I'll admit that an IQ test is not completely deterministic of actual intelligence. But it's the best we've got.
TO address you enumerated points: 1) yes there have been different selection pressures. Exactly how important an individual pressure is in determining overall intelligence is not clear. 2) What do you mean by 'very little gene flow'? Because until recent times there wasn't really much gene flow into certain races (Japanese, Australian aborigine) but a fair amount in others (European, South Asian). You may think that it is racist BS, but the topic is still a hot one with much research going on. I suggest you read the wikipedia article on "Racial Intelligence" for a broad summary of the field.
Personally, I'd like to believe that my race is the most intelligent. But science seems to be showing that it is not. I can deal with those results, because I believe in the value of scientific weighing of the various attributes of different animals, including man.
I'd like to point out that while I scored rather highly on IQ tests as a child, they really don't have much bearing some thirty years later. It's quite difficult to measure intelligence as opposed to learning at the higher end of the scale, in adults.
It can be shown that native intelligence is heritable to some degree. There's even racial differences in average IQ - with east Asians being the smartest (oh that ought to get me a lot of flack).
But more importantly, is the idea that intelligence is self-selecting. When the stupid choose to have sex with the stupid, they'll also do stupid things during pregnancy (drink Brawndo, for instance), treat their children stupidly (i.e. without enough the proper stimuli) and the combination of genetic inferiority, developmental inferiority, and a society that glamourizes both will create a society that will ruin itself faster than lead pipes ruined Rome.
What I find amazing is that people today choose to be stupid, even as adults who are have a reasonably high IQ. There's huge social pressure to act stupidly.
I could say that humanity is on the cusp of a drastic change, but we've been in a period of drastic change for a while so that sounds a bit stale. But if we can manage to survive the great social upheaval that will accompany a change in energy sources, we will modify the DNA of every living thing. This, coupled with eventual space colonization, is one possible outcome, Idiocracy is another. I don't know which will happen, but things will NOT be as they are now in a century.
Well, I hope when they come to Cambridge, Microsoft will realize a few things:
1) The machine is in production. It's too late to make hardware changes. Wayyyyy too late.
2) It's already got an SD slot. And it will hold a 4gb, possibly 8gb, SD device.
3) OLPC is not really interested in running Windows..or any other proprietary product (even the Marvell Libertas has been a very contentious issue). Go port XP to the XO if you want, but don't expect to be welcomed with open arms.
4) How can you be so clueless as to the above facts? Perhaps you could blithely ignore #3, but #1 and #2 are pretty evident.
I am so damned tired of questions like "Will $nextyear be the year of Linux on the desktop?". Linux is already on the desktop. it has been for years. And I hate to say it, because I don't like hype, but Ubuntu really does deliver the goods for the best desktop system ever. Ubuntu can do 95% (or so) of what Microsoft can do on the desktop, and a lot that Microsoft can't.
What the Linux world is missing out on is the specialized applications, such as CAD, electronics design, chemistry, etc. It would be great to have native builds of these tools, and not to have to run them under emulation.
Haven't you figured out that the majority of the bible is just ballast to cover the underlying message, which is hidden (see Steganography)? I mean, why do you think that numbers and letters have such a strange relationship in Hebrew? (I don't know about Aramaic though, perhaps the new testament isn't encoded in the same way). Here's some clues: Cheese! 55/89 This statement is false. Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
One has to wonder if it's really worth the money, or is it just a boondoggle? German tax rates are already very high, among the highest in Europe. These high taxes are responsible for much industry moving to, or starting in, other EC countries with much lower costs, such as Slovakia or even Ireland (Ireland has low taxes but other costs are now getting quite high). This is quite a problem, particularly in the East, where the industrial base is not as developed as in the West. The West has many highly skilled jobs, such as R&D, that cannot be easily moved to other countries nor easily replicated by those countries. The East gets both bad parts of both underdeveloped countries - the high taxes and expenses of being in Germany with the economic development of Romania.
I am not saying that the West hasn't put a lot of money into fixing up the east since reunification. In fact, the German government has spent more money fixing the East than the US has destroying Iraq. Industry is slowly moving into the east, at least in the larger cities (Dresden and Leipzig), but its pace is slow. It could be sped up by lowering taxes.
I wonder about expensive German projects like the railway tunnel under the center of Leipzig. It's Leipzig's version of Boston's "Big Dig". It has a cost of over 20,000 eu per Leipzig resident! While it is appealing from a transportation point of view and exciting from a civil engineering one, I don't see it as being worth the price. The Munich project sounds similarly unjustified.
All this having been said, I am not 100% just of myself. I have never been to Munich, I don't know how bad the airport travel is. It's also possible that much of this spending will in fact (rather than in rhetoric) be an investment which can be recouped by future sales to other cities and countries. Perhaps some of the R&D necessary has already been done in the Shanghai project.
