenomenon and interesting concept.
/quote>
I agree -- it's particularly interesting in light of the usual artists' plight of only getting a share when it sells at the lowest price (assuming, of course, that the value is monotonically non-decreasing).
I suppose it's a strange variation on performance art -- community performance art. Or perhaps it's a variation on installation art -- with lots of individual installations...
That is, when you buy it, are you performing or installing the artwork?
Professional service is not suitable for short-term volunteering - better dig a ditch or something simple like that.
Unfortunately, that's probably right. Except in unusual circumstances, the organization / person looking for a professional volunteer doesn't understand the problem they're trying to solve, and it will take you more than a week to figure that out yourself.
If you stay long enough to figure it out it may well turn out not to be in your area of expertise.
I know -- why don't we all go to travelocity and check on flights to Pakistan, and then start encrypting all our email?
Or maybe someone could develop a web page that will set us up for encrypted email, and check for flights to Pakistan behind the scenes the first time, first...
Then we might have an interesting test of the security of encryption...
I agree. Many of the questions and answers surrounding "which math course" seem to be thinking about the question wrong.
In 35 years of programming I probably never used Calculus directly in developing a program or wrote a program to solve a problem that required calculus. Would I argue against including Calculus in a Comp. Sci. curriculum then? Absolutely NOT.
When I look at what I do every day as a software designer / developer and I ask where did I learn to do that, the answer is often "in Calculus class". Why? "Limits"! -- not Limits themselves, but I think the concept of Limits as used in calc was the first real abstraction I had to grapple with.
If you ask me what High School class was most useful in preparing to be a programmer, I'd say "Geometry". Why? Proofs!
When did you ever need to know some factoid you picked up in a history class? Should you not take history?
The important aspect of most classes is NOT the facts or fomulae you might learn, but the ways of thinking you learn.
Geometry / Proofs in general teach you logical thinking and step by step progression. Constructing a proof and constructing a program are quite similar. That should make it clear that is important that you actually do the proofs, not just read someone else's proof -- you won't learn to program by reading about someone else writing a program.
I agree with the "take 'em both" school of thought -- not only are the thinking processes different, but the concepts in both subjects are also useful to you.
I'm a big fan of automata theory and formal languages, too. You'd be surprised how often you can set out to solve the Halting Problem without recognizing it -- and if you don't know what it is and why it's not worth trying to solve... It's also useful to know the limitations of regular expressions and how to write problem oriented languages that are easy to parse...
But the most important aspect of both courses is how they stretch your mind if you can get your head around the proofs. You learn to spot weaknesses / holes in proofs and it's amazing what sorts of problems you can spot in requirements. And debugging proofs is good practice for debugging programs.
I don't know about the ETF, but I found that the $1.99/MB was charged when I turned on my new phone and pushed the button looking for the tool menu. I reprogrammed the buttons to avoid that, but it was clear that accidentally turning on the "standard" service was going to cost me $2 each time. It's obviously "$1.99 per (MB or fraction thereof)" and that includes the splash screen, without a data plan.
One only needs to look at what was done in Hypercard to see that this will actually be useful to many people, especially with modern hardware underneath it.
It will be used for inappropriately complex systems, of course, but so it goes. Many people will find it's wonderful for the problem they want to solve, for which they'd never hire a "real" programmer.
When I was designing a scripting language for testing wireless protocols I modeled parts of it on Hypertalk -- I allowed programmers to use either message[id] or 'id of message', for instance. It wasn't particularly fast, compared to what one could do in C, but it was certainly more usable by someone who understood the domain but wasn't a programmer.
The testers found it very useful. The people writing the protocols weren't interested in using it to produce realtime efficient implementations, but nobody expected it to be used that way. I was surprised to find some testers, who were also programmers, using it to write load generating tests, though.
Very few people need to extract every bit of efficiency out of a dual core CPU in order to manage their model railroad and train collection, or their knitting pattern collection, but the relatively inexpensive computer they might buy will certainly have such a CPU in the near future. Such a machine will run such an application very satisfactorily, and they'll be able to make it do just what they want.
Go find a copy of Danny Goodman's Hypercard Handbook and see how well it explained how to use the language. People did great things with it -- but they weren't interested in writing operating systems.
Given it's purpose, to be the glue that fastens functionality to web pages, it should be called "Goo"...
Of course, the makers of ShoeGoo may think people will be confused, and those who clean their hands with Goop may also have some difficulty being clear, if it should stick to their fingers...
Anyway you slice it, human demand for energy is only going to increase. We all know that.
