A few years ago I read an interesting book of bona fide vampire legends collected by a professional folklorist, and he makes a convincing argument that nearly all such real legends (as opposed to literary creations) are associated with events consistent with and strongly suggesting tuberculosis outbreaks. It fits: the increasing pallor and weakness, the slow decline of one, then another family member. In rural populations a single family member might bring the disease back, dooming the entire family, but their neighbors would be hardly exposed at all, giving an effect much like a curse on a single family.
So vampires represent infectious disease in the true folk imagination.
A long time ago I read an account by a psychologist who believed that people have a latent fear that the dead will return to life. He convinced a local funeral parlor owner to offer locks on caskets as an option and they sold extremely well.
So the second thing vampires represent might well be... fear of vampires.
It might better be described as a faulty design which asked too much of the weld, then faulty welding.
The weld in question was on a prefabricated part that broke apart in the field. The pictures clearly show that. So what you say goes double. It's very unlikely that the weld was performed incorrectly.
My guess is that the behavior of the part hadn't been characterized well enough before the design was settled on. I'm guessing the part and weld were probably plenty strong, so long as the part didn't move.
"IPhone killer" is what I call a self-destructing concept.
If ever such a thing were to exist, that would mean we wouldn't *think* of it as an "iPhone killer". It would define a new category, the "X-killer", to which it would not belong because it would be "X".
It follows trying to create an 'iPhone killer" is a self-defeating enterprise.
Depends on the rate of return you can get on other investments.
True story. I had a guy working for me who applied for a loan on a sailboat. This was a non-profit, so there were a lot of rich kids doing the noblesse oblige thing. Anyhow the bank calls, and afterward the guys says, "they turned me down".
"Why?" I asked.
"They screwed up. They said I didn't qualify because my income was only 40K."
"I don't pay you that much," I said.
"Actually 40K is my bi-weekly income, but I wanted to get a loan because my investments are returning higher than the loan interest rate."
What you want is the net value of the United States to increase as much as possible. You want the debt to go down relative to that figure. No major corporation *ever* tries to pay down all its debt. It would be insane, because they'd be paying opportunity costs. Just like my young friend, they don't worry about just one side of the ledger. They maximize their net worthy subject to whatever limitations liquidity puts on them. Naturally, this is not an option most of us ordinary mortals have.
What you really need to worry about isn't debt alone, but what you are using the liquidity the debt gets you to do. In other words, spending the money wisely. Spending on maintaining critical infrastructure *should* be a no-brainer. You don't say, "we're going to stop painting this very important bridge because we want to reduce our debt." That would be moronic. Likewise, even if you didn't have a nickel of debt, spending money on something that doesn't return anything is just as moronic.
This is what you call a rock-and-a-hard-place scenario.
Stuff suspended over people is the thing that gives the civil engineers I know nightmares. Closing a bridge like that gives traffic planners nightmares.
You put the two together, and there's a lot of pressure to do a little wishful thinking. That the emergency field repairs on the single most important piece of infrastructure in a major city are acting in an unexpected way is the kind of news nobody wants to hear. And so it's so easy to say, "well, we can't be *sure* what's going to happen, but what's the chance it's going to happen before we get a proper fix in?"
I can't help but think there might be parallels between the situation in California, where they're enduring a budget crisis that won't quit, and the situation as NASA where the goals stayed as ambitious as ever but the money was never there. As an engineer, I've been in situations where I've been ordered to do things for less money and time that is reasonable. And sometimes I've been successful, but even when I usually walk away from these scenarios *looking* successful, I *know* that I've left problems for the next guy that are going to cost a lot more than anything that could possibly be saved. And when management began to think of me as a miracle worker, I stopped functioning as a real engineer, because engineering is about cold, hard realities, not wishful thinking and trusting in luck (statistics, of course are a different matter).
Well, what is a risk? Getting out of bed in the morning is a risk. Naturally, nobody with any sense says, "never do anything that involves risk."
I think the point is not to engage in wishful thinking. You don't do something thinking, "well, it's not going to happen *this* time." You do it saying, "Well, there's a 1% chance of it happening this time, but I can accept that."
What happens as resources are cut back but goals are not, is that wishful thinking becomes necessary to get you through the day.
Consultants aren't necessarily highly paid fat cats. Often they're low paid wage slaves who are "consultants" in that the employer doesn't want to treat them with the consideration that civilized society demands of employers.
I think you put your finger on an important point though: often *quality* is a more economical choice than *inexpensive*. The key is this: how long are you going to live with whatever you're paying for? We recently bought new windows for our house. We could go anything from under $200 per window to over $1000. We settled in the high $200s as the most economical choice. We could have save $100 per window, but those units are aimed at condo-flippers who don't care if the things fail in ten years.
You can't cut corners *everywhere* and expect to save money.