As far as what one poster said about New York: Surely, you jest. It would be so expensive and poorly constructed, if done in and by New Yorkers, that it wold make Boston's Big Dig look like a swiss watch by comparison. I don't think that New York has the wherewithal to build another wonder of the industrial world on the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hopefully, they'll know enough not to attempt it. I have considerably more confidence in the competence and honesty of Germans in completing such a large project.
There's information that Japan had tried to surrender before the US dropped the bombs on them, but this surrender was considered inconvenient so it was ignored. You want my sources? BAH! This is Slashdot! We don't need no steenkin sources!
What a bunch of FUD. This is what I'd expect from Microsoft or similar. It's already clear that the Linux kernel cannot ever adopt any new license, and it the keystone for all Linux distributions. Many, many other projects have already said they will not adopt the GPLv3. I am sure that many Linux distributions will be wary of it as well, making it very prominent wherever a package is provided with said license. ("warning: module rmsgnu.o taints the kernel").
It's a shame to see such FUD perpetrated under the BSD banner, when there is actually so much more that the communities of Linux and BSD have in common than that which separates them. The only thing I have as bad is this is that NetBSD spinoff company that promotes their own embedded BSD version (Wasabi).
Like many space and exotic aircraft, it must have to expend a lot of energy to get to its cruising altitude. Once that's done, conditions should become easier. Would it be considered 'cheating' to launch such a perpetual flying machine with an assistance device? That could be either disposable batteries that are jettisoned when discharged, or some chemcal rocket engine, or a jet engine, or have it launched from an aircraft.
Insolation is going to me much better at high altitudes. I just hope the photovoltaic cells are designed to take advantage of the increased amount of energy available in the UV spectrum. How about filling the free space in the wings with hydrogen? That might help lift a little, at least from the ground. However, there would have to be some way of dealing with the reduced pressure at operational altitude.
There's been a lot of interesting improvements in PV efficiency lately. However, most of these seem to only happen when the cell is operated at insolation far above normal. These are obtained by focusing the sunlight. Unfortunately, all of the technologies I know of which could do this are heavier than simply adding more, less efficient cells which operate at normal insolation or the slight improvement that high-atmosphere flight provides.
For some time, I was quite annoyed at being charged quite a bit to read scientific papers. But then, I had a thought that there might be a good reason for it: that there is a lot of work in checking that there is good scientific methodology behind the paper, i.e. it's an issue of value-addition through through selection. That would seem like a good reason to charge for journals. So I shut up for a while. But I am starting to get angry again, now that I find that much of the selection is not done reasonably, but is instead just a very disreputable part of the great machinery of the politics of science. No, I don't have any examples at hand.
So my conclusion is that if you find the selection that the journals you read is fair, then subscribe. Otherwise, do not, and do not submit to them either. The problem with this method is that you may never know what kind of back room sausage machine the editorial staff are running for very many years.
After attending the grand celebration of the final book at Harvard Square, I wasn't going to wait in line to buy the book. I simply went home and spend five seconds (literally - that fast) and downloaded it. It took about 12 hours to read.
It's complex. It really depends a lot on the books before it, including some details that may have seemed trivial in the prior books. So, you'd do best to re-read them if it's been a while and your memory of them is foggy.
I was happy to see some of my theories about character motivation born out, though they were slightly different than I had guessed they would be (I mean Snape and Dumbledore).
I wonder how children are going to react to this book. It's very complicated, like I said, and it will probably take them a long time to get through it.
There's also subtle propaganda in it, not all of which I agree. But I admire her propagandist craft. I don't know if my side would ever be able to come out with such a clever counter-propaganda.
I don't think it would be hard to find some company to pay $5m, if they could keep the rights to the images, and pull a Westlaw type of scam. I am sure Harvard-Smithsonian isn't going to fall for this. They want to keep these images for the public, which makes it difficult for anyone to build a business model on and therefore difficult to get funding for. How would Google make money on this? Google adwords for a particular star? Or perhaps on google maps - "coffee near Barnard's star"? I am not saying that Google won't do this, just that it's not as simple of a decision for them as you might think. There's really no way to prove it's value to Google stockholders.
I am sure that the glass plates aren't going to be thrown away when this is done. They'll just be moved away from the very expensive Cambridge real estate on which they currently sit, and the space will be reused for storing more astronomers.
The reason why Harvard HAS so much money is because they don't SPEND it. Kind of like that crazy uncle Joe you have (or wish you had), the one that drove a school bus for his whole adult life and died with an estate worth over a million dollars. Yeah, Harvard is weird like that. I should know. I am depending on a NSF grant for my salary at Harvard, the school doesn't seem to want to give me any of its money. However, they seem to fund all sorts of useless "humanities" programs (I am not saying that all humanities interests are useless, but that Harvard doesn't place enough value on hard science).
