Oh, it's reason to celebrate, because while we need a reversal, we need a reduction in the rate of increase too.
It's not heat per se that's the issue, nor is it even change per se; it's the rate of change. Ideally we keep the rate of change low enough so that ecosystem distress is not widespread. There's always going to be some ecosystems in trouble and some doing fine, but it makes a difference whether you have a lot of them collapsing or just a few.
Even if the rate of change is fast enough to produce widespread ecological stress, humans are the most adaptable animal on the planet. But even our adaptability has limits; it doesn't mean we're going to enjoy adapting. Personally as a fisherman I'm not going to be happy about wild trout and salmon stocks collapsing. Since I live in a wealthy country my government will probably stock smallmouth bass, but even a world with more smallmouth isn't the same as one with both smallmouth and salmon and wild trout. Don't get me started on hatchery trout.
And the more rapid change is the more it'll hit us in our wallets. This of course is offset by short term profits, but the costs and benefits aren't evenly distributed. If you're an investment bank you get more than your share of the benefits of carbon emissions -- in fact you make money creating the problem and then dealing with it. If you're a Bengladeshi subsistence farmer you're just screwed all around.
He was on my ship. I was a nuke. He was not, and he was not nearly smart enough to be one.
The Harper's story reminds me of something Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
The story paints a picture of a kid who appears to have little common sense or self-preservation instinct, and yet he improvised a procedure to reduce extract the thorium dioxide from lantern mantles and reduce it with lithium (from lithium batteries) to metallic thorium! And then... then he tries to reduce the radiation escaping into the neighborhood by using cobalt steel drill bits as "control rods" in his makeshift reactor... WTF?
I think his story may suggest that we underestimate how smart even not-particularly-smart people can be if they're sufficiently motivated. Maybe Or for a more extreme boost, obsessed.
There was never a single country that *invaded* Russia that didn't regret it profoundly. Russia (and the Russian dominated Soviet Union) has been successfully confronted many times.
The "obsession" with confrontation is that it's run by an authoritarian who assasinates and jails his political opponents, is killing civilians wholesale in Syria, has subverted his country's electoral process, and has ambitions of creating an empire in Europe. Not opposing people like that is also something people have historically regretted. So the smart thing is to oppose him without invading his country.
Fortunately for us Putin's run his country's economy into the ground with crony capitalism. It's too bad for the Russians but soon the economic disaster is going to curtail his international ambitions.
I'm all for being friends with Russia. I said back in '92 George H.W. Bush was making a big mistake by not extending Russia the hand of friendship. But at present there's no way to separate Russia from Putin, and Putin should be contained.
Except the TPP was definitely a bad thing for anyone who isn't the head of a huge corporation..
Oh, it'll definitely be good for the big multinationals, but the effect on other people is complicated. If you're a migrant factory worker in Malaysia (one of the worst countries to be a factory worker in) it'll prevent your employer from treating you like a slave. If you're an American it'll make some goods cheaper but medicines more expensive -- and we already pay more for the same medicines than anyone else does. If you're a patent or trade law attorney it'll be like the heavens have opened up and are raining money on you.
I actually read the chapter summaries of the entire treaty, and it most definitely IS about trade. And it is ALSO about intellectual property. AND it is about environmental protection. AND it is about workers' rights. AND it is about currency manipulation. Oh, and by the way it's about cutting China off at the knees, which is a big deal for the Obama administration. Obama's much keener on using economics to shape geopolitics than most people realize, which is why he has been furtively supportive of the Dakota Access Pipeline despite it's wild unpopularity with his base: it'll be like pouring gasoline on the Russian economic fire.
This is how the world actually works: major changes require a coalition of interests. In an international agreement, it's actually multiple coalitions, one for each country, plus mulitnational entities like corporations. Every interest in each coalition has its own goals, and when they're done hammering out a consensus it HAS to be about about a lot of things.
It's only through the lens of retail politics that something this big becomes about just one thing.
The thing is, this sucker is monster huge. It will transform all the member countries in ways that will be nearly impossible to undo without inviting chaos.
People want a leader who makes things seem simple. But reality isn't simple, and if you give them a taste of that then you're a soulless technocrat who doesn't feel their pain.
They want a politician so consummate he makes them feel like he's not a politician.