A lot of the reason I like open source based solutions is that they are biased towards a scenario I prefer: systems run by a modest core of highly skilled and well paid professionals. While the salaries you pay your guys may be a bit shocking, overall its an economical and flexible scenario. Try to implement the same software with cheap labor and you're screwed.
Of course, you can go proprietary software with top notch staff and that works too. They'll save you money on software licensing by selecting the right products, and they'll be able to find areas to do a little "sweat equity". But a proprietary vendor will happily let you de-skill your staff and become dependent on their products and services. But you aren't going to save money that way.
Government is a funny animal though. People get angry if people working for the government make good money. But apparently they don't get mad if the government sends a lot of money to software vendors. So it's not surprising to see cheap contract workers and exorbitant license fees.
So what was the prototype? I just see an uneconomic mess of well-developed technologies. Subsidizing an expensive alternative isn't the same as a "prototype". It can be, I admit that. But I don't see the novelty here. Another qualm I have is whether this program is sustainable. It apparently depends to a great degree on locals burning their hay in an heating plant rather than leaving it on the field. That might lead to soil loss in the long run.
Your point about the soil is worth considering, but it is not necessarily a telling one. The question is whether they are removing enough biomass to disturb some kind of equilibrium or generate some kind of physical disturbance. It leads to another important issue which you don't raise: scalability.
My wife is a scientist who worked on the planning stages of the Boston Harbor cleanup. The basic design the engineers came up with was this: a large scale conventional primary and secondary treatment plant, discharging through the world's longest single heading tunnel down to a long array of deep water diffuser structures. In a way, this design triggers some of your objections in the Danish scenario: it's all well developed, proven technologies, just deployed on an unusually large scale. The engineer in me happens to *like* that.
Now as they were planning this design, the media went looking for other models, and the found one: a town in California that uses a salt marsh after primary treatment as a natural treatment plant. Why couldn't we do that? Well, Arcata is a residential and college town of about fifteen thousand souls which probably has more marshland in its municipal boundaries than developed land. The Boston plant had to serve over two and a half million people, not to mention industrial users. Combine that with the fact you have to design sewers around the well known fact that water flows downhill, there just isn't enough marsh to handle more than a couple of percentage points of the required sewage flow.
Scalability is the Achilles heel of any environmental panacea. Traditional Inuit hunters clothed themselves sustainably with seal leather. If you tried to clothe all 300 million Americans in seal leather, it wouldn't be sustainable.
As far as the subsidy is concerned -- that's neither here nor there. Nothing gets done in this world without money being spent. Even saving money, if you exclude simply not doing something. You don't need to commission engineers and scientists to answer the question, "Can we make this Island energy self-sufficient if they stop heating their homes, using electricity or internal combustion vehicles." You *do* have to spend money to answer a question like, "How much of this straw can we burn before the soil dries up and blows away."
Err... That's the way the courts act. They don't make laws, they figure out how existing laws apply to new classes of situations.
The basic problem is that there is no right of information privacy in US law. In fact, the common law right of privacy didn't exist until Louis Brandeis wrote his famous law review article, and even *that* varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Way back in 1973, HUD under Elliot Richardson undertook a study on the privacy effects of this new information technology. It was very prescient and insightful about the coming problem, but curiously anemic in its response, which has specific action items onlly for Federal agencies, even though it was clear from the report that they were only a tiny slice of the problem. Why? Because Richardson left HUD (where as a liberal Republican he'd been safely buried) and took over Justice after the Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre". His replacement: Caspar Weinberger, later Reagan's Defense Secretary.
The report's recommendation for the private sector: let the market take its course, and where problems arise that are unbearable, write new laws to patch that problem. That's been the basic stance of US statutory privacy law ever since. That's why we have HIPPAA, and a patchwork of *different* laws embodying *different* philosophies of privacy for each commercial sector, such as banking and credit. It's a mass of ad hoc patches passed whenever the political heat on some problem got too much to ignore. Unlike the European Union, we don't have a fundamental information privacy law. That's why the details of our private lives can be publicly traded.
One of the upshots of this is things we can *see* are *obviously* abuses have to be hashed out in the courts using circuitous reasoning. We have no legal *interest* in the details of our private lives, which are just another commodity. We have to do all kinds of intellectual gymnastics to fit specific acts into frameworks not designed to cover them, because we miss the fundamental interest we have in our privacy, what Brandeis called, "the right to be left alone." We have no such right in US statutory law.
Then it could be called "The Razzler", except the word "razzle" is so poorly adapted to lexicographic survival it can only survive as a parasite on "dazzle".
Reminds me of when I was an MIT student and the Reagan administration came in. It turned the place upside down. Suddenly all those ONR grants were being scrutinized. The catch phrase of the day was "Deaths per Dollar." So we sat around thinking of various things that might have high deaths per dollar.
What about blowing up those huge LNG tanks between the highway and Dorchester Bay? Nope, the Chem-Es informed it it would be almost impossible to get the right stoichiometric mixture to get supersonic burning. Mostly the fuel would drift away.