I wonder if the ant feels that way when a boy finds how to use magnifying glass to increase the energy available to it...
I suspect the human energy needs (on earth) will peak and decline within the next century or so, because the human population will. I suspect we'll also learn we need to focus on sustainability of the planetary system -- looks like we're beginning to see that need WRT the ocean fish stocks, for instance...
How much of that energy would have reached Earth anyway, albeit in a less concentrated form?
It's an interesting question -- might be fun to try to calculate orbital parameters both to maximize (sunshade) and to minimize it -- can you make an orbit precess so it is always in the plane that contains the day/night boundary?
Otherwise, worst case would be if you put the collector in L4 or L5 so it's in solar orbit, rather than earth orbit, I guess.
When I think about beaming energy from space to ground, I wonder about the impact on global warming...
The process basically increases the solar energy reaching the surface to be dissipated (eventually) into the atmosphere. Thus it's a positive direct contribution to global warming. What offsets that? If it reduces greenhouse gas generation sufficiently I can see it might reduce the warming, but I never see that issue discussed.
A compiler translates source language to target language (usually executable machine code) and stops there. It does not execute the code.
An interpreter translates source language to target language (usually machine code), and executes it.
...
If the federal law requires there be no interpretation, all code has to be compiled before the election to comply. That is clearly not the case with T-SQL exec statements running dynamically constructed statements.
Unfortunately, the hardware is an interpreter for "machine code". Thus, any code that actually accomplishes anything is illegal, as it is interpreted code.
One thing about being part of the "Axis of Evil" is that it tends to make one feel insecure. Sometimes other countries threaten to invade and/or talk about bombing back to the stone age... and then one notices that they don't talk that way about countries with nukes...
We had a summer student who was asked to write a hex dump (actually octal dump, but those were ancient times) analyser for some data structures we used.
When they brought it to me to test, the first thing I did was cat(1) a binary file at it... It crashed immediately, of course. You should have seen the shocked look on the student's face!
The next time it came for testing, it was quite stable and at least said "invalid input" on such an occasion.
I always employ the 'Shut the fuck up' protocol. Unfortunately for my testing team it is usually me who is shouting it . ..
Right. I work(ed) as a software tools developer in a group of such people. Most of our users were other technical people, a high percentage with MS in CS.
They needed to know how to use many Unix tools, plus the domain knowledge for whatever project they were working on.
Unfortunately, each tool developer had their own idea about what was an "intuitive" user interface, thus our users needed to learn them all...
When a "Brain dead User"(tm) tried to explain why they had difficulty using the tool for whatever their job was, they'd say something like "But then I need to do XXXX, and the tool won't do that" -- And the developer would say, "Sure it does, you just need to do YYYYY". As a BDU for some tools myself, I got really tired of that answer. Imagine a mechanical tool -- that response would be something like "Sure it can, you just need to stand on one leg and hold it behind your back with your other hand" (Geee, why didn't I think of that?).
Eventually I realized this was another place where "The Customer is Always RIght" applies, except many of us don't understand the proper meaning of that phrase: If the customer has a problem, you have a problem to solve, even if they don't properly describe it. It may be a matter of educating the customer, but it may be better to educate yourself -- how do they think it should work?
I don't know about where you work, but where I worked, it was hard to learn everything I needed to know about the product domain -- needing also to learn a couple of dozen idiosyncratic user interfaces was just extra work. The result was that even if I finally realized what the perfect tool was and made it, I couldn't get people who were already in overload to take the time to learn to use it. Then I started trying to understand what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it, and then made something they didn't need to learn to use, it just worked the way they did, and did more than they expected.
Of course the next step for the company was retirement incentives for the experienced employees with layoffs to follow.
I've been watching for something like this since the New Yorker carried a series about hybrid airships when I was in grad school. Seems it was finally published as a book (1973): The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
I guess it says something about the time it takes for new technology to get off the ground, so to speak.
Everyone thinks of the Hindenburg, but as the New Yorker article pointed out, there weren't many passenger aircraft in those days, and this was the first such crash caught on video, so it had a huge impact. These days, we have 10 times as many lost in a passenger jet crash and even if on video it has much less impact on the public at large.
Sounds reasonable -- but can't the same argument be made for the amount of CO2 added by the next coal fired power plant compared to the total CO2 in the atmosphere? In fact, isn't that the basic argument made by those who insist it's all due to weathering?
When I heard of this idea some time ago I wondered: Right now we have a "Global Warming" problem -- X amount of incident energy from the sun being absorbed and Y being radiated from the planet. Due to the "greenhouse gasses" the earth is getting warmer and we see it as a problem
I know! Let's attack the problem by increasing X! Why settle for only the energy that comes directly to Earth from the Sun? Why don't we add some mirrors in space, and beam some more down?