So tactical falsehood is part of the job description. However it's still possible to know where most politicians are going. I often compare this to a trial, with the voters as jury. You can't trust what the defense or prosecution says, but you can be certain of what verdict they want. There's no mystery about where someone like Paul Ryan or Bernie Sanders wants to take the country.
Trump... not so much. You can intuit a lot about a liar from his lies, because they're designed to make you believe something. Trump's statements don't rise to that level; they're designed to make his followers feel something. That's why they don't care when he contradicts himself. As the Atlantic put it, "The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."
That's how his supporters defend the indefensible; they see it as bluster. It's all just locker-room talk.
Because he doesn't consider himself bound by his prior statements, and his supporters don't hold him to them.
There are some things we know he won't do: build a border wall and make the Mexicans pay for it. There are other things we can be pretty sure he will do: lower taxes on the wealthiest people. But everything else will depend on how he feels that day.
There's a reason both liberal AND conservatives don't like him, because he's basically unprincipled. But similar conversations are going on on both sides to the effect: maybe we can exploit some of this situation to our advantage.
Well, I'd be the last person to advocate jettisoning methodologies, any more than I'd advocate jettisoning architecture, although I've seen both abused by people who make fetishes of them.
My point is that software development is multidisciplinary. You can't rely on one kind of discipline to ensure success.
No, he's from the centrist wing of the Democratic party. Which doesn't "defend" anything; it just explains where his positions come from,e.g. like on energy, which was very bullish on production including DAPL. You might not have read the news but the US became a net exporter of energy in 2016.
I think the problem is the paradigm shift from object oriented to functional. I learned to program in Scheme many, many years ago (early 80s), although I never used it professionally. When javascript came along, people looked at the bizarre object system and thought "This is dumbed down Java." I looked at it and thought, "This is kind of like Scheme."
Well, that's because Agile is not supposed to solve technical issues like architecture or data models. It's supposed to help software development efforts track changes in organizational priorities and incorporate things they learn into their plans as they learn them.
If you rely too much on any methodology it's not going to work.
I have often thought the most important quality a software developer has to have is caring about the people who will be affected by their work. If you're only interested in technology you'll find an excuse to use the latest thing. If you're a prig about methodology you'll end up going through the motions. When you care about your users you'll always find a way to not let them down.
Technically, a uranium tamper is still fissioned with fast neutron flux, so it is partly there for its nuclear properties, isn't it?
Yes, the tamper does fission a little and adds somewhat to the bomb's yield, which is why I said "mainly". I didn't want to obscure the important point, which is that that the uranium in this bomb cannot be made to explode by any means without installing the pit.
"Natural uranium" (meaning unenriched) is reasonably safe to handle; if you look up the MSDS for natural uranium metal the main hazards are ingestion and inhalation. You can handle it with disposable gloves.
It's in a sun-synchronous orbit. That means it's set up to take pictures of what is under it at a certain time of day. Also given it's high resolution it no doubt takes a very narrow picture -- like looking at the Earth through a straw. It might well take that long to image the entire surface of the Earth, especially as you have to have the weather cooperate.
While you can't trust the military to report honestly to the public on an accident, in this case there is every reason to believe this bomb is quite safe. The Mark IV bomb had a hinge on it so you can open it up and load the fissile pit into it in flight, during an actual bombing run.
During a training mission there would be no reason to have the fissile pit on the aircraft.
The uranium in this case was unenriched, and incapable of going critical. It was part of the device's "tamper" -- a kind of shield that delayed the expansion of the material in the pit during explosion, thus boosting efficiency. It was used mainly for its phsyical density, not its nuclear properties.
The mark IV bomb was designed to be transported and loaded on the aircraft without the "physics package", which contained the actual fissile material. As such this particular bomb is no more dangerous than a small conventional bomb. There is no particular reason not to use one in a training exercise.
Which is not to say there weren't some hair-raising incidents over the years. The closest we came to a real disaster was the Goldsboro incident, in which two thermonuclear weapons were ejected from a disintegrating airplane with nearly all of their safety mechanisms too damaged to operate.
I looked at an online PDF for Improvised Munitions and it's clearly a manual for insurgents, not regular military. It has recipes for a variety of improvised weapons including explosives you can make with stuff you can buy at places like pharmacies, paint stores, garden centers and so on. Some of the information is dated - carbon tetrachloride isn't a commonplace chemical anymore because it's largely been replaced by tetrachlorethane; mercury has been phased out of a lot of its most commonplace applications. But most of the recipes are still quite doable.
