Well, macro has worked pretty well until the last three or so decades when they forgot everything they learned about the large-scale dynamics of an economy and tried to model it instead on a completely false premise, i.e. that humans are fundamentally rational (and also that thus the market is always right). I understand the desire to be reductionist in science, I am a physicist after all, but you have to make sure that your small-scale behavior mirrors your large-scale behavior in the "macro" or "classical" limit. If anything, the anti-Keynesian economics has completely failed to do that, living in a parallel world where austerity in a recession is somehow expansionary when reality is saying completely the opposite.
But back on the "Out of Africa" thing, I really think geography makes a huge difference... South Africa has a climate very similar to Europe, and thus similar lifestyles and foodstuffs are possible there. In the heart of Africa, without any navigable (from the sea) rivers and not even a good highway system (let alone rail) and multiple borders to cross to get to the world market, your imports are expensive and so are your exports, so having a modern economy is almost impossible. This explains pretty well much of the lack of development of Africa.
And by the way, Africa has some of the greatest genetic diversity of any continent.
LOL, advocating a bubble... If someone is calling something a bubble, obviously he's saying it's unsustainable. But you know. Gold standard. voteronpaul.
The Austrians are always predicting failure because they think anything besides a hard-money (usually gold-based) system is on the verge of collapsing. What they get wrong is that collapses and bubbles and depressions were just as bad (nay, worse) before fiat currency. So yeah, if you always predict failure, you're likely to be right/eventually/. What they still haven't got right is the complete lack of an increase in inflation (compared to its pre-crisis rate) even after a huge increase in the money supply. They keep predicting Zimbabwe any minute now, but they're STILL wrong!
When the crisis hit big time in 2007, I read up on a lot of economics, starting with Austrian economics (I was skeptical), then reading a mainstream macro textbook from a few decades ago (which talked about how lack of demand can keep an economy depressed even if the productive capacity is high). The latter made much more sense. Too bad so