Then I realized we were working the wrong end of the puzzle.
"Go down to the dump and find and old two by four," I said. "Then head over to Mass Ave. and start whacking people. There you go, *infinite* deaths per dollar."
"That's only true if your time is free," the economist points out.
Read critically, and you'll see that the article is really saying this: the management overreaction to a tiny "porn problem" wasted huge amounts of time and produced almost no results.
All the docs I'd downloaded over USB were gone, along with the notes I'd taken on them. They were the majority of what I had on the device, largely PDFs I'd converted to mobi format using Calibre on Linux. The docs I'd gotten over WhisperNet were archived and I was able to get them back. So if I'd indeed been using it to take notes I really needed later, I'd have been screwed.
Lesson 1: Back up your Kindle, or totally embrace Amazon's version of the cloud in which your device phones home.
Lesson 2: The Kindle is not a note taking device.
That last bit is important. I really like my Kindle, and it's neat that I can take notes on it and sort of play MP3 and browse the web, but it's a book reader. Period. Those other things are bonus features, and if you worry about *how well* the kindle does them, it is not the device for you. I have a kind of crude HTML mashup with my Google Calendar and mail stored on the device, and it's terrific to be able to consult my calendar any place I have coverage, which thus far has been almost everywhere I've taken the device, but it's not as good as a PDA for *calendar management*. That's what PDAs were built to do, and they're really the best thing ever yet devised for that purpose -- even better than smartphones in my opinion, largely because smartphones are designed to lock you into your carrier's value added services.
That said, the Kindle would be nearly perfect for *my* style of academic reading, if it only had a decent keyboard. But that's a highly personal thing. That's probably the single most important thing I've learned about technology marketing: people are different; they need different things and they react to things differently. The brain is a piece of meat; it doesn't work reasonably like a machine would. It has its own rules and they don't make sense.
I've never really understood people who dog ear textbooks or underline passages in them. The people who have elaborate systems of color coded highlighers and sticky notes are even more foreign to me. That's because my brain doesn't work that way.
I went to a parent teacher conference recently to talk about the volume of homework my elementary school son had. A few weeks later, my wife and I were discussing which assignments he should do first.
"He should do section E," I said. "That's what Mrs. Jones said."
"Are you sure?" my wife asked.
"Yes, I'm sure," I replied. "He has to do Section E handwritten, but he can do the flash cards on the computer."
"Where are the notes you took?"
"I recycled them when I got home."
"Why did you take them then?"
"So I'd remember what Mrs. Jones said."
And it's true. If I didn't take notes, I'd never remember something like that. As long as I taken them, I'll never need to *refer* to them. I've tried taking the kind of structured notes they tell you to do at Freshman Orientation, but it just doesn't work for me. The kind of pre-test cramming that some people rely on just doesn't work for me, I'm better off going to bed early. And the *note taking systems themselves* are a distraction. I find they actually reduce my ability recall. For *me at least*, the surest way to remember a source of information is to pay complete attention to it right at the start. This seems to work best if the information passes in some way from my eyes and ears to my hands, but once that has happened the tangible product has no value at all to me.
The thing that is a challenge for me is bibliography: remembering *where* I got a piece of information. So for me, the Kindle would be *perfect* as a note taking device, if it only had a decent keyboard. I often jot a few keywords down on the dreadful little keyboard and voila! I can find the place which prompted a certain thought. That's all I ask from a note taking system.
But other people are different. Many people seemingly need to visit the stationary store like a warrior arming himself before they can
We know at some point petroleum will become impractical to support the energy needs of civilization as we know it. In 1979, people thought the end was nigh, when in fact it was just an oil cartel flexing its muscle. But the ability of the cartel to do this was a harbinger of peak oil. The US was no longer anywhere near energy self-sufficient. The same thing happened in 2008, suddenly the end was nigh. It wasn't.
Let me draw a closer analogy. During the Dot Com boom, lots of individuals made money, but very, very few web enterprises did. VCs were pouring money into startups with nothing more than a name and a PowerPoint presentation -- not a real business plan. There wasn't time. Money had to be spent. Why? Because everyone knew web commerce was coming. And they were right, web commerce was coming. Yet the vast majority of money invested in those days was wasted, at least from the perspective that investments should provide returns to the investors. In part it was classic bubble behavior, but even *solid* business plans had a huge element of uncertainty. If the business plan was timed *right*, it would be like buying Microsoft in 1986.
Some day, if the conditions are right, one of these photovoltaic "breakthroughs" may take the world by storm. The chance of any single "breakthrough" doing it is vanishingly small, but the chance of *some* "breakthrough" doing it is substantial. It has to be the right development at the right time.
There are basically three avenues I can imagine working:
(1) Really cheap cells. If it works and can be produced commercially, this is an almost certain winner, because there are many places we can use power and are throwing away photons. Probably won't change the world if it is really inefficient, because *other* costs around installation will limit success.