It has quite a long list of ingenious timer devices, improvised grenades and mines (including shaped charges), smoke grenades, switches (tripwire, altitude, weight), and detonation power sources. It shows you how to make everything you need; it even has a very nice recipe for an improvised blasting cap, including a wooden jig for packing your homebrew explosive mixture into the case.
It's really well done. I've got tons of how-to books on car maintenance, furniture making, watch repair etc. but I don't think I've ever seen a how-to book that is as comprehensive and carefully thought-out. Presuming the recipes in thisi cookbook actually work, anyone with basic maker skills and maybe two hundred bucks for supplies could use it to do some really horrific stuff.
Doubt it. Interrupting banks gets very expensive, and Russia is in the middle of a multi-year financial crisis touched off by low oil prices and economic sanctions.
That's kind of a peculiar reading of the situation. Ukraine had a treaty with Russia and Russia abrogated it by invading and annexing the Crimea. Ukraine didn't ask them to do it.
And the nose they cut off was Yanukovych -- a wildly unpopular and corrupt authoritarian who jailed political opponents, outlawed protest, censored the press and introduced laws restricting freedom of speech, and had his secret police torture people who criticized him. He enriched himself and his cronies at public expense. It's estimated he embezzled 70 billion dollars from the public treasury.
You neglected to mention that Russia, in addition in return for cheap natural gas, Russia got a lease to keep its fleet at Sevastapol. Oh, we should look carefully at that particular deal, because when that particular corrupt puppet was deposed Russia simply invaded and annexed the region.
America, in aggregate, actually chose the other candidate. But we've got this antiquated system that was designed to shore up the political power of slave holding interests and was quickly twisted for factional ends.
The people who argued for the electoral college were appalled by how it worked out. They intended as an exercise in indirect democracy, not some kind of broken popular election.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, it's reason to celebrate, because while we need a reversal, we need a reduction in the rate of increase too.
It's not heat per se that's the issue, nor is it even change per se; it's the rate of change. Ideally we keep the rate of change low enough so that ecosystem distress is not widespread. There's always going to be some ecosystems in trouble and some doing fine, but it makes a difference whether you have a lot of them collapsing or just a few.
Even if the rate of change is fast enough to produce widespread ecological stress, humans are the most adaptable animal on the planet. But even our adaptability has limits; it doesn't mean we're going to enjoy adapting. Personally as a fisherman I'm not going to be happy about wild trout and salmon stocks collapsing. Since I live in a wealthy country my government will probably stock smallmouth bass, but even a world with more smallmouth isn't the same as one with both smallmouth and salmon and wild trout. Don't get me started on hatchery trout.
And the more rapid change is the more it'll hit us in our wallets. This of course is offset by short term profits, but the costs and benefits aren't evenly distributed. If you're an investment bank you get more than your share of the benefits of carbon emissions -- in fact you make money creating the problem and then dealing with it. If you're a Bengladeshi subsistence farmer you're just screwed all around.
He was on my ship. I was a nuke. He was not, and he was not nearly smart enough to be one.
The Harper's story reminds me of something Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.
The story paints a picture of a kid who appears to have little common sense or self-preservation instinct, and yet he improvised a procedure to reduce extract the thorium dioxide from lantern mantles and reduce it with lithium (from lithium batteries) to metallic thorium! And then... then he tries to reduce the radiation escaping into the neighborhood by using cobalt steel drill bits as "control rods" in his makeshift reactor... WTF?
I think his story may suggest that we underestimate how smart even not-particularly-smart people can be if they're sufficiently motivated. Maybe Or for a more extreme boost, obsessed.
There was never a single country that *invaded* Russia that didn't regret it profoundly. Russia (and the Russian dominated Soviet Union) has been successfully confronted many times.
The "obsession" with confrontation is that it's run by an authoritarian who assasinates and jails his political opponents, is killing civilians wholesale in Syria, has subverted his country's electoral process, and has ambitions of creating an empire in Europe. Not opposing people like that is also something people have historically regretted. So the smart thing is to oppose him without invading his country.
Fortunately for us Putin's run his country's economy into the ground with crony capitalism. It's too bad for the Russians but soon the economic disaster is going to curtail his international ambitions.