Slashdot Mirror
How about they patent it? Then they can charge you for using it!
Luckily it takes years for patents to be awarded...
I have done 10 to 15 hours straight on a project, and been wiped after that, but the most interesting time I was working with two other guys to redesign/redo a program in Smalltalk. We were essentially doing triples programming and we found that 6 hours was just about all we could handle. 3 hours in the morning, lunch, 3 hours in the afternoon and then we were basically wiped. After that we could do email or other unrelated things, but not programming.
The level of concentration in that effort was as high as I've achieved -- we were in the unusual position of basically knowing everything we needed to know, so we didn't need to spend time investigating this API or that library or what the requirements were -- we could focus on exploring the design space, implementing and testing.
It was exhilarating but exhausting.
"It is well-known in our community that there is no scientific, firm way of actually completely verifying and validating software."
How wrong can you be? Yes there is. Software is fundamentally the composition of many mathematical functions. Its results can be formally proven if the hardware it is running on is assumed (or preferably also proven) to be error free. Don't get me wrong, it would be incredibly cost, labor and time expensive, and require real computer scientists, but it is certainly possible.
NOT! -- or rather, SO WHAT?
Let's, for the moment, assume you have a combined hardware and software system that have both been mathematically proved correct. Presume the proof was completed at Noon on 1 Jan, 2010. The particular hardware and software so proved is then installed in a vehicle and driven for 50,000 km throughout the USA -- through rain, snow, desert heat, etc -- and is involved in several minor impacts (backed into a tree, jumped a curb)...
In that process salted water is splashed throughout the engine compartment, one dog got carsick, a kid dropped a coke and it splashed under the seat, Dad dropped a cup of coffee under the same seat, the windows were accidentally left open during a rainstorm, a total of 10,000 km was driven with a smoker in the car, and the car was taken to the "detailer" 5 times, where they sprayed various cleansers on the vinyl surfaces (and into the air), etc.
A lot of those events can have impacted the hardware that was proved correct before Noon on 1 Jan, 2010. Corrosives in the air, moisture, dust, yukky liquids, etc.
Is that proof relevant to the system at the end of that period?
Fact is, the real world may be modeled by a mathematical system, but it is, itself, not a mathematical system. The mathematical system may be incapable of failure, but the physical system still may fail.
To me it seems bizarre that in 2010 we are using electronic document preparation software -- MS Word, for instance -- to prepare a document. We then [print it,] fax it, [scan it,] and feed it to optical character recognition software in order to get it back into some semblance of the original, probably with a few extra errors caused by the low fidelity of faxes.
Is it really not possible to use email for document transmission?
I agree -- thinking about it, I realized it's probably a problem with almost any control system. Essentially tweaking the speed button is generating an error signal which the system tries to zero, but there's a delay involved (takes time to accelerate). If you keep increasing the error signal, it will keep trying to match. If the error signal gets large enough, the system will downshift and try to accelerate faster. At that point, it's almost certain to overshoot what you requested (and that's probably much more than what you intended) before the system can recover.
It would probably make sense to modify such systems to set a high speed limit -- and also to sense the brakes -- if the brakes come on, shut the throttle.
I'm pretty sure that not buying a product is a strong and clear signal to a corporation that their product sucks. If the corporation is smart, it will listen to the signal and try something else.
No signal is significant if it cannot be distinguished from the background noise. What signal do you suppose Macdonald's sees in the fact that I didn't buy a BigMac yesterday?
There's a basic problem in trying to interpret the lack of something as a strong signal. Last week noone, anywhere in the world, bought an iPad. You can't get a much stronger signal than that, if not buying an iPad is a signal. Of course, I could be wrong, perhaps that's why Apple announced one yesterday?
Do you suppose "They" don't like something we're doing, because, even though SETI has been looking for years, no alien has contacted them? How strong a signal is that?
You buy it to participate in a cultural phenomenon and interesting concept.
/quote>
I agree -- it's particularly interesting in light of the usual artists' plight of only getting a share when it sells at the lowest price (assuming, of course, that the value is monotonically non-decreasing).
I suppose it's a strange variation on performance art -- community performance art. Or perhaps it's a variation on installation art -- with lots of individual installations...
That is, when you buy it, are you performing or installing the artwork?
Professional service is not suitable for short-term volunteering - better dig a ditch or something simple like that.