(2) Incrementally better cells. If it works with given production infrastructure and doesn't have any significant drawbacks, a nearly certain winner that will expand the utility of photovoltaics to applications that are currently marginal. Certainly not a big winner in the short term, but a step forward for the tortoise in the race.
(3) Radically more efficient cells. Least likely to succeed, IMHO. The best cells on the market are about 23% efficient; given thermodynamic limits there isn't a *great* deal of room for improvement. Super-efficient cells will probably have niche applications, but any "breakthrough" in this area needs to have the proviso "and costs about the same to produce as current photovoltaics" before it's worth sitting up and taking notice of.
If I'm powering a satellite, I *almost* don't care what it costs. If I'm powering a planetary probe, it'd easily be worth its weight in gold.
On the other end of the spectrum, I read last year about a group working on photovoltaic house paint. That's almost certain to be extremely inefficient. However if it costs about the same as regular house paint, and works about as well, the inefficiency *almost* wouldn't matter. I've got to paint my house anyhow, and I were going to throw those photons away in any case. If I got any useful output from it at all, it'd be a win.
Now for selling vast amounts of energy into a commodity "energy" market, a low total amortized cost per watt is the difference between making a profit and losing money. Efficiency is secondary -- we were throwing those watts away anyhow -- but all other things being equal efficient cells reduce costs. For example, imagine land is your limiting factor. You can get twice as many watts per acre from a cell that was twice as expensive. While land is probably one of the least important factors in scaling a photovoltaic installation up just about *any* expense outside the cell itself is going to be reduced by a more efficient cell exactly the same way.
It's the expenses attached to the cell itself that will determine whether the technology is viable: producing the cell, replacing the cell as it wears out, and disposing of the cell.
The difference is that you (a) took normal steps (having locks on your garage) and (b) suffered damage (not including the assault which raises the stakes in this situation considerably) and (c) asked to have him pay the cost of the extraordinary steps you took to catch him.
If you left your garage wide open and the guy peeked in and saw something you didn't want him to see, it would be reasonable to get injunctive relief (a court order telling him to stop), but not to have a lock put on your garage.
It's not entirely unreasonable for the government to want to discourage this kind of restricted system tourism. But charging this guy to repair its own negligence (not a factor in *your* story) is not only unreasonable, it is *foolish*. It's shooting the bearer of bad news. Bad things will still happen to you, you'll just be the last to know.
Um... You know that that big guy with the gang tattoos and stuff at the end of the bar... the one who just had his cigarette lit by the *other* big guy with the gang tattoos? I just sorta think it'd be a good idea for you to lay off him. Yeah, I know he's a muscle-bound idiot, I'm just saying let it go.
This is like the salesman's nightmare, where you take the guy from engineering to visit the customer. Things are going great, the engineer can answer all the customer's questions.
Then you realize, *the stupid bastard is answering the questions honestly*.
Honesty is a basic requirement to be a halfway decent engineer. Persistent and incurable dissatisfaction with how you did the last job is another. Even if you *know* you did a great job, deep inside part of you knows you could have done it *better*.
This shows how wrong headed the long standing "ASCII only" policy of was. It's relaxed now, but it still is apparently "preferred". I call that insane; as somebody once said, the definition of "insane" is "doing the same thing over and over again even though it doesn't work." I understand the purpose of "plain text" as a safeguard againt future format changes, but UTF-8 is just as "plain" as ASCII, and it unlike ASCII it *correctly* encodes a wide variety of texts. Many of the texts in the Gutenberg collection are obscure because of the ASCII policy, which makes it impossible to accurately transcribe Greek letters, mathematical symbols, or words in may European languages (let alone non-European).
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Actually, vampires represent two things.
A few years ago I read an interesting book of bona fide vampire legends collected by a professional folklorist, and he makes a convincing argument that nearly all such real legends (as opposed to literary creations) are associated with events consistent with and strongly suggesting tuberculosis outbreaks. It fits: the increasing pallor and weakness, the slow decline of one, then another family member. In rural populations a single family member might bring the disease back, dooming the entire family, but their neighbors would be hardly exposed at all, giving an effect much like a curse on a single family.
So vampires represent infectious disease in the true folk imagination.
A long time ago I read an account by a psychologist who believed that people have a latent fear that the dead will return to life. He convinced a local funeral parlor owner to offer locks on caskets as an option and they sold extremely well.
So the second thing vampires represent might well be ... fear of vampires.
It might better be described as a faulty design which asked too much of the weld, then faulty welding.
The weld in question was on a prefabricated part that broke apart in the field. The pictures clearly show that. So what you say goes double. It's very unlikely that the weld was performed incorrectly.
My guess is that the behavior of the part hadn't been characterized well enough before the design was settled on. I'm guessing the part and weld were probably plenty strong, so long as the part didn't move.
Medicare? Keeping grandma alive and living in a decent nursing facility is the equivalent to a scam to drop environmental clean-up on the government?