I'm all for being friends with Russia. I said back in '92 George H.W. Bush was making a big mistake by not extending Russia the hand of friendship. But at present there's no way to separate Russia from Putin, and Putin should be contained.
It's an ill wind that blows nobody good.
Except the TPP was definitely a bad thing for anyone who isn't the head of a huge corporation..
Oh, it'll definitely be good for the big multinationals, but the effect on other people is complicated. If you're a migrant factory worker in Malaysia (one of the worst countries to be a factory worker in) it'll prevent your employer from treating you like a slave. If you're an American it'll make some goods cheaper but medicines more expensive -- and we already pay more for the same medicines than anyone else does. If you're a patent or trade law attorney it'll be like the heavens have opened up and are raining money on you.
I actually read the chapter summaries of the entire treaty, and it most definitely IS about trade. And it is ALSO about intellectual property. AND it is about environmental protection. AND it is about workers' rights. AND it is about currency manipulation. Oh, and by the way it's about cutting China off at the knees, which is a big deal for the Obama administration. Obama's much keener on using economics to shape geopolitics than most people realize, which is why he has been furtively supportive of the Dakota Access Pipeline despite it's wild unpopularity with his base: it'll be like pouring gasoline on the Russian economic fire.
This is how the world actually works: major changes require a coalition of interests. In an international agreement, it's actually multiple coalitions, one for each country, plus mulitnational entities like corporations. Every interest in each coalition has its own goals, and when they're done hammering out a consensus it HAS to be about about a lot of things.
It's only through the lens of retail politics that something this big becomes about just one thing.
The thing is, this sucker is monster huge. It will transform all the member countries in ways that will be nearly impossible to undo without inviting chaos.
People want a leader who makes things seem simple. But reality isn't simple, and if you give them a taste of that then you're a soulless technocrat who doesn't feel their pain.
They want a politician so consummate he makes them feel like he's not a politician.
So tactical falsehood is part of the job description. However it's still possible to know where most politicians are going. I often compare this to a trial, with the voters as jury. You can't trust what the defense or prosecution says, but you can be certain of what verdict they want. There's no mystery about where someone like Paul Ryan or Bernie Sanders wants to take the country.
Trump... not so much. You can intuit a lot about a liar from his lies, because they're designed to make you believe something. Trump's statements don't rise to that level; they're designed to make his followers feel something. That's why they don't care when he contradicts himself. As the Atlantic put it, "The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally."
That's how his supporters defend the indefensible; they see it as bluster. It's all just locker-room talk.
Because he doesn't consider himself bound by his prior statements, and his supporters don't hold him to them.
There are some things we know he won't do: build a border wall and make the Mexicans pay for it. There are other things we can be pretty sure he will do: lower taxes on the wealthiest people. But everything else will depend on how he feels that day.
There's a reason both liberal AND conservatives don't like him, because he's basically unprincipled. But similar conversations are going on on both sides to the effect: maybe we can exploit some of this situation to our advantage.
Well, I'd be the last person to advocate jettisoning methodologies, any more than I'd advocate jettisoning architecture, although I've seen both abused by people who make fetishes of them.
My point is that software development is multidisciplinary. You can't rely on one kind of discipline to ensure success.
Obama is No true Scottsman .
No, he's from the centrist wing of the Democratic party. Which doesn't "defend" anything; it just explains where his positions come from,e.g. like on energy, which was very bullish on production including DAPL. You might not have read the news but the US became a net exporter of energy in 2016.
I think the problem is the paradigm shift from object oriented to functional. I learned to program in Scheme many, many years ago (early 80s), although I never used it professionally. When javascript came along, people looked at the bizarre object system and thought "This is dumbed down Java." I looked at it and thought, "This is kind of like Scheme."
Well, that's because Agile is not supposed to solve technical issues like architecture or data models. It's supposed to help software development efforts track changes in organizational priorities and incorporate things they learn into their plans as they learn them.
If you rely too much on any methodology it's not going to work.
I have often thought the most important quality a software developer has to have is caring about the people who will be affected by their work. If you're only interested in technology you'll find an excuse to use the latest thing. If you're a prig about methodology you'll end up going through the motions. When you care about your users you'll always find a way to not let them down.
Technically, a uranium tamper is still fissioned with fast neutron flux, so it is partly there for its nuclear properties, isn't it?
Yes, the tamper does fission a little and adds somewhat to the bomb's yield, which is why I said "mainly". I didn't want to obscure the important point, which is that that the uranium in this bomb cannot be made to explode by any means without installing the pit.