Unfortunately, that's probably right. Except in unusual circumstances, the organization / person looking for a professional volunteer doesn't understand the problem they're trying to solve, and it will take you more than a week to figure that out yourself.
If you stay long enough to figure it out it may well turn out not to be in your area of expertise.
I know -- why don't we all go to travelocity and check on flights to Pakistan, and then start encrypting all our email?
Or maybe someone could develop a web page that will set us up for encrypted email, and check for flights to Pakistan behind the scenes the first time, first...
Then we might have an interesting test of the security of encryption...
That's cool. I wouldn't want to work for a company that judged me by my email address.
Above all, don't think it has any connection to this story from last week.
I agree. Many of the questions and answers surrounding "which math course" seem to be thinking about the question wrong.
In 35 years of programming I probably never used Calculus directly in developing a program or wrote a program to solve a problem that required calculus. Would I argue against including Calculus in a Comp. Sci. curriculum then? Absolutely NOT.
When I look at what I do every day as a software designer / developer and I ask where did I learn to do that, the answer is often "in Calculus class". Why? "Limits"! -- not Limits themselves, but I think the concept of Limits as used in calc was the first real abstraction I had to grapple with.
If you ask me what High School class was most useful in preparing to be a programmer, I'd say "Geometry". Why? Proofs!
When did you ever need to know some factoid you picked up in a history class? Should you not take history?
The important aspect of most classes is NOT the facts or fomulae you might learn, but the ways of thinking you learn.
Geometry / Proofs in general teach you logical thinking and step by step progression. Constructing a proof and constructing a program are quite similar. That should make it clear that is important that you actually do the proofs, not just read someone else's proof -- you won't learn to program by reading about someone else writing a program.
I agree with the "take 'em both" school of thought -- not only are the thinking processes different, but the concepts in both subjects are also useful to you.
I'm a big fan of automata theory and formal languages, too. You'd be surprised how often you can set out to solve the Halting Problem without recognizing it -- and if you don't know what it is and why it's not worth trying to solve ... It's also useful to know the limitations of regular expressions and how to write problem oriented languages that are easy to parse...
But the most important aspect of both courses is how they stretch your mind if you can get your head around the proofs. You learn to spot weaknesses / holes in proofs and it's amazing what sorts of problems you can spot in requirements. And debugging proofs is good practice for debugging programs.
I don't know about the ETF, but I found that the $1.99/MB was charged when I turned on my new phone and pushed the button looking for the tool menu. I reprogrammed the buttons to avoid that, but it was clear that accidentally turning on the "standard" service was going to cost me $2 each time. It's obviously "$1.99 per (MB or fraction thereof)" and that includes the splash screen, without a data plan.
Precisely!
One only needs to look at what was done in Hypercard to see that this will actually be useful to many people, especially with modern hardware underneath it.
It will be used for inappropriately complex systems, of course, but so it goes. Many people will find it's wonderful for the problem they want to solve, for which they'd never hire a "real" programmer.
When I was designing a scripting language for testing wireless protocols I modeled parts of it on Hypertalk -- I allowed programmers to use either message[id] or 'id of message', for instance. It wasn't particularly fast, compared to what one could do in C, but it was certainly more usable by someone who understood the domain but wasn't a programmer.
The testers found it very useful. The people writing the protocols weren't interested in using it to produce realtime efficient implementations, but nobody expected it to be used that way. I was surprised to find some testers, who were also programmers, using it to write load generating tests, though.
Very few people need to extract every bit of efficiency out of a dual core CPU in order to manage their model railroad and train collection, or their knitting pattern collection, but the relatively inexpensive computer they might buy will certainly have such a CPU in the near future. Such a machine will run such an application very satisfactorily, and they'll be able to make it do just what they want.
Go find a copy of Danny Goodman's Hypercard Handbook and see how well it explained how to use the language. People did great things with it -- but they weren't interested in writing operating systems.
joe
Given it's purpose, to be the glue that fastens functionality to web pages, it should be called "Goo"...
Of course, the makers of ShoeGoo may think people will be confused, and those who clean their hands with Goop may also have some difficulty being clear, if it should stick to their fingers...
joe
Anyway you slice it, human demand for energy is only going to increase. We all know that.
I wonder if the ant feels that way when a boy finds how to use magnifying glass to increase the energy available to it...
I suspect the human energy needs (on earth) will peak and decline within the next century or so, because the human population will. I suspect we'll also learn we need to focus on sustainability of the planetary system -- looks like we're beginning to see that need WRT the ocean fish stocks, for instance ...
joe
How much of that energy would have reached Earth anyway, albeit in a less concentrated form?
