I agree. I'm just pointing out there's a world of difference between imagining some system built and operating and imagining how to get it built and operating, and the differences start with where you're going to get the money.
I'm not. Warm water is what the models say are going to drive the greater precipitation.
I also think there will be *specific* incidents where warm water creates a US landfall where one wouldn't otherwise have happened (e.g. the Harvey scenario). We just don't have any reliable evidence that the rate of landfalls in the US will be greater, and the evidence that the rate of hurricane formation will increase isn't there either. That's because a hurricane forming and staying together is result of chaotic interaction with other weather systems which will also become more powerful.
There's lots of things we can do that we aren't doing because of the cost. We could be building a vehicle right now that would send a man to Mars at the 2024 launch window. But we're talking about at least 10+ years after that for a good reason: nobody wants to spend the kind of money it would take to have the kind of program where you could commit to an actual date for a mission. But we are willing to spend enough to kick the can down the road roughly in the direction of Mars.
Same goes with engineering systems. It would be great to have a non-rocket launch system that could put stuff in orbit. That would save a ton of money on a per-mission basis, but nobody wants to spend the kind of money it would take to even start seriously looking at a space elevator or sky hook.
My point is the best way to handle a story idea like this is a suspenseful thriller. I was a few years off on that though; the 70s were the heyday of "diaster" films which are primarily visual spectacle. 1970 was a pivotal year. The same year that saw Colossus, the Forbin Project also saw Airport, that kicked off the disaster-film fad.
What I'm saying is that most people are parochial in their outlook, both in space and time. If something doesn't happen to them personally and preferably very recently, it might as well never happen as far as their opinions are concerned.
The strength of the hurricane in any particular place is not a straightforward function of atmospheric energy. For example many Cape Verde hurricanes weaken to tropical storms by the time they hit the US; it's not because they interact with other weather systems which are also driven by atmospheric and ocean energy.
I understand that the notion AGW == stronger hurricanes hitting the US "stands to reason", but the model support is weak on that point. What models are almost unequivocal on is significantly higher rainfall. We saw what that looks like with Harvey. Harvey weakened dramatically after landfall, but still delivered devastating rainfall to places that saw relatively little wind damage. This is consistent with what happened in Katrina; almost nobody was killed by wind, but flooding and its aftermath killed something like 1800 people.
Hacking a global weather control network is a pretty old sci-fi trope. It's just a variant on technology run amok.
Had a movie along these lines been done fifty years ago it almost certainly would have been better. That's because without elaborate computer generated effects to rub into your eyeballs the director would have had to use suspense to entertain the audience.
In any case being scientifically literate ruins most movie and TV sci-fi. I spent most of the Star Trek Discovery premier pissed off by fact that the writers are apparently unaware that most visible stars in the galaxy are multiple star systems, and that being near a binary wouldn't change the amount of radiation experienced by astronauts much if at all. But then I get irritated when Star Trek movies assume that you have to go by Saturn and the Moon on the way to the Earth. Didn't the writers realize that the path of the Milky Way in the sky is tilted with respect to the ecliptic?
I'm quite familiar with the IPCC projections, by the way. That's why I didn't suggest that hurricanes would be more frequent. And as the model results suggesting hurricanes would be stronger are relatively weak, I left those out. The one thing the models consistently predict is more rainfall. And that's serious enough.
Now denilaists like to set up staw men to paint concern over AGW as "alarmist", and there are people peddling scenarios (like human extinction) that are extremely improbable. I steer clear of that by sticking with what there's overwhelming evidence for, and that this: climate change is going to cost us a boatload of money to deal with.
Certain people like to confuse hurricanes not hitting the US and hurricanes not happening at all.
Hurricanes hitting the US are the product of a long string of chaotic interactions between low pressure areas and surrounding weather systems. Climate models aren't very good at predicting those, so we don't really know if hurricanes will be more frequent under the various global warming scenarios.
The thing that the models consistently point to is greater rainfall, wherever the hurricane happens to go. That, along with increased development in flood-prone areas, will make future hurricanes more costly and dangerous.
Yep, storms rapidly lose power over land. That said, there are places that still could be looking at 5" of rain.
