It's more complicated if you insist on a solution that makes sense a priori, or at least clearly makes more sense a priori than any other solution possibly could.
What human beings do when faced with situations like this is they adopt a set of largely obvious conventions that seem objectively correct and more sensible after we get used to them. That's pretty much how everything that is governed by law works. Something like private property seems as natural a part of universe as gravity or momentum, but if you look closely you find a number of weird corner cases (like easement-by-necessity or theft-by-finding) that demonstrate that property is just a set of useful conventions.
I had something slightly different in mind. To a hammer AI trained on nails, everything looks like (possibly a very weird) nail. Yes, as a result of life experience, in a human's head the spanner will clamor to be used.
Insofar what an expert does follows some kind of logic, you could say the same for him.
Human minds have quite a diverse and useful bag of tricks, which is what makes human experts so versatile. I think we're at the point where we can reproduce individual tricks from that bag and perform them with inhumanly repetitive perfection. But that perfection is actually a liability, because it leaves not room for common sense, which throws spanners into logical works all the time.
The Swedes proved that the physics works on burning trees. That doesn't make it practical, except in very unusual cases (e.g., a small fire on a bombing range unsafe for firefighters).
This doesn't work by depriving the fire of oxygen. It works exactly like blowing out a candle. When you blow out a candle you're actually providing it with *more* oxygen, but the fire goes out because you're physically moving the flame away from its fuel. .
The interesting thing about a flame is that the actual combustion happens outside the wood. The heat radiates back to the wood and causes combustible compounds on the surface to volatilize. This is how the flame sustains itself: it's a chain reaction. Physically move the zone combustion away from the fuel and the process stops.
So what will happen is that within a certain radius the fire will go out, but the hot wood will continue to smolder and may well rekindle if there's any wind. You couldn't just drop a bunch of bombs and hope for the best, you'd have to be prepared to go in to fight smaller fires. If some of the bombs are duds this could be even more exciting than normal.
I would expect this to actually work less effectively the larger the bomb is. The reason is that the force of the bomb is distributed through a spherical volume proportional to its yield, but the fire is spread over a two-dimensional surface. So area of a given level of destruction goes up as the 2/3 power of yield.
This is why gigantic bombs are largely impractical. In most cases they're less effective than a equivalent weight of smaller bombs. MOAB weighs as much as 43 Mark 82 500 pound bombs; it has as much H6 as 97 Mark 82s, but destroys an area equivalent to 21 Mark 82s.
Yes, I was wondering when someone would notice that.
Also the 500 pound bomb extinguished flame "up to 100 meters" away. Let's be wildly generous and assume that everything within a 100 meter radius was extinguished. That works out to seven and three quarter acres per bomb.
The Mendocino Complex fires were reported on July 27, when they burned about 4000 acres. Suppose you decided the very next day to send your bombers, and they arrived on the 29th. By then they'd be facing a fire of well over 50,000 acres, because the wildfire had spread, well, like wildfire. At 7 acres a bomb you'd need nearly 80 bomber loads of 500 pound bombs to deal with a fire of that size. You'd be spending well over half a billion dollars too, just in bombs.
The reason the California fires have grown so big is that they've grown too rapidly to mount an effective response against. Fires that are small and slow enough to fight this way would be small and slow enough to contain using conventional methods.
You really can't talk meaningfully about trends by examining individual events in isolation.
Climate change is neither necessary nor sufficient for the kinds of fires we are seeing. However, in places prone to wildfires, wildfire is a seasonal phenomenon, and the lengths of fire seasons over the last forty years has increased by 19%, and the area burned in fire seasons has more than doubled. Wildfires are only possible when three factors are present: fuel, ignition sources, and dry weather. While the acreage and number of fires *might conceivably* be due to increased fuel or ignition sources, the lengthened fire season is pretty obviously correlated to prolonged dry seasons.