Goddamn it...just trying to read and reason through this argument makes my head hurt. This is like the old SCO orguments all over again. Both sides have lawyers trying to be clever by introducing more and more complexity. This is the diseased law system we now have, thanks to not only greedy show-off lawyers but people who are ready to accept them as necessary in their world. Software licenses should be pretty easy to understand - this goes for GPLv3 and everything else. Contracts between Microsoft and Novell should be simple and easy to understand. But they aren't. Lawyers screwing everyone again.
There can be such a thing as an honest and useful lawyer. A lawyer should take pride in creating a contract that clearly lays out the rights and responsibilities of both parties. There should be no vague language, and no grey areas left over. A contract should be designed so that any breach of it would be such a clear-cut violation that the violator would have not a leg to stand on in court, and therefore not think that they can get away with bad behavior.
There should be no wiggle room. None. Ockham's Razor comes to mind as a way of making everything clear and solid.
In a way, criminal and common law can also be thought of as a contract of sorts, and that the same principles of clarity simplicity, and zero wiggle room should apply. Laws should be engineered - no extra crap piled on. Like engineered products, there are occasional minor revisions that need to be made to fix bugs or to become compatible with another body of law. Eventually, however, a complete rewrite of a section of law would be commissioned - one in which the simplicity of the section of law becomes clearer and more simple, and is free of bugs, while being compatible. This is what our lawyers, courts, and legislatures ought to be doing, and are not.
There's just too much cruft in the law. I wonder what would happen if we were to take a crack team of programmers and turn them lose to rewrite the legal code.
My point was mainly that in the US, the anti wind-turbine movement is funded and largely run by the wealthy and privileged. Regardless, your view from a small fishing village is still a luxury. Personally, I like the view of windmills. And lighthouses. Do you think people, who complained that when a given lighthouse was build hundreds of years ago, were taken seriously at all? Of course not - the utility of a lighthouse outweighs the objection of diminished natural beauty. I imagine that many of the people who didn't like lighthouses built were those who would secretly profit from salvaging/pirating ships lost upon the rocks. That is probably similar in some respects to today, where oil billionairs (Koch) are the most active opponents of wind power.
As I sit here, my view is impeded by buildings, there is visual and noise interference of man with nature in the sky by aircraft, and even some ways away from the road the sound of cars takes away from my enjoyment of nature. The birds are still louder. I don't mind though - because were I not so close to civilization I could not take advantage of things like public transit, easily available groceries, entertainment, social events, or even such things as quality medical care and electricity on demand. If I desire to be a hermit, I will have to move further away from civilization in order to be free of its interference. In such a case, windmills on the horizon would be the least of my worries.
I suggest a compromise - that each person who objects to windmills find some way to generate for themselves all of their electricity needs, without releasing greenhouse gases. You can't use coal, or petroleum, wood, or even horses (methane source). You might try building a nuclear reactor, but I doubt you'd be successful. You'd probably have to adapt some bicycles to a generator, and hook it to batteries, to get enough electricity to power one dim light bulb and to spend ten minutes online per day, where you could take the high road and complain about the blight of windmills. All that bicycling you'd have to do would be great for your heart, lungs, and legs. I still would think you were crazy, but at least you wouldn't be labeled as a greedy, anti-social NIMBY.
But....these will block Ted Kennedy's view of Norway!
Seriously..all these people complain about wind turbines blocking the view of their million-dollar ocean cottages get no sympathy from me. They ought to think about the value their oceanfront property will have when the oceans rise thirty feet because the polar ice caps melt due to global warming. Oh wait, NIMBY! I forgot! Make it someone else's problem!
I am the oldest of three boys. My youngest brother is pretty smart, and more importantly he has his thoughts better organized than me. I can be a bit all over the map, but I think I have been inductive reasoning than him.
I have noticed that oldest siblings, tend to have better leadership skills and desires. This sort of makes sense, when you think about it. However, my brothers and I are all pretty close in age - I would guess that the differences in leadership would be more pronounced with a greater difference in age, whereas I expect that the IQ difference noticed would increase with difference in age to a certain point (as the eldest gets exclusive attention until #2 comes along), and then decrease (as eldest becomes less of a care burden to parents, and also contributes to the intellectual development of the younger child). But the leadership skills would increase through age difference to a much higher point before decreasing. What I mean by this, is that as a sixteen year old I could feel comfortable leading my twelve year old brother, but I don't think I'd have much effect on an infant, and by the time the infant was twelve, I'd be out of my parents' house and therefore not as effected or effective.
BUT, these are just statistics. I believe that life events, genetics, and family personality has a far greater effect than birth order.