Gosh, where's Barney Frank when you need him? I'd love to see his reaction when you explain that to him.
"IPhone killer" is what I call a self-destructing concept.
If ever such a thing were to exist, that would mean we wouldn't *think* of it as an "iPhone killer". It would define a new category, the "X-killer", to which it would not belong because it would be "X".
It follows trying to create an 'iPhone killer" is a self-defeating enterprise.
Depends on the rate of return you can get on other investments.
True story. I had a guy working for me who applied for a loan on a sailboat. This was a non-profit, so there were a lot of rich kids doing the noblesse oblige thing. Anyhow the bank calls, and afterward the guys says, "they turned me down".
"Why?" I asked.
"They screwed up. They said I didn't qualify because my income was only 40K."
"I don't pay you that much," I said.
"Actually 40K is my bi-weekly income, but I wanted to get a loan because my investments are returning higher than the loan interest rate."
What you want is the net value of the United States to increase as much as possible. You want the debt to go down relative to that figure. No major corporation *ever* tries to pay down all its debt. It would be insane, because they'd be paying opportunity costs. Just like my young friend, they don't worry about just one side of the ledger. They maximize their net worthy subject to whatever limitations liquidity puts on them. Naturally, this is not an option most of us ordinary mortals have.
What you really need to worry about isn't debt alone, but what you are using the liquidity the debt gets you to do. In other words, spending the money wisely. Spending on maintaining critical infrastructure *should* be a no-brainer. You don't say, "we're going to stop painting this very important bridge because we want to reduce our debt." That would be moronic. Likewise, even if you didn't have a nickel of debt, spending money on something that doesn't return anything is just as moronic.
This is what you call a rock-and-a-hard-place scenario.
Stuff suspended over people is the thing that gives the civil engineers I know nightmares. Closing a bridge like that gives traffic planners nightmares.
You put the two together, and there's a lot of pressure to do a little wishful thinking. That the emergency field repairs on the single most important piece of infrastructure in a major city are acting in an unexpected way is the kind of news nobody wants to hear. And so it's so easy to say, "well, we can't be *sure* what's going to happen, but what's the chance it's going to happen before we get a proper fix in?"
I can't help but think there might be parallels between the situation in California, where they're enduring a budget crisis that won't quit, and the situation as NASA where the goals stayed as ambitious as ever but the money was never there. As an engineer, I've been in situations where I've been ordered to do things for less money and time that is reasonable. And sometimes I've been successful, but even when I usually walk away from these scenarios *looking* successful, I *know* that I've left problems for the next guy that are going to cost a lot more than anything that could possibly be saved. And when management began to think of me as a miracle worker, I stopped functioning as a real engineer, because engineering is about cold, hard realities, not wishful thinking and trusting in luck (statistics, of course are a different matter).
God, if I were Scotty, I'd have fragged Kirk.
Well, what is a risk? Getting out of bed in the morning is a risk. Naturally, nobody with any sense says, "never do anything that involves risk."
I think the point is not to engage in wishful thinking. You don't do something thinking, "well, it's not going to happen *this* time." You do it saying, "Well, there's a 1% chance of it happening this time, but I can accept that."
What happens as resources are cut back but goals are not, is that wishful thinking becomes necessary to get you through the day.
Consultants aren't necessarily highly paid fat cats. Often they're low paid wage slaves who are "consultants" in that the employer doesn't want to treat them with the consideration that civilized society demands of employers.
I think you put your finger on an important point though: often *quality* is a more economical choice than *inexpensive*. The key is this: how long are you going to live with whatever you're paying for? We recently bought new windows for our house. We could go anything from under $200 per window to over $1000. We settled in the high $200s as the most economical choice. We could have save $100 per window, but those units are aimed at condo-flippers who don't care if the things fail in ten years.
You can't cut corners *everywhere* and expect to save money.
A lot of the reason I like open source based solutions is that they are biased towards a scenario I prefer: systems run by a modest core of highly skilled and well paid professionals. While the salaries you pay your guys may be a bit shocking, overall its an economical and flexible scenario. Try to implement the same software with cheap labor and you're screwed.
Of course, you can go proprietary software with top notch staff and that works too. They'll save you money on software licensing by selecting the right products, and they'll be able to find areas to do a little "sweat equity". But a proprietary vendor will happily let you de-skill your staff and become dependent on their products and services. But you aren't going to save money that way.
Government is a funny animal though. People get angry if people working for the government make good money. But apparently they don't get mad if the government sends a lot of money to software vendors. So it's not surprising to see cheap contract workers and exorbitant license fees.
So what was the prototype? I just see an uneconomic mess of well-developed technologies. Subsidizing an expensive alternative isn't the same as a "prototype". It can be, I admit that. But I don't see the novelty here. Another qualm I have is whether this program is sustainable. It apparently depends to a great degree on locals burning their hay in an heating plant rather than leaving it on the field. That might lead to soil loss in the long run.