It's probably meaningless to ask whether anthropogenic climate change "caused" any particular fire or set of local fires, because such fires could happen in a steady state world, or a cooling world. The more narrowly you look in space and time the less meaningful the question is. But the overall global, multi-decade trend to more area burned and longer fire seasons is a different kettle of fish.
People treat "GMO food" as if all GMO foods are necessarily all the same. We don't expect a Kia Rio to be exactly as safe as a Volvo XC90, so why should all GMO foods be inherently equally safe or unsafe?
Like any other engineered artifact, a piece of GMO food's quality is a product of the care taken in its design and production, and of course the objectives of the producer. At present I'd expect GMO foods to be very safe because public acceptance of GMO is low, regulatory suspicion is high, and the price to bring a product to market is high. As long as these conditions hold, I have not the slightest concern eating GMO food. There are strong incentives for people producing GMO foods to do a good job.
Let us imagine a future where the public acceptance of GMO is very high, and regulatory scrutiny is very low, and technology has advanced to the point hobbyists are editing plant genes for their home garden. Would you expect GMO foods, as a category, to be equally safe then?
The current promise is that they'll be able to do it for a billion and a half. It'd be more reasonable to say that nobody really knows what it will cost, but it's going to be more than a billion and a half.
Even if it cost, say, three billion to decommission this, it's not so bad when you amortize that cost over fifty years of service and consider it costs about a half billion dollars annually to operate one of these things, not counting all the other supporting ships in a carrier group. And we operate ten carrier groups...
The fact that people find a multi-billion dollar bill to scrap an old nuclear carrier surprising suggests to me a lot of folks don't really understand how much we spend on this kind of stuff.
There is a persistent error even experts make in nutrition: attributing the effects of a particular compound to a wider class of compounds to which it belongs for classification purposes. Not all saturated fats are bad, not all unsaturated fats are good. Trans fats (which by definition are unsaturated) are not all bad; the ones that are reasonably common in nature like CLA are good for you. It's when hydrogenation creates products with very high quantities of stuff like elaidic acid, which is rare in nature, that you have problems. Elaidic acid looks enough like the more common vaccenic acid that your body tries to process it, but with subtle differences in the long term.
As for CFCs, global production is much, much lower than it was in 1987. The global goal is a complete eradication by 2030, and in general most of the world has been making steady progress in reduction, but evidence shows somebody in East Asia has been cheating since around 2012. Since it is unlikely to be Japan or Korea, I leave it up to you to figure out who has a large enough economy to hide the emission of 13,000 tons of bootleg CFCs annually. It's probably not Mongolia.
Asbestosis usually requires heavy and regular exposure. However it's not the absestos directly that causes problems, but the long-term effects of chronic low-level inflammation. It takes twenty to fifty years for symptoms to manifest. If I'd had moderate occupational exposure I wouldn't freak out, but I'd take extra good care of my lungs to keep that inflammation down. That means not smoking, getting your flu shots, an anti-inflammatory diet and living somewhere with low air pollution -- all things that are good for you anyway.
It's interesting how you can date a TV episode or movie by the tech. My wife and I have been working our way through all twenty seasons of "Midsomer Murders" and have reached the point where their cars look more modern than ours (they have built in GPS touch screens) but they're still using flip-phones. I'm pretty sure that season was shot in 2008.
The phone form factor thing is fashion, not function. I wouldn't be surprised if the huge, razor thin, bezel-less phone looks as dated as 1970s bell-bottoms in a few years. They're not really comfortable to use or carry, and the thinness drives all kinds of design limitations.
Sure, we don't ban the existence of asbestos, in the same way we don't ban the existence of mercury. But the use of these substances is heavily regulated so that they are either illegal or impractical.
Asbestos use is limited under three major laws: (1) The Toxic Substances Control Act, (2) The Clean Air Act, and (3) The Consumer Product Safety Act. A number of other federal laws ban asbestos in places like schools. Asbestos is banned in the manufacture of a wide variety of products such as flooring felt, and use in commercial developments has been forbidden under the TCSA since 1989. However concrete-asbestos insulated pipes continued to be used in some niche industrial applications for some years after that.