Now, some notes on IQ. IQ means intelligence quotient. Beyond that, there is no universally agreed upon meaning. The original IQ tests by Binet were developed to measure intellect of children. The later tests, Stanford-Binet, were extended to test young adults, with the goal of predicting academic success. These were adapted for testing of recruits in the US military, to determine officer potential. Stanford-Binet is very accurate in useful in this regard. However, there are many other attributes of intelligence which are not tested by Stanford-Binet and this has caused it to be criticized.
I believe the test has value. Is this because I did well on the test? My score was in the 'gifted' range, just a few points short of 'genius', so it's obviously not totally accurate, as I am in fact a genius mad scientist!;)
I don't pretend to be an expert on it, but from what I've read, ZFS just isn't ready yet. It hasn't been fulled 'baked' to get all the bugs out. For instance, being the boot file system is still pretty new. File systems are pretty critical things, Apple would hate to commit to ZFS just to have it be junk, especially when there's no contract that makes promises (maybe they could hire Sun to fix it up really nice, and have some guarantees - but I don't know if this has happened. Maybe it's happening right now). In the meantime, Apple is just waiting for all the unpaid testers to find the bugs. Apple I am sure has lots of in-house work on it as well.
That being said, I really don't like Apple or Steve Jobs. I am no Apple fanboy.
What about the mutant humans with horrible mutations but also special powers, and the gangs of outlaws trafficing in radioactive materials, without fear because the police and military fear to tred in the radioactive area? A mutant leader with horrible mind control powers who desires absolute power at any expense, and is building the New Soviet Union out of the rubble of Chernobyl?
Yes, the efficiency of modern consumer photovoltaics has much room in terms of improvement. Typically, they're still more effective than photosynthesis. However, it's not just efficiency that's a problem - it's environment. The 40+% efficiency being quoted is with hundreds of suns, i.e. with lots of mirrors or lenses in comparison to the semiconductor area size. This is all good and fine, because mirrors are cheap to produce in comparison to semiconductors, but there's still that nasty problem of waste heat. I don't know about their technology, but the current generation of PV is very much allergic to high temperatures. I mean, anything that makes you sweat is going to make the PV cell feel bad as well (i.e., less efficient - specifically, I mean a drop in output voltage). It also shortens their life. If you were able to keep a PV cell at just above water freezing, continuously, it would last 50+ years. But if you keep at at 100F, it's going to poop out at 10-15 years.
Then there's the whole question of control and storage. Semiconductors are expensive per volume, so the desire to use as little of them as possible is not just so you can fit a pentium3-500 equivalent in your pocket - it's so the chip fabs can get more out of a hunk of pure silicon. When you start pumping a lot of current through them, that minor inefficiency, which gets lost in heat, becomes more than just a problem of not being able to use all the electricity you put into the device - the heat builds up and becomes a problem. So, you have to keep a large enough surface area on the devices, so they can disapate heat into either the air or heat sinks or liquid cooling devices. That extra silicon costs money, and lots of it, which is why the power controllers / battery chargers for 500 watt solar cells cost so much. And this gets me back to why I brought up conventional semiconductors in the first place - it's great that they get 40% efficiency, but how much of the energy they harness do they have to spend on fancy cooling systems? How long does this 40% cell last at 10^2 Sols? I imagine that, because they are using multi-spectrum cells, they heat much less than traditional cells (because light of a greater variety of wavelengths is being converted into electricity) but still, what about that almost 60% of the solar power at 10^2 sols? where does it go? into heat, that's where, and you are going to have to get it out of there damned quick. I think that if they could reduce the light intensity required in order to get this type of efficiency, to, say, 10 Suns, we'd have a real winner on our hands.
Everyone things their data is important, but it's up to management to decide what the value of each type of data is. Certainly, the critical financial data mention in one post here has a high value. However, how long does it have to remain online? Other data has less value, but some tangible value, such as old email. How long does it have to remain online vs. the convenience of having it at your fingertips?
Managers pull apart the poor sysadmin, but in the end you have to tell them that they have to decide the value of each type of data, and segregate it appropriately. I did this in a crappy company I used to work for that made codecs for cellphones and video games. Management had its head up its collective ass, so I just took control (something I shouldn't have to do on a sysadmin's salary with no stock options) and told them the cost of data on each storage solution. I left before the plan was fully implemented, but the ideas was to have important financial data and current software in development on the expensive commercial NAS, the audio files, email, and miscellaneous junk on the cheap Linux RAID box I build out of white-box parts. The only time the linux box had a problem was when the AC failed in the data closet (the NAS was located right near it, and I wonder if it would have puked a few moments after the Linux box panicked. Note that having reliable environmental controls is probably more important than choosing the expensive hardware). I left before the division of data was fully separated, but it seemed like it was going well. Every manager's ass seemed to be fully covered, and at a reasonable cost.
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, forgive me for being late.
I'll admit that an IQ test is not completely deterministic of actual intelligence. But it's the best we've got.