It's an interesting question -- might be fun to try to calculate orbital parameters both to maximize (sunshade) and to minimize it -- can you make an orbit precess so it is always in the plane that contains the day/night boundary?
Otherwise, worst case would be if you put the collector in L4 or L5 so it's in solar orbit, rather than earth orbit, I guess.
joe
When I think about beaming energy from space to ground, I wonder about the impact on global warming...
The process basically increases the solar energy reaching the surface to be dissipated (eventually) into the atmosphere. Thus it's a positive direct contribution to global warming. What offsets that? If it reduces greenhouse gas generation sufficiently I can see it might reduce the warming, but I never see that issue discussed.
Joe
A compiler translates source language to target language (usually executable machine code) and stops there. It does not execute the code.
An interpreter translates source language to target language (usually machine code), and executes it.
If the federal law requires there be no interpretation, all code has to be compiled before the election to comply. That is clearly not the case with T-SQL exec statements running dynamically constructed statements.
Unfortunately, the hardware is an interpreter for "machine code". Thus, any code that actually accomplishes anything is illegal, as it is interpreted code.
Not to be pedantic, or anything...
One thing about being part of the "Axis of Evil" is that it tends to make one feel insecure. Sometimes other countries threaten to invade and/or talk about bombing back to the stone age... and then one notices that they don't talk that way about countries with nukes...
just sayin..
Yes. And evil testing can be fun!
We had a summer student who was asked to write a hex dump (actually octal dump, but those were ancient times) analyser for some data structures we used.
When they brought it to me to test, the first thing I did was cat(1) a binary file at it... It crashed immediately, of course. You should have seen the shocked look on the student's face!
The next time it came for testing, it was quite stable and at least said "invalid input" on such an occasion.
joe
I always employ the 'Shut the fuck up' protocol. Unfortunately for my testing team it is usually me who is shouting it . . .
Right. I work(ed) as a software tools developer in a group of such people. Most of our users were other technical people, a high percentage with MS in CS.
They needed to know how to use many Unix tools, plus the domain knowledge for whatever project they were working on.
Unfortunately, each tool developer had their own idea about what was an "intuitive" user interface, thus our users needed to learn them all...
When a "Brain dead User"(tm) tried to explain why they had difficulty using the tool for whatever their job was, they'd say something like "But then I need to do XXXX, and the tool won't do that" -- And the developer would say, "Sure it does, you just need to do YYYYY". As a BDU for some tools myself, I got really tired of that answer. Imagine a mechanical tool -- that response would be something like "Sure it can, you just need to stand on one leg and hold it behind your back with your other hand" (Geee, why didn't I think of that?).
Eventually I realized this was another place where "The Customer is Always RIght" applies, except many of us don't understand the proper meaning of that phrase: If the customer has a problem, you have a problem to solve, even if they don't properly describe it. It may be a matter of educating the customer, but it may be better to educate yourself -- how do they think it should work?
I don't know about where you work, but where I worked, it was hard to learn everything I needed to know about the product domain -- needing also to learn a couple of dozen idiosyncratic user interfaces was just extra work. The result was that even if I finally realized what the perfect tool was and made it, I couldn't get people who were already in overload to take the time to learn to use it. Then I started trying to understand what they wanted to do and how they wanted to do it, and then made something they didn't need to learn to use, it just worked the way they did, and did more than they expected.
Of course the next step for the company was retirement incentives for the experienced employees with layoffs to follow.
I've been watching for something like this since the New Yorker carried a series about hybrid airships when I was in grad school. Seems it was finally published as a book (1973): The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed
I guess it says something about the time it takes for new technology to get off the ground, so to speak.
Everyone thinks of the Hindenburg, but as the New Yorker article pointed out, there weren't many passenger aircraft in those days, and this was the first such crash caught on video, so it had a huge impact. These days, we have 10 times as many lost in a passenger jet crash and even if on video it has much less impact on the public at large.
Sounds reasonable -- but can't the same argument be made for the amount of CO2 added by the next coal fired power plant compared to the total CO2 in the atmosphere? In fact, isn't that the basic argument made by those who insist it's all due to weathering?
When I heard of this idea some time ago I wondered: Right now we have a "Global Warming" problem -- X amount of incident energy from the sun being absorbed and Y being radiated from the planet. Due to the "greenhouse gasses" the earth is getting warmer and we see it as a problem
I know! Let's attack the problem by increasing X! Why settle for only the energy that comes directly to Earth from the Sun? Why don't we add some mirrors in space, and beam some more down?
How does that compute?
joe