Your point about the soil is worth considering, but it is not necessarily a telling one. The question is whether they are removing enough biomass to disturb some kind of equilibrium or generate some kind of physical disturbance. It leads to another important issue which you don't raise: scalability.
My wife is a scientist who worked on the planning stages of the Boston Harbor cleanup. The basic design the engineers came up with was this: a large scale conventional primary and secondary treatment plant, discharging through the world's longest single heading tunnel down to a long array of deep water diffuser structures. In a way, this design triggers some of your objections in the Danish scenario: it's all well developed, proven technologies, just deployed on an unusually large scale. The engineer in me happens to *like* that.
Now as they were planning this design, the media went looking for other models, and the found one: a town in California that uses a salt marsh after primary treatment as a natural treatment plant. Why couldn't we do that? Well, Arcata is a residential and college town of about fifteen thousand souls which probably has more marshland in its municipal boundaries than developed land. The Boston plant had to serve over two and a half million people, not to mention industrial users. Combine that with the fact you have to design sewers around the well known fact that water flows downhill, there just isn't enough marsh to handle more than a couple of percentage points of the required sewage flow.
Scalability is the Achilles heel of any environmental panacea. Traditional Inuit hunters clothed themselves sustainably with seal leather. If you tried to clothe all 300 million Americans in seal leather, it wouldn't be sustainable.
As far as the subsidy is concerned -- that's neither here nor there. Nothing gets done in this world without money being spent. Even saving money, if you exclude simply not doing something. You don't need to commission engineers and scientists to answer the question, "Can we make this Island energy self-sufficient if they stop heating their homes, using electricity or internal combustion vehicles." You *do* have to spend money to answer a question like, "How much of this straw can we burn before the soil dries up and blows away."
Err... That's the way the courts act. They don't make laws, they figure out how existing laws apply to new classes of situations.
The basic problem is that there is no right of information privacy in US law. In fact, the common law right of privacy didn't exist until Louis Brandeis wrote his famous law review article, and even *that* varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction.
Way back in 1973, HUD under Elliot Richardson undertook a study on the privacy effects of this new information technology. It was very prescient and insightful about the coming problem, but curiously anemic in its response, which has specific action items onlly for Federal agencies, even though it was clear from the report that they were only a tiny slice of the problem. Why? Because Richardson left HUD (where as a liberal Republican he'd been safely buried) and took over Justice after the Watergate "Saturday Night Massacre". His replacement: Caspar Weinberger, later Reagan's Defense Secretary.
The report's recommendation for the private sector: let the market take its course, and where problems arise that are unbearable, write new laws to patch that problem. That's been the basic stance of US statutory privacy law ever since. That's why we have HIPPAA, and a patchwork of *different* laws embodying *different* philosophies of privacy for each commercial sector, such as banking and credit. It's a mass of ad hoc patches passed whenever the political heat on some problem got too much to ignore. Unlike the European Union, we don't have a fundamental information privacy law. That's why the details of our private lives can be publicly traded.
One of the upshots of this is things we can *see* are *obviously* abuses have to be hashed out in the courts using circuitous reasoning. We have no legal *interest* in the details of our private lives, which are just another commodity. We have to do all kinds of intellectual gymnastics to fit specific acts into frameworks not designed to cover them, because we miss the fundamental interest we have in our privacy, what Brandeis called, "the right to be left alone." We have no such right in US statutory law.
Then it could be called "The Razzler", except the word "razzle" is so poorly adapted to lexicographic survival it can only survive as a parasite on "dazzle".
Reminds me of when I was an MIT student and the Reagan administration came in. It turned the place upside down. Suddenly all those ONR grants were being scrutinized. The catch phrase of the day was "Deaths per Dollar." So we sat around thinking of various things that might have high deaths per dollar.
What about blowing up those huge LNG tanks between the highway and Dorchester Bay? Nope, the Chem-Es informed it it would be almost impossible to get the right stoichiometric mixture to get supersonic burning. Mostly the fuel would drift away.
Then I realized we were working the wrong end of the puzzle.
"Go down to the dump and find and old two by four," I said. "Then head over to Mass Ave. and start whacking people. There you go, *infinite* deaths per dollar."
"That's only true if your time is free," the economist points out.
"This is *government* work," I reminded him.
Read critically, and you'll see that the article is really saying this: the management overreaction to a tiny "porn problem" wasted huge amounts of time and produced almost no results.
I've had my kindle 2 reset mysteriously on me.
All the docs I'd downloaded over USB were gone, along with the notes I'd taken on them. They were the majority of what I had on the device, largely PDFs I'd converted to mobi format using Calibre on Linux. The docs I'd gotten over WhisperNet were archived and I was able to get them back. So if I'd indeed been using it to take notes I really needed later, I'd have been screwed.
Lesson 1: Back up your Kindle, or totally embrace Amazon's version of the cloud in which your device phones home.
Lesson 2: The Kindle is not a note taking device.