TO address you enumerated points: 1) yes there have been different selection pressures. Exactly how important an individual pressure is in determining overall intelligence is not clear. 2) What do you mean by 'very little gene flow'? Because until recent times there wasn't really much gene flow into certain races (Japanese, Australian aborigine) but a fair amount in others (European, South Asian). You may think that it is racist BS, but the topic is still a hot one with much research going on. I suggest you read the wikipedia article on "Racial Intelligence" for a broad summary of the field.
Personally, I'd like to believe that my race is the most intelligent. But science seems to be showing that it is not. I can deal with those results, because I believe in the value of scientific weighing of the various attributes of different animals, including man.
I'd like to point out that while I scored rather highly on IQ tests as a child, they really don't have much bearing some thirty years later. It's quite difficult to measure intelligence as opposed to learning at the higher end of the scale, in adults.
It can be shown that native intelligence is heritable to some degree. There's even racial differences in average IQ - with east Asians being the smartest (oh that ought to get me a lot of flack).
But more importantly, is the idea that intelligence is self-selecting. When the stupid choose to have sex with the stupid, they'll also do stupid things during pregnancy (drink Brawndo, for instance), treat their children stupidly (i.e. without enough the proper stimuli) and the combination of genetic inferiority, developmental inferiority, and a society that glamourizes both will create a society that will ruin itself faster than lead pipes ruined Rome.
What I find amazing is that people today choose to be stupid, even as adults who are have a reasonably high IQ. There's huge social pressure to act stupidly.
I could say that humanity is on the cusp of a drastic change, but we've been in a period of drastic change for a while so that sounds a bit stale. But if we can manage to survive the great social upheaval that will accompany a change in energy sources, we will modify the DNA of every living thing. This, coupled with eventual space colonization, is one possible outcome, Idiocracy is another. I don't know which will happen, but things will NOT be as they are now in a century.
Well, I hope when they come to Cambridge, Microsoft will realize a few things:
1) The machine is in production. It's too late to make hardware changes. Wayyyyy too late.
2) It's already got an SD slot. And it will hold a 4gb, possibly 8gb, SD device.
3) OLPC is not really interested in running Windows..or any other proprietary product (even the Marvell Libertas has been a very contentious issue). Go port XP to the XO if you want, but don't expect to be welcomed with open arms.
4) How can you be so clueless as to the above facts? Perhaps you could blithely ignore #3, but #1 and #2 are pretty evident.
I am so damned tired of questions like "Will $nextyear be the year of Linux on the desktop?". Linux is already on the desktop. it has been for years. And I hate to say it, because I don't like hype, but Ubuntu really does deliver the goods for the best desktop system ever. Ubuntu can do 95% (or so) of what Microsoft can do on the desktop, and a lot that Microsoft can't.
What the Linux world is missing out on is the specialized applications, such as CAD, electronics design, chemistry, etc. It would be great to have native builds of these tools, and not to have to run them under emulation.
Haven't you figured out that the majority of the bible is just ballast to cover the underlying message, which is hidden (see Steganography)? I mean, why do you think that numbers and letters have such a strange relationship in Hebrew? (I don't know about Aramaic though, perhaps the new testament isn't encoded in the same way). Here's some clues:
Cheese!
55/89
This statement is false.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg?
What's the big deal? I've livedinagarageforfreebefore,why should I pay $4.7m to do so?
One has to wonder if it's really worth the money, or is it just a boondoggle? German tax rates are already very high, among the highest in Europe. These high taxes are responsible for much industry moving to, or starting in, other EC countries with much lower costs, such as Slovakia or even Ireland (Ireland has low taxes but other costs are now getting quite high). This is quite a problem, particularly in the East, where the industrial base is not as developed as in the West. The West has many highly skilled jobs, such as R&D, that cannot be easily moved to other countries nor easily replicated by those countries. The East gets both bad parts of both underdeveloped countries - the high taxes and expenses of being in Germany with the economic development of Romania.
I am not saying that the West hasn't put a lot of money into fixing up the east since reunification. In fact, the German government has spent more money fixing the East than the US has destroying Iraq. Industry is slowly moving into the east, at least in the larger cities (Dresden and Leipzig), but its pace is slow. It could be sped up by lowering taxes.
I wonder about expensive German projects like the railway tunnel under the center of Leipzig. It's Leipzig's version of Boston's "Big Dig". It has a cost of over 20,000 eu per Leipzig resident! While it is appealing from a transportation point of view and exciting from a civil engineering one, I don't see it as being worth the price. The Munich project sounds similarly unjustified.
All this having been said, I am not 100% just of myself. I have never been to Munich, I don't know how bad the airport travel is. It's also possible that much of this spending will in fact (rather than in rhetoric) be an investment which can be recouped by future sales to other cities and countries. Perhaps some of the R&D necessary has already been done in the Shanghai project.