Deregulating asbestos is something which the Executive Branch cannot entirely do without new legislation. Even if it had the federal legislation, there'd still be local laws and building codes forbidding its use. Even if you got rid of those, you'd have civil liability. And if you could get rid of that, you'd have the fact that installing asbestos lowers a building's market value.
The idea that federal bureaucrats can reanimate the dead corpse of asbestos insulation is even dumber than the idea they can win back the market share coal has lost to natural gas.
Great fishing in warm waters depends on the what you're fishing for. American bass (which are actually sunfish) are warm water species and do well in unnaturally warm waters. Trout, salmon, northern pike, and walleye are cool water species which often can't survive elevated temperatures.
Some cool water game fish are warm tolerant, others not. The most important game fish of Europe are trout and salmon, which die when exposed to warm water. There are fishing subcultures that go after "coarse fish" (which pretty much means anything not a salmon or trout), but I don't think anyone thinks it's a good idea to wipe out trout to make better habitat for carp.
When you say "chill the water", what that inevitably means is putting the heat somewhere else. You can't magic it away, it has to go somewhere, and you have to build some kind of heat exchanger that gets it there.
So where would you put the heat? The obvious answer is the atmosphere, but consider that this was an option open to engineers when they designed the plant. They *could* have condensed the turbine working fluid by exchanging the heat with the atmosphere like the air conditioner in your house, which demonstrates that it is physically possible to do. But they rejected this approach for a good reason.
That reason is likely that the quantities of heat involved are considerably greater than those involved with cooling your house. They chose to put the heat into water because (a) water has over 4x the heat capacity of dry air on a mass basis and (b) water is 1000x denser than air. For any given level of efficiency, your air cooling device would have to be thousands of times larger.
I always find this view of the relative political clout of tree-hugging hippies and major corporations bemusing.
Strumming kumbaya on guitars didn't kill nuclear power. Cheap fossil fuels did. In 1980, crude oil cost about $111/barrel. Six years later the price of oil had dropped to $32/barrel. The early 80s corresponds to a massive uptick in nuclear project cancellations.
So basically fossil fuels is standing over the corpse of nuclear power holding a smoking gun, but it must be that bearded guy over there playing the guitar that killed him.
This is largely because coal has been supplanted by natural gas -- both carbon emitting fossil fuels, but gas is vastly more efficient when it comes to extraction, transport, and usage. Switching from coal to natural gas is not a long term solution, but it certainly buys us time to develop other technologies like nuclear and storage for renewables.
This demonstrates the importance of acknowledging problems. It enables you to pursue a more incrementalist approach rather than waiting for a crisis and looking to extreme last-minute solutions. The reason US natural gas production rose so quickly is that the last administration pursued aggressively pro-fracking policies that were extremely unpopular with its base. They wouldn't have angered their supports this way had it not been for concerns over US carbon emissions.
The same principle applies to natural gas. Yes, it makes our short term numbers better but it's not a panacea. Even if you discount the carbon emissions, relying on natural gas in the long term creates problems we need to acknowledge and manage.
I have nothing against lawyers, but their job is to keep you out of future trouble, and the easy way of doing that is to make agreements as one-sided as possible. But you can't always do business that way. You should listen to your lawyers but be prepared to overrule them.
Frankly, for many jobs I think having a smartphone at all is probably not a good idea -- for that matter devices like smart speakers. Anything like that needs to have a hardware "off" button that ensures they aren't listening or transmitting.
But I'm not sure how secure modern feature phones either in the era of enhanced 911.
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It's more complicated if you insist on a solution that makes sense a priori, or at least clearly makes more sense a priori than any other solution possibly could.