Anyone in NE Alabama, NW Georgia or Eastern Tennessee should keep alert for flood warnings. If you do go out, do not try to drive through standing water more than a couple inches deep, particularly if that water is moving.
Remember it's flooding that kills the most people in most storms in the US. Very few people live in a structure that would be blown down by even a category 3 storm (excepting trailers).
Up to a point, sure. For what in relational terms would be selection, projection, and aggregation of delimited input, awk works great. PERL slots in where you'd start thinking about writing a C program instead.
The idea that Perl doesn't do one thing well just goes to show people haven't changed; they latch onto a catch phrase then go running around seeing who they can whack with it, apparently proving to themselves how clever they are.
PERL's wheelhouse from back in the day was right there in the name: practical extraction and report language. People who actually did that stuff for a living had no difficulty grasping PERL's significance: it made your job easier.
Well, actually having been in the position of developing products, the part you're missing is the way novelty and utility dovetail. A pragmatist won't buy something until it's proven to work. The way you do that is you sell novelty to early adopters and prove that it works with them.
You can't use the same message for early adopters and pragmatists; you can't sell to them both at the same time. But they're both on the long term path to success.
Who cares if crowdfunding projects meet some academic definition of "innovation"?
That question asked, I suspect the "problem" has to do with the tech adoption cycle: early adopters and pragmatists are two different groups that are important at different phases of a product's life. Anyone who has ever sold a tech product into a market that's never seen tech before (granted a less common experience than it was twenty years ago) knows you can't appeal to both groups at the same time.
In the end success means winning the pragmatists over, but early adopters are a key step toward that goal.
The problem with these evolutionary behavior argument is that it's so easy to gin up a scenario to support whatever preconception you have.
Now let's take the notion that we evolved to have preference for mates that look like us. In fact social psychologists have long shown that people are more attracted to others who resemble them. But there's a big difference between selecting a mate, and who you mate with. When you actually look at peoples' genes, it's clear people aren't nearly so picky about outbreeding as this suggests.
Jobs did have a genius for marketing, but that wasn't the only role he had in Apple's success. I'd boil his genius down to three factors: (1) timing; (2) and appreciation of the value of design; and (3) discipline.
Timing: As you point out, Jobs didn't create any products people hadn't tried to create before; but they were all premature. Jobs was good at recognizing when all the technological pieces (display, battery, processor, UI) had reached the point where you could create a successful product.
Design: Apple is as much a design company as it is a tech company. That was Jobs doing. He recognized that design was valuable and useful in itself, and built his company around groundbreaking design. But as with inventing, he was not a designer of products himself. That was guys like Jonathan Ive. Jobs own personal contributions to Apple designs were minimal, and questionable (e.g. the skeuomorphic brushed aluminum surfaces on some version of the Quicktime player).
Discipline: One of the first things Jobs did when he returned to Apple was cut down Apple's broad and confusing product offerings, both simplifying marketing and the manufacturing process. This was a hallmark of his decision making process: not doing things that on paper looked reasonable but which collectively imposed a death-of-a-thousand-cuts on its manufacturing, design and marketing efforts.
This of course is an enormous issue: people imprint on the first solution to a problem they understand.
But I think more to the point here is Java's long struggle with overengineered frameworks and libraries. They tend to have a "designed by a committee" feel, and impose significant cognitive load on learners. Add to that first-solution-imprinting, and it's a recipe for trouble.
Ulitmately, though, this is no new thing. There have always been a small number of people who produce elegant, quality code and a much larger body of people who are mediocre. What's happened is that the scope of application has expanded to the point where we're asking mediocre people to do quite difficult things.
I'm guessing Tesla really can't do it well enough, cheap enough either... yet.
But one of the advantages of having a Bond villain as chairman and CEO is that he's a little less bound by quarterly profit targets and the need to dole out healthy shareholder dividends like clockwork.
For the first fifteen years after Microsoft went public it never paid a penny in dividends. Investors didn't expect dividends; they expected all the profits to be plowed back into world domination.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I'm just pointing out there's a world of difference between imagining some system built and operating and imagining how to get it built and operating, and the differences start with where you're going to get the money.
I'm not. Warm water is what the models say are going to drive the greater precipitation.