As far as what one poster said about New York: Surely, you jest. It would be so expensive and poorly constructed, if done in and by New Yorkers, that it wold make Boston's Big Dig look like a swiss watch by comparison. I don't think that New York has the wherewithal to build another wonder of the industrial world on the scale of the Brooklyn Bridge. Hopefully, they'll know enough not to attempt it. I have considerably more confidence in the competence and honesty of Germans in completing such a large project.
Yea I was thinking the same thing - is this Rearden metal or what? Except that I think it's more likely Airbus than Alcoa who would be behind the FUD.
There's information that Japan had tried to surrender before the US dropped the bombs on them, but this surrender was considered inconvenient so it was ignored. You want my sources? BAH! This is Slashdot! We don't need no steenkin sources!
What a bunch of FUD. This is what I'd expect from Microsoft or similar. It's already clear that the Linux kernel cannot ever adopt any new license, and it the keystone for all Linux distributions. Many, many other projects have already said they will not adopt the GPLv3. I am sure that many Linux distributions will be wary of it as well, making it very prominent wherever a package is provided with said license. ("warning: module rmsgnu.o taints the kernel").
It's a shame to see such FUD perpetrated under the BSD banner, when there is actually so much more that the communities of Linux and BSD have in common than that which separates them. The only thing I have as bad is this is that NetBSD spinoff company that promotes their own embedded BSD version (Wasabi).
Like many space and exotic aircraft, it must have to expend a lot of energy to get to its cruising altitude. Once that's done, conditions should become easier. Would it be considered 'cheating' to launch such a perpetual flying machine with an assistance device? That could be either disposable batteries that are jettisoned when discharged, or some chemcal rocket engine, or a jet engine, or have it launched from an aircraft.
Insolation is going to me much better at high altitudes. I just hope the photovoltaic cells are designed to take advantage of the increased amount of energy available in the UV spectrum. How about filling the free space in the wings with hydrogen? That might help lift a little, at least from the ground. However, there would have to be some way of dealing with the reduced pressure at operational altitude.
There's been a lot of interesting improvements in PV efficiency lately. However, most of these seem to only happen when the cell is operated at insolation far above normal. These are obtained by focusing the sunlight. Unfortunately, all of the technologies I know of which could do this are heavier than simply adding more, less efficient cells which operate at normal insolation or the slight improvement that high-atmosphere flight provides.
For some time, I was quite annoyed at being charged quite a bit to read scientific papers. But then, I had a thought that there might be a good reason for it: that there is a lot of work in checking that there is good scientific methodology behind the paper, i.e. it's an issue of value-addition through through selection. That would seem like a good reason to charge for journals. So I shut up for a while. But I am starting to get angry again, now that I find that much of the selection is not done reasonably, but is instead just a very disreputable part of the great machinery of the politics of science. No, I don't have any examples at hand.
So my conclusion is that if you find the selection that the journals you read is fair, then subscribe. Otherwise, do not, and do not submit to them either. The problem with this method is that you may never know what kind of back room sausage machine the editorial staff are running for very many years.
After attending the grand celebration of the final book at Harvard Square, I wasn't going to wait in line to buy the book. I simply went home and spend five seconds (literally - that fast) and downloaded it. It took about 12 hours to read.
It's complex. It really depends a lot on the books before it, including some details that may have seemed trivial in the prior books. So, you'd do best to re-read them if it's been a while and your memory of them is foggy.
I was happy to see some of my theories about character motivation born out, though they were slightly different than I had guessed they would be (I mean Snape and Dumbledore).
I wonder how children are going to react to this book. It's very complicated, like I said, and it will probably take them a long time to get through it.
There's also subtle propaganda in it, not all of which I agree. But I admire her propagandist craft. I don't know if my side would ever be able to come out with such a clever counter-propaganda.
I don't think it would be hard to find some company to pay $5m, if they could keep the rights to the images, and pull a Westlaw type of scam. I am sure Harvard-Smithsonian isn't going to fall for this. They want to keep these images for the public, which makes it difficult for anyone to build a business model on and therefore difficult to get funding for. How would Google make money on this? Google adwords for a particular star? Or perhaps on google maps - "coffee near Barnard's star"? I am not saying that Google won't do this, just that it's not as simple of a decision for them as you might think. There's really no way to prove it's value to Google stockholders.
I am sure that the glass plates aren't going to be thrown away when this is done. They'll just be moved away from the very expensive Cambridge real estate on which they currently sit, and the space will be reused for storing more astronomers.
The reason why Harvard HAS so much money is because they don't SPEND it. Kind of like that crazy uncle Joe you have (or wish you had), the one that drove a school bus for his whole adult life and died with an estate worth over a million dollars. Yeah, Harvard is weird like that. I should know. I am depending on a NSF grant for my salary at Harvard, the school doesn't seem to want to give me any of its money. However, they seem to fund all sorts of useless "humanities" programs (I am not saying that all humanities interests are useless, but that Harvard doesn't place enough value on hard science).