What human beings do when faced with situations like this is they adopt a set of largely obvious conventions that seem objectively correct and more sensible after we get used to them. That's pretty much how everything that is governed by law works. Something like private property seems as natural a part of universe as gravity or momentum, but if you look closely you find a number of weird corner cases (like easement-by-necessity or theft-by-finding) that demonstrate that property is just a set of useful conventions.
I wouldn't say it's "usually" wrong; that's way too strong. But it sure is unreliable.
I had something slightly different in mind. To a hammer AI trained on nails, everything looks like (possibly a very weird) nail. Yes, as a result of life experience, in a human's head the spanner will clamor to be used.
Insofar what an expert does follows some kind of logic, you could say the same for him.
Human minds have quite a diverse and useful bag of tricks, which is what makes human experts so versatile. I think we're at the point where we can reproduce individual tricks from that bag and perform them with inhumanly repetitive perfection. But that perfection is actually a liability, because it leaves not room for common sense, which throws spanners into logical works all the time.
Yes, but that does nothing with respect to fire season *length*, which is what makes that an interesting metric.
Anyhow you get both under AGW models: more intense rainy seasons and longer dry seasons.
The Swedes proved that the physics works on burning trees. That doesn't make it practical, except in very unusual cases (e.g., a small fire on a bombing range unsafe for firefighters).
This doesn't work by depriving the fire of oxygen. It works exactly like blowing out a candle. When you blow out a candle you're actually providing it with *more* oxygen, but the fire goes out because you're physically moving the flame away from its fuel. .
The interesting thing about a flame is that the actual combustion happens outside the wood. The heat radiates back to the wood and causes combustible compounds on the surface to volatilize. This is how the flame sustains itself: it's a chain reaction. Physically move the zone combustion away from the fuel and the process stops.
So what will happen is that within a certain radius the fire will go out, but the hot wood will continue to smolder and may well rekindle if there's any wind. You couldn't just drop a bunch of bombs and hope for the best, you'd have to be prepared to go in to fight smaller fires. If some of the bombs are duds this could be even more exciting than normal.
I would expect this to actually work less effectively the larger the bomb is. The reason is that the force of the bomb is distributed through a spherical volume proportional to its yield, but the fire is spread over a two-dimensional surface. So area of a given level of destruction goes up as the 2/3 power of yield.
This is why gigantic bombs are largely impractical. In most cases they're less effective than a equivalent weight of smaller bombs. MOAB weighs as much as 43 Mark 82 500 pound bombs; it has as much H6 as 97 Mark 82s, but destroys an area equivalent to 21 Mark 82s.
Yes, I was wondering when someone would notice that.
Also the 500 pound bomb extinguished flame "up to 100 meters" away. Let's be wildly generous and assume that everything within a 100 meter radius was extinguished. That works out to seven and three quarter acres per bomb.
The Mendocino Complex fires were reported on July 27, when they burned about 4000 acres. Suppose you decided the very next day to send your bombers, and they arrived on the 29th. By then they'd be facing a fire of well over 50,000 acres, because the wildfire had spread, well, like wildfire. At 7 acres a bomb you'd need nearly 80 bomber loads of 500 pound bombs to deal with a fire of that size. You'd be spending well over half a billion dollars too, just in bombs.
The reason the California fires have grown so big is that they've grown too rapidly to mount an effective response against. Fires that are small and slow enough to fight this way would be small and slow enough to contain using conventional methods.
You really can't talk meaningfully about trends by examining individual events in isolation.
Climate change is neither necessary nor sufficient for the kinds of fires we are seeing. However, in places prone to wildfires, wildfire is a seasonal phenomenon, and the lengths of fire seasons over the last forty years has increased by 19%, and the area burned in fire seasons has more than doubled. Wildfires are only possible when three factors are present: fuel, ignition sources, and dry weather. While the acreage and number of fires *might conceivably* be due to increased fuel or ignition sources, the lengthened fire season is pretty obviously correlated to prolonged dry seasons.