That last bit is important. I really like my Kindle, and it's neat that I can take notes on it and sort of play MP3 and browse the web, but it's a book reader. Period. Those other things are bonus features, and if you worry about *how well* the kindle does them, it is not the device for you. I have a kind of crude HTML mashup with my Google Calendar and mail stored on the device, and it's terrific to be able to consult my calendar any place I have coverage, which thus far has been almost everywhere I've taken the device, but it's not as good as a PDA for *calendar management*. That's what PDAs were built to do, and they're really the best thing ever yet devised for that purpose -- even better than smartphones in my opinion, largely because smartphones are designed to lock you into your carrier's value added services.
That said, the Kindle would be nearly perfect for *my* style of academic reading, if it only had a decent keyboard. But that's a highly personal thing. That's probably the single most important thing I've learned about technology marketing: people are different; they need different things and they react to things differently. The brain is a piece of meat; it doesn't work reasonably like a machine would. It has its own rules and they don't make sense.
I've never really understood people who dog ear textbooks or underline passages in them. The people who have elaborate systems of color coded highlighers and sticky notes are even more foreign to me. That's because my brain doesn't work that way.
I went to a parent teacher conference recently to talk about the volume of homework my elementary school son had. A few weeks later, my wife and I were discussing which assignments he should do first.
"He should do section E," I said. "That's what Mrs. Jones said."
"Are you sure?" my wife asked.
"Yes, I'm sure," I replied. "He has to do Section E handwritten, but he can do the flash cards on the computer."
"Where are the notes you took?"
"I recycled them when I got home."
"Why did you take them then?"
"So I'd remember what Mrs. Jones said."
And it's true. If I didn't take notes, I'd never remember something like that. As long as I taken them, I'll never need to *refer* to them. I've tried taking the kind of structured notes they tell you to do at Freshman Orientation, but it just doesn't work for me. The kind of pre-test cramming that some people rely on just doesn't work for me, I'm better off going to bed early. And the *note taking systems themselves* are a distraction. I find they actually reduce my ability recall. For *me at least*, the surest way to remember a source of information is to pay complete attention to it right at the start. This seems to work best if the information passes in some way from my eyes and ears to my hands, but once that has happened the tangible product has no value at all to me.
The thing that is a challenge for me is bibliography: remembering *where* I got a piece of information. So for me, the Kindle would be *perfect* as a note taking device, if it only had a decent keyboard. I often jot a few keywords down on the dreadful little keyboard and voila! I can find the place which prompted a certain thought. That's all I ask from a note taking system.
But other people are different. Many people seemingly need to visit the stationary store like a warrior arming himself before they can
Which raises an interesting question. Would this lead to virtual models replacing live but enhanced ones?
I'm guessing virtually every professionally published image is tweaked in some way, at the very least by color.
It's all a matter of timing.
We know at some point petroleum will become impractical to support the energy needs of civilization as we know it. In 1979, people thought the end was nigh, when in fact it was just an oil cartel flexing its muscle. But the ability of the cartel to do this was a harbinger of peak oil. The US was no longer anywhere near energy self-sufficient. The same thing happened in 2008, suddenly the end was nigh. It wasn't.
Let me draw a closer analogy. During the Dot Com boom, lots of individuals made money, but very, very few web enterprises did. VCs were pouring money into startups with nothing more than a name and a PowerPoint presentation -- not a real business plan. There wasn't time. Money had to be spent. Why? Because everyone knew web commerce was coming. And they were right, web commerce was coming. Yet the vast majority of money invested in those days was wasted, at least from the perspective that investments should provide returns to the investors. In part it was classic bubble behavior, but even *solid* business plans had a huge element of uncertainty. If the business plan was timed *right*, it would be like buying Microsoft in 1986.
Some day, if the conditions are right, one of these photovoltaic "breakthroughs" may take the world by storm. The chance of any single "breakthrough" doing it is vanishingly small, but the chance of *some* "breakthrough" doing it is substantial. It has to be the right development at the right time.
There are basically three avenues I can imagine working:
(1) Really cheap cells. If it works and can be produced commercially, this is an almost certain winner, because there are many places we can use power and are throwing away photons. Probably won't change the world if it is really inefficient, because *other* costs around installation will limit success.
(2) Incrementally better cells. If it works with given production infrastructure and doesn't have any significant drawbacks, a nearly certain winner that will expand the utility of photovoltaics to applications that are currently marginal. Certainly not a big winner in the short term, but a step forward for the tortoise in the race.
(3) Radically more efficient cells. Least likely to succeed, IMHO. The best cells on the market are about 23% efficient; given thermodynamic limits there isn't a *great* deal of room for improvement. Super-efficient cells will probably have niche applications, but any "breakthrough" in this area needs to have the proviso "and costs about the same to produce as current photovoltaics" before it's worth sitting up and taking notice of.
It all depends on the application.