Goddamn it...just trying to read and reason through this argument makes my head hurt. This is like the old SCO orguments all over again. Both sides have lawyers trying to be clever by introducing more and more complexity. This is the diseased law system we now have, thanks to not only greedy show-off lawyers but people who are ready to accept them as necessary in their world. Software licenses should be pretty easy to understand - this goes for GPLv3 and everything else. Contracts between Microsoft and Novell should be simple and easy to understand. But they aren't. Lawyers screwing everyone again.
There can be such a thing as an honest and useful lawyer. A lawyer should take pride in creating a contract that clearly lays out the rights and responsibilities of both parties. There should be no vague language, and no grey areas left over. A contract should be designed so that any breach of it would be such a clear-cut violation that the violator would have not a leg to stand on in court, and therefore not think that they can get away with bad behavior.
There should be no wiggle room. None. Ockham's Razor comes to mind as a way of making everything clear and solid.
In a way, criminal and common law can also be thought of as a contract of sorts, and that the same principles of clarity simplicity, and zero wiggle room should apply. Laws should be engineered - no extra crap piled on. Like engineered products, there are occasional minor revisions that need to be made to fix bugs or to become compatible with another body of law. Eventually, however, a complete rewrite of a section of law would be commissioned - one in which the simplicity of the section of law becomes clearer and more simple, and is free of bugs, while being compatible. This is what our lawyers, courts, and legislatures ought to be doing, and are not.
There's just too much cruft in the law. I wonder what would happen if we were to take a crack team of programmers and turn them lose to rewrite the legal code.
My point was mainly that in the US, the anti wind-turbine movement is funded and largely run by the wealthy and privileged. Regardless, your view from a small fishing village is still a luxury. Personally, I like the view of windmills. And lighthouses. Do you think people, who complained that when a given lighthouse was build hundreds of years ago, were taken seriously at all? Of course not - the utility of a lighthouse outweighs the objection of diminished natural beauty. I imagine that many of the people who didn't like lighthouses built were those who would secretly profit from salvaging/pirating ships lost upon the rocks. That is probably similar in some respects to today, where oil billionairs (Koch) are the most active opponents of wind power.
As I sit here, my view is impeded by buildings, there is visual and noise interference of man with nature in the sky by aircraft, and even some ways away from the road the sound of cars takes away from my enjoyment of nature. The birds are still louder. I don't mind though - because were I not so close to civilization I could not take advantage of things like public transit, easily available groceries, entertainment, social events, or even such things as quality medical care and electricity on demand. If I desire to be a hermit, I will have to move further away from civilization in order to be free of its interference. In such a case, windmills on the horizon would be the least of my worries.
I suggest a compromise - that each person who objects to windmills find some way to generate for themselves all of their electricity needs, without releasing greenhouse gases. You can't use coal, or petroleum, wood, or even horses (methane source). You might try building a nuclear reactor, but I doubt you'd be successful. You'd probably have to adapt some bicycles to a generator, and hook it to batteries, to get enough electricity to power one dim light bulb and to spend ten minutes online per day, where you could take the high road and complain about the blight of windmills. All that bicycling you'd have to do would be great for your heart, lungs, and legs. I still would think you were crazy, but at least you wouldn't be labeled as a greedy, anti-social NIMBY.
But....these will block Ted Kennedy's view of Norway!
Seriously..all these people complain about wind turbines blocking the view of their million-dollar ocean cottages get no sympathy from me. They ought to think about the value their oceanfront property will have when the oceans rise thirty feet because the polar ice caps melt due to global warming. Oh wait, NIMBY! I forgot! Make it someone else's problem!
I am the oldest of three boys. My youngest brother is pretty smart, and more importantly he has his thoughts better organized than me. I can be a bit all over the map, but I think I have been inductive reasoning than him.
;)
I have noticed that oldest siblings, tend to have better leadership skills and desires. This sort of makes sense, when you think about it. However, my brothers and I are all pretty close in age - I would guess that the differences in leadership would be more pronounced with a greater difference in age, whereas I expect that the IQ difference noticed would increase with difference in age to a certain point (as the eldest gets exclusive attention until #2 comes along), and then decrease (as eldest becomes less of a care burden to parents, and also contributes to the intellectual development of the younger child). But the leadership skills would increase through age difference to a much higher point before decreasing. What I mean by this, is that as a sixteen year old I could feel comfortable leading my twelve year old brother, but I don't think I'd have much effect on an infant, and by the time the infant was twelve, I'd be out of my parents' house and therefore not as effected or effective.
BUT, these are just statistics. I believe that life events, genetics, and family personality has a far greater effect than birth order.