It's probably meaningless to ask whether anthropogenic climate change "caused" any particular fire or set of local fires, because such fires could happen in a steady state world, or a cooling world. The more narrowly you look in space and time the less meaningful the question is. But the overall global, multi-decade trend to more area burned and longer fire seasons is a different kettle of fish.
People treat "GMO food" as if all GMO foods are necessarily all the same. We don't expect a Kia Rio to be exactly as safe as a Volvo XC90, so why should all GMO foods be inherently equally safe or unsafe?
Like any other engineered artifact, a piece of GMO food's quality is a product of the care taken in its design and production, and of course the objectives of the producer. At present I'd expect GMO foods to be very safe because public acceptance of GMO is low, regulatory suspicion is high, and the price to bring a product to market is high. As long as these conditions hold, I have not the slightest concern eating GMO food. There are strong incentives for people producing GMO foods to do a good job.
Let us imagine a future where the public acceptance of GMO is very high, and regulatory scrutiny is very low, and technology has advanced to the point hobbyists are editing plant genes for their home garden. Would you expect GMO foods, as a category, to be equally safe then?
The current promise is that they'll be able to do it for a billion and a half. It'd be more reasonable to say that nobody really knows what it will cost, but it's going to be more than a billion and a half.
Even if it cost, say, three billion to decommission this, it's not so bad when you amortize that cost over fifty years of service and consider it costs about a half billion dollars annually to operate one of these things, not counting all the other supporting ships in a carrier group. And we operate ten carrier groups...
The fact that people find a multi-billion dollar bill to scrap an old nuclear carrier surprising suggests to me a lot of folks don't really understand how much we spend on this kind of stuff.
An asbestos fiber is gigantic in relation to a DNA molecule. It's the inflammation, not mechanical damage.
There is a persistent error even experts make in nutrition: attributing the effects of a particular compound to a wider class of compounds to which it belongs for classification purposes. Not all saturated fats are bad, not all unsaturated fats are good. Trans fats (which by definition are unsaturated) are not all bad; the ones that are reasonably common in nature like CLA are good for you. It's when hydrogenation creates products with very high quantities of stuff like elaidic acid, which is rare in nature, that you have problems. Elaidic acid looks enough like the more common vaccenic acid that your body tries to process it, but with subtle differences in the long term.
As for CFCs, global production is much, much lower than it was in 1987. The global goal is a complete eradication by 2030, and in general most of the world has been making steady progress in reduction, but evidence shows somebody in East Asia has been cheating since around 2012. Since it is unlikely to be Japan or Korea, I leave it up to you to figure out who has a large enough economy to hide the emission of 13,000 tons of bootleg CFCs annually. It's probably not Mongolia.
Asbestosis usually requires heavy and regular exposure. However it's not the absestos directly that causes problems, but the long-term effects of chronic low-level inflammation. It takes twenty to fifty years for symptoms to manifest. If I'd had moderate occupational exposure I wouldn't freak out, but I'd take extra good care of my lungs to keep that inflammation down. That means not smoking, getting your flu shots, an anti-inflammatory diet and living somewhere with low air pollution -- all things that are good for you anyway.
It's interesting how you can date a TV episode or movie by the tech. My wife and I have been working our way through all twenty seasons of "Midsomer Murders" and have reached the point where their cars look more modern than ours (they have built in GPS touch screens) but they're still using flip-phones. I'm pretty sure that season was shot in 2008.
The phone form factor thing is fashion, not function. I wouldn't be surprised if the huge, razor thin, bezel-less phone looks as dated as 1970s bell-bottoms in a few years. They're not really comfortable to use or carry, and the thinness drives all kinds of design limitations.
Sure, we don't ban the existence of asbestos, in the same way we don't ban the existence of mercury. But the use of these substances is heavily regulated so that they are either illegal or impractical.
Asbestos use is limited under three major laws: (1) The Toxic Substances Control Act, (2) The Clean Air Act, and (3) The Consumer Product Safety Act. A number of other federal laws ban asbestos in places like schools. Asbestos is banned in the manufacture of a wide variety of products such as flooring felt, and use in commercial developments has been forbidden under the TCSA since 1989. However concrete-asbestos insulated pipes continued to be used in some niche industrial applications for some years after that.