"Natural uranium" (meaning unenriched) is reasonably safe to handle; if you look up the MSDS for natural uranium metal the main hazards are ingestion and inhalation. You can handle it with disposable gloves.
It's in a sun-synchronous orbit. That means it's set up to take pictures of what is under it at a certain time of day. Also given it's high resolution it no doubt takes a very narrow picture -- like looking at the Earth through a straw. It might well take that long to image the entire surface of the Earth, especially as you have to have the weather cooperate.
While you can't trust the military to report honestly to the public on an accident, in this case there is every reason to believe this bomb is quite safe. The Mark IV bomb had a hinge on it so you can open it up and load the fissile pit into it in flight, during an actual bombing run.
During a training mission there would be no reason to have the fissile pit on the aircraft.
The uranium in this case was unenriched, and incapable of going critical. It was part of the device's "tamper" -- a kind of shield that delayed the expansion of the material in the pit during explosion, thus boosting efficiency. It was used mainly for its phsyical density, not its nuclear properties.
The mark IV bomb was designed to be transported and loaded on the aircraft without the "physics package", which contained the actual fissile material. As such this particular bomb is no more dangerous than a small conventional bomb. There is no particular reason not to use one in a training exercise.
Which is not to say there weren't some hair-raising incidents over the years. The closest we came to a real disaster was the Goldsboro incident, in which two thermonuclear weapons were ejected from a disintegrating airplane with nearly all of their safety mechanisms too damaged to operate.
Greetings from the Trouser of Time's other leg. Glad to see you made it.
I looked at an online PDF for Improvised Munitions and it's clearly a manual for insurgents, not regular military. It has recipes for a variety of improvised weapons including explosives you can make with stuff you can buy at places like pharmacies, paint stores, garden centers and so on. Some of the information is dated - carbon tetrachloride isn't a commonplace chemical anymore because it's largely been replaced by tetrachlorethane; mercury has been phased out of a lot of its most commonplace applications. But most of the recipes are still quite doable.
It has quite a long list of ingenious timer devices, improvised grenades and mines (including shaped charges), smoke grenades, switches (tripwire, altitude, weight), and detonation power sources. It shows you how to make everything you need; it even has a very nice recipe for an improvised blasting cap, including a wooden jig for packing your homebrew explosive mixture into the case.
It's really well done. I've got tons of how-to books on car maintenance, furniture making, watch repair etc. but I don't think I've ever seen a how-to book that is as comprehensive and carefully thought-out. Presuming the recipes in thisi cookbook actually work, anyone with basic maker skills and maybe two hundred bucks for supplies could use it to do some really horrific stuff.
Doubt it. Interrupting banks gets very expensive, and Russia is in the middle of a multi-year financial crisis touched off by low oil prices and economic sanctions.
So you're saying the problem with people getting false information off the Internet is that social media is a source of information.
Thank you, Sherlock.
That's kind of a peculiar reading of the situation. Ukraine had a treaty with Russia and Russia abrogated it by invading and annexing the Crimea. Ukraine didn't ask them to do it.
And the nose they cut off was Yanukovych -- a wildly unpopular and corrupt authoritarian who jailed political opponents, outlawed protest, censored the press and introduced laws restricting freedom of speech, and had his secret police torture people who criticized him. He enriched himself and his cronies at public expense. It's estimated he embezzled 70 billion dollars from the public treasury.
A Yanukovych fan, I see.
You neglected to mention that Russia, in addition in return for cheap natural gas, Russia got a lease to keep its fleet at Sevastapol. Oh, we should look carefully at that particular deal, because when that particular corrupt puppet was deposed Russia simply invaded and annexed the region.
The qualifications for presenting the scientific consensus and contradicting the scientific consensus are different.
Only a year or two to go and Russia will be out of money and Putin will become unpopular. Obama's policy has been excellent in this respect.
I wonder how much that scenario may change. Trump is a lot more pro-Russia and pro-Putin, but it's all predicated on US energy production and sales.
America, in aggregate, actually chose the other candidate. But we've got this antiquated system that was designed to shore up the political power of slave holding interests and was quickly twisted for factional ends.
The people who argued for the electoral college were appalled by how it worked out. They intended as an exercise in indirect democracy, not some kind of broken popular election.