Now, some notes on IQ. IQ means intelligence quotient. Beyond that, there is no universally agreed upon meaning. The original IQ tests by Binet were developed to measure intellect of children. The later tests, Stanford-Binet, were extended to test young adults, with the goal of predicting academic success. These were adapted for testing of recruits in the US military, to determine officer potential. Stanford-Binet is very accurate in useful in this regard. However, there are many other attributes of intelligence which are not tested by Stanford-Binet and this has caused it to be criticized.
I believe the test has value. Is this because I did well on the test? My score was in the 'gifted' range, just a few points short of 'genius', so it's obviously not totally accurate, as I am in fact a genius mad scientist!
I don't pretend to be an expert on it, but from what I've read, ZFS just isn't ready yet. It hasn't been fulled 'baked' to get all the bugs out. For instance, being the boot file system is still pretty new. File systems are pretty critical things, Apple would hate to commit to ZFS just to have it be junk, especially when there's no contract that makes promises (maybe they could hire Sun to fix it up really nice, and have some guarantees - but I don't know if this has happened. Maybe it's happening right now). In the meantime, Apple is just waiting for all the unpaid testers to find the bugs. Apple I am sure has lots of in-house work on it as well.
That being said, I really don't like Apple or Steve Jobs. I am no Apple fanboy.
What about the mutant humans with horrible mutations but also special powers, and the gangs of outlaws trafficing in radioactive materials, without fear because the police and military fear to tred in the radioactive area? A mutant leader with horrible mind control powers who desires absolute power at any expense, and is building the New Soviet Union out of the rubble of Chernobyl?
My ratio is 1:1. This makes sense, as I am a person who has a good balance of left-brain and right-brain skills. I am pretty happy with that balance.
Yes, the efficiency of modern consumer photovoltaics has much room in terms of improvement. Typically, they're still more effective than photosynthesis. However, it's not just efficiency that's a problem - it's environment. The 40+% efficiency being quoted is with hundreds of suns, i.e. with lots of mirrors or lenses in comparison to the semiconductor area size. This is all good and fine, because mirrors are cheap to produce in comparison to semiconductors, but there's still that nasty problem of waste heat. I don't know about their technology, but the current generation of PV is very much allergic to high temperatures. I mean, anything that makes you sweat is going to make the PV cell feel bad as well (i.e., less efficient - specifically, I mean a drop in output voltage). It also shortens their life. If you were able to keep a PV cell at just above water freezing, continuously, it would last 50+ years. But if you keep at at 100F, it's going to poop out at 10-15 years.
Then there's the whole question of control and storage. Semiconductors are expensive per volume, so the desire to use as little of them as possible is not just so you can fit a pentium3-500 equivalent in your pocket - it's so the chip fabs can get more out of a hunk of pure silicon. When you start pumping a lot of current through them, that minor inefficiency, which gets lost in heat, becomes more than just a problem of not being able to use all the electricity you put into the device - the heat builds up and becomes a problem. So, you have to keep a large enough surface area on the devices, so they can disapate heat into either the air or heat sinks or liquid cooling devices. That extra silicon costs money, and lots of it, which is why the power controllers / battery chargers for 500 watt solar cells cost so much. And this gets me back to why I brought up conventional semiconductors in the first place - it's great that they get 40% efficiency, but how much of the energy they harness do they have to spend on fancy cooling systems? How long does this 40% cell last at 10^2 Sols? I imagine that, because they are using multi-spectrum cells, they heat much less than traditional cells (because light of a greater variety of wavelengths is being converted into electricity) but still, what about that almost 60% of the solar power at 10^2 sols? where does it go? into heat, that's where, and you are going to have to get it out of there damned quick. I think that if they could reduce the light intensity required in order to get this type of efficiency, to, say, 10 Suns, we'd have a real winner on our hands.
Everyone things their data is important, but it's up to management to decide what the value of each type of data is. Certainly, the critical financial data mention in one post here has a high value. However, how long does it have to remain online? Other data has less value, but some tangible value, such as old email. How long does it have to remain online vs. the convenience of having it at your fingertips?
Managers pull apart the poor sysadmin, but in the end you have to tell them that they have to decide the value of each type of data, and segregate it appropriately. I did this in a crappy company I used to work for that made codecs for cellphones and video games. Management had its head up its collective ass, so I just took control (something I shouldn't have to do on a sysadmin's salary with no stock options) and told them the cost of data on each storage solution. I left before the plan was fully implemented, but the ideas was to have important financial data and current software in development on the expensive commercial NAS, the audio files, email, and miscellaneous junk on the cheap Linux RAID box I build out of white-box parts. The only time the linux box had a problem was when the AC failed in the data closet (the NAS was located right near it, and I wonder if it would have puked a few moments after the Linux box panicked. Note that having reliable environmental controls is probably more important than choosing the expensive hardware). I left before the division of data was fully separated, but it seemed like it was going well. Every manager's ass seemed to be fully covered, and at a reasonable cost.