Deregulating asbestos is something which the Executive Branch cannot entirely do without new legislation. Even if it had the federal legislation, there'd still be local laws and building codes forbidding its use. Even if you got rid of those, you'd have civil liability. And if you could get rid of that, you'd have the fact that installing asbestos lowers a building's market value.
The idea that federal bureaucrats can reanimate the dead corpse of asbestos insulation is even dumber than the idea they can win back the market share coal has lost to natural gas.
Great fishing in warm waters depends on the what you're fishing for. American bass (which are actually sunfish) are warm water species and do well in unnaturally warm waters. Trout, salmon, northern pike, and walleye are cool water species which often can't survive elevated temperatures.
Some cool water game fish are warm tolerant, others not. The most important game fish of Europe are trout and salmon, which die when exposed to warm water. There are fishing subcultures that go after "coarse fish" (which pretty much means anything not a salmon or trout), but I don't think anyone thinks it's a good idea to wipe out trout to make better habitat for carp.
When you say "chill the water", what that inevitably means is putting the heat somewhere else. You can't magic it away, it has to go somewhere, and you have to build some kind of heat exchanger that gets it there.
So where would you put the heat? The obvious answer is the atmosphere, but consider that this was an option open to engineers when they designed the plant. They *could* have condensed the turbine working fluid by exchanging the heat with the atmosphere like the air conditioner in your house, which demonstrates that it is physically possible to do. But they rejected this approach for a good reason.
That reason is likely that the quantities of heat involved are considerably greater than those involved with cooling your house. They chose to put the heat into water because (a) water has over 4x the heat capacity of dry air on a mass basis and (b) water is 1000x denser than air. For any given level of efficiency, your air cooling device would have to be thousands of times larger.
Or a Philco phone.
You could design it around miniature vacuum tubes and market it to audiophiles.
I always find this view of the relative political clout of tree-hugging hippies and major corporations bemusing.
Strumming kumbaya on guitars didn't kill nuclear power. Cheap fossil fuels did. In 1980, crude oil cost about $111/barrel. Six years later the price of oil had dropped to $32/barrel. The early 80s corresponds to a massive uptick in nuclear project cancellations.
So basically fossil fuels is standing over the corpse of nuclear power holding a smoking gun, but it must be that bearded guy over there playing the guitar that killed him.
Of course by that logic we should be encouraging immigration from Saudi Arabia.
This is largely because coal has been supplanted by natural gas -- both carbon emitting fossil fuels, but gas is vastly more efficient when it comes to extraction, transport, and usage. Switching from coal to natural gas is not a long term solution, but it certainly buys us time to develop other technologies like nuclear and storage for renewables.
This demonstrates the importance of acknowledging problems. It enables you to pursue a more incrementalist approach rather than waiting for a crisis and looking to extreme last-minute solutions. The reason US natural gas production rose so quickly is that the last administration pursued aggressively pro-fracking policies that were extremely unpopular with its base. They wouldn't have angered their supports this way had it not been for concerns over US carbon emissions.
The same principle applies to natural gas. Yes, it makes our short term numbers better but it's not a panacea. Even if you discount the carbon emissions, relying on natural gas in the long term creates problems we need to acknowledge and manage.
I have nothing against lawyers, but their job is to keep you out of future trouble, and the easy way of doing that is to make agreements as one-sided as possible. But you can't always do business that way. You should listen to your lawyers but be prepared to overrule them.
Well, *I* could trace the circuit. Also, a switch position could cut out the mic as well.
Frankly, for many jobs I think having a smartphone at all is probably not a good idea -- for that matter devices like smart speakers. Anything like that needs to have a hardware "off" button that ensures they aren't listening or transmitting.
But I'm not sure how secure modern feature phones either in the era of enhanced 911.