If I'm powering a satellite, I *almost* don't care what it costs. If I'm powering a planetary probe, it'd easily be worth its weight in gold.
On the other end of the spectrum, I read last year about a group working on photovoltaic house paint. That's almost certain to be extremely inefficient. However if it costs about the same as regular house paint, and works about as well, the inefficiency *almost* wouldn't matter. I've got to paint my house anyhow, and I were going to throw those photons away in any case. If I got any useful output from it at all, it'd be a win.
Now for selling vast amounts of energy into a commodity "energy" market, a low total amortized cost per watt is the difference between making a profit and losing money. Efficiency is secondary -- we were throwing those watts away anyhow -- but all other things being equal efficient cells reduce costs. For example, imagine land is your limiting factor. You can get twice as many watts per acre from a cell that was twice as expensive. While land is probably one of the least important factors in scaling a photovoltaic installation up just about *any* expense outside the cell itself is going to be reduced by a more efficient cell exactly the same way.
It's the expenses attached to the cell itself that will determine whether the technology is viable: producing the cell, replacing the cell as it wears out, and disposing of the cell.
The difference is that you (a) took normal steps (having locks on your garage) and (b) suffered damage (not including the assault which raises the stakes in this situation considerably) and (c) asked to have him pay the cost of the extraordinary steps you took to catch him.
If you left your garage wide open and the guy peeked in and saw something you didn't want him to see, it would be reasonable to get injunctive relief (a court order telling him to stop), but not to have a lock put on your garage.
It's not entirely unreasonable for the government to want to discourage this kind of restricted system tourism. But charging this guy to repair its own negligence (not a factor in *your* story) is not only unreasonable, it is *foolish*. It's shooting the bearer of bad news. Bad things will still happen to you, you'll just be the last to know.
Um... You know that that big guy with the gang tattoos and stuff at the end of the bar... the one who just had his cigarette lit by the *other* big guy with the gang tattoos? I just sorta think it'd be a good idea for you to lay off him. Yeah, I know he's a muscle-bound idiot, I'm just saying let it go.
No, no! Don't make eye contact!
Oh, crud.
I'll go fetch the mop.
Genetic alteration to make inedible things food (oh, sorry, got that backwards -- make food inedible) is so 1970s.
We've got to figure out how to turn this stuff into biodiesel.
That's right. The bloat goes elsewhere, where it does less arm, e.g., Slashdot posts describing microkernel operating systems.
This is like the salesman's nightmare, where you take the guy from engineering to visit the customer. Things are going great, the engineer can answer all the customer's questions.
Then you realize, *the stupid bastard is answering the questions honestly*.
Honesty is a basic requirement to be a halfway decent engineer. Persistent and incurable dissatisfaction with how you did the last job is another. Even if you *know* you did a great job, deep inside part of you knows you could have done it *better*.
I just had to deal with this recently. I was converting an old dataset from South Africa on insect predation from dBase and the conversion choked on a number of species designations like "Aplomyia confinis (Fallén 1820)". This is a very common way to identify species, it means, roughly, "An individual classified as Aplomyia confinis according to the taxonomic criteria of Fallén's paper of 1820." Carl Fredrik Fallén (1764-1830) was apparently to fly taxomy what Newton was to physics.
Now it wasn't hard to figure out what was going on. DBase is an old, pre-unicode technology, so characters are all 8 bit bytes. All the 7 bit ASCII characters are encoded compatibly in the major Western European languages, but characters like "é" are encoded inconsistently from country to country, or not at all. In this dataset, what I infer to be "é" was encoded as 9D (decimal 157). In most codepages 9d is encodes the Japanese Yen sign (Â¥), although in other common code pages it is capital or lower case "u" with a grave accent. Some software systems that are permissive render it as "ï½" since 0x9D zero padded left one byte is defined to represent this curious glyph (known as "OPERATING SYSTEM COMMAND") in UTF-8.
Naturally, I just fixed the data with what I surmised to be the correct value, but I was curious as to which code page the dataset might be using; knowing that and doing a proper conversion would be a better procedure than simply fixing the problems I happened to notice. I was unable to find any eight bit code page which had a plausible encoding of 0x9D. It ought to be "é", but I can't know for sure what originator of the data intended.
This shows how wrong headed the long standing "ASCII only" policy of was. It's relaxed now, but it still is apparently "preferred". I call that insane; as somebody once said, the definition of "insane" is "doing the same thing over and over again even though it doesn't work." I understand the purpose of "plain text" as a safeguard againt future format changes, but UTF-8 is just as "plain" as ASCII, and it unlike ASCII it *correctly* encodes a wide variety of texts. Many of the texts in the Gutenberg collection are obscure because of the ASCII policy, which makes it impossible to accurately transcribe Greek letters, mathematical symbols, or words in may European languages (let alone non-European).
I think eating implies coexistence, although the converse is not necessarily true.
Well, I don't know about NZ, but I have doubts about their next door neighbors. Tie me kangaroo down, sport, indeed.