I also think there will be *specific* incidents where warm water creates a US landfall where one wouldn't otherwise have happened (e.g. the Harvey scenario). We just don't have any reliable evidence that the rate of landfalls in the US will be greater, and the evidence that the rate of hurricane formation will increase isn't there either. That's because a hurricane forming and staying together is result of chaotic interaction with other weather systems which will also become more powerful.
They've got Twitter up on the ISS.
There's lots of things we can do that we aren't doing because of the cost. We could be building a vehicle right now that would send a man to Mars at the 2024 launch window. But we're talking about at least 10+ years after that for a good reason: nobody wants to spend the kind of money it would take to have the kind of program where you could commit to an actual date for a mission. But we are willing to spend enough to kick the can down the road roughly in the direction of Mars.
Same goes with engineering systems. It would be great to have a non-rocket launch system that could put stuff in orbit. That would save a ton of money on a per-mission basis, but nobody wants to spend the kind of money it would take to even start seriously looking at a space elevator or sky hook.
Well that's what global warming is. It's not a uniform warming ot the globe, it's an increase in energy content of the troposphere and upper ocean.
My point is the best way to handle a story idea like this is a suspenseful thriller. I was a few years off on that though; the 70s were the heyday of "diaster" films which are primarily visual spectacle. 1970 was a pivotal year. The same year that saw Colossus, the Forbin Project also saw Airport, that kicked off the disaster-film fad.
What I'm saying is that most people are parochial in their outlook, both in space and time. If something doesn't happen to them personally and preferably very recently, it might as well never happen as far as their opinions are concerned.
The strength of the hurricane in any particular place is not a straightforward function of atmospheric energy. For example many Cape Verde hurricanes weaken to tropical storms by the time they hit the US; it's not because they interact with other weather systems which are also driven by atmospheric and ocean energy.
I understand that the notion AGW == stronger hurricanes hitting the US "stands to reason", but the model support is weak on that point. What models are almost unequivocal on is significantly higher rainfall. We saw what that looks like with Harvey. Harvey weakened dramatically after landfall, but still delivered devastating rainfall to places that saw relatively little wind damage. This is consistent with what happened in Katrina; almost nobody was killed by wind, but flooding and its aftermath killed something like 1800 people.
Hacking a global weather control network is a pretty old sci-fi trope. It's just a variant on technology run amok.
Had a movie along these lines been done fifty years ago it almost certainly would have been better. That's because without elaborate computer generated effects to rub into your eyeballs the director would have had to use suspense to entertain the audience.
In any case being scientifically literate ruins most movie and TV sci-fi. I spent most of the Star Trek Discovery premier pissed off by fact that the writers are apparently unaware that most visible stars in the galaxy are multiple star systems, and that being near a binary wouldn't change the amount of radiation experienced by astronauts much if at all. But then I get irritated when Star Trek movies assume that you have to go by Saturn and the Moon on the way to the Earth. Didn't the writers realize that the path of the Milky Way in the sky is tilted with respect to the ecliptic?
Where did I say hurricanes will be more frequent?
I'm quite familiar with the IPCC projections, by the way. That's why I didn't suggest that hurricanes would be more frequent. And as the model results suggesting hurricanes would be stronger are relatively weak, I left those out. The one thing the models consistently predict is more rainfall. And that's serious enough.
Now denilaists like to set up staw men to paint concern over AGW as "alarmist", and there are people peddling scenarios (like human extinction) that are extremely improbable. I steer clear of that by sticking with what there's overwhelming evidence for, and that this: climate change is going to cost us a boatload of money to deal with.
Certain people like to confuse hurricanes not hitting the US and hurricanes not happening at all.
Hurricanes hitting the US are the product of a long string of chaotic interactions between low pressure areas and surrounding weather systems. Climate models aren't very good at predicting those, so we don't really know if hurricanes will be more frequent under the various global warming scenarios.
The thing that the models consistently point to is greater rainfall, wherever the hurricane happens to go. That, along with increased development in flood-prone areas, will make future hurricanes more costly and dangerous.
Oh, come now. This is news for nerds after all.
Cyberstalking generally isn't something that people who are good at thinking things through and restricting their behaviors accordingly do.
Yep, storms rapidly lose power over land. That said, there are places that still could be looking at 5" of rain.
Anyone in NE Alabama, NW Georgia or Eastern Tennessee should keep alert for flood warnings. If you do go out, do not try to drive through standing water more than a couple inches deep, particularly if that water is moving.
Remember it's flooding that kills the most people in most storms in the US. Very few people live in a structure that would be blown down by even a category 3 storm (excepting trailers).
Batman vs. Bond would have been a better movie.
Up to a point, sure. For what in relational terms would be selection, projection, and aggregation of delimited input, awk works great. PERL slots in where you'd start thinking about writing a C program instead.
The idea that Perl doesn't do one thing well just goes to show people haven't changed; they latch onto a catch phrase then go running around seeing who they can whack with it, apparently proving to themselves how clever they are.
PERL's wheelhouse from back in the day was right there in the name: practical extraction and report language. People who actually did that stuff for a living had no difficulty grasping PERL's significance: it made your job easier.
Well, actually having been in the position of developing products, the part you're missing is the way novelty and utility dovetail. A pragmatist won't buy something until it's proven to work. The way you do that is you sell novelty to early adopters and prove that it works with them.
You can't use the same message for early adopters and pragmatists; you can't sell to them both at the same time. But they're both on the long term path to success.
Who cares if crowdfunding projects meet some academic definition of "innovation"?
That question asked, I suspect the "problem" has to do with the tech adoption cycle: early adopters and pragmatists are two different groups that are important at different phases of a product's life. Anyone who has ever sold a tech product into a market that's never seen tech before (granted a less common experience than it was twenty years ago) knows you can't appeal to both groups at the same time.
In the end success means winning the pragmatists over, but early adopters are a key step toward that goal.
The problem with these evolutionary behavior argument is that it's so easy to gin up a scenario to support whatever preconception you have.
Now let's take the notion that we evolved to have preference for mates that look like us. In fact social psychologists have long shown that people are more attracted to others who resemble them. But there's a big difference between selecting a mate, and who you mate with. When you actually look at peoples' genes, it's clear people aren't nearly so picky about outbreeding as this suggests.
In the way that Steve Jobs "invented" the iPhone, yes.
Jobs did have a genius for marketing, but that wasn't the only role he had in Apple's success. I'd boil his genius down to three factors: (1) timing; (2) and appreciation of the value of design; and (3) discipline.
Timing: As you point out, Jobs didn't create any products people hadn't tried to create before; but they were all premature. Jobs was good at recognizing when all the technological pieces (display, battery, processor, UI) had reached the point where you could create a successful product.
Design: Apple is as much a design company as it is a tech company. That was Jobs doing. He recognized that design was valuable and useful in itself, and built his company around groundbreaking design. But as with inventing, he was not a designer of products himself. That was guys like Jonathan Ive. Jobs own personal contributions to Apple designs were minimal, and questionable (e.g. the skeuomorphic brushed aluminum surfaces on some version of the Quicktime player).
Discipline: One of the first things Jobs did when he returned to Apple was cut down Apple's broad and confusing product offerings, both simplifying marketing and the manufacturing process. This was a hallmark of his decision making process: not doing things that on paper looked reasonable but which collectively imposed a death-of-a-thousand-cuts on its manufacturing, design and marketing efforts.
This of course is an enormous issue: people imprint on the first solution to a problem they understand.
But I think more to the point here is Java's long struggle with overengineered frameworks and libraries. They tend to have a "designed by a committee" feel, and impose significant cognitive load on learners. Add to that first-solution-imprinting, and it's a recipe for trouble.
Ulitmately, though, this is no new thing. There have always been a small number of people who produce elegant, quality code and a much larger body of people who are mediocre. What's happened is that the scope of application has expanded to the point where we're asking mediocre people to do quite difficult things.
Microsoft demonstrates the transition from a startup, growth oriented company to a mature, profit oriented one.
Jobs, by the way, hardly counts as an inventor. Visionary, sure, but that's not the same thing at all.
I'm guessing Tesla really can't do it well enough, cheap enough either ... yet.
But one of the advantages of having a Bond villain as chairman and CEO is that he's a little less bound by quarterly profit targets and the need to dole out healthy shareholder dividends like clockwork.
For the first fifteen years after Microsoft went public it never paid a penny in dividends. Investors didn't expect dividends; they expected all the profits to be plowed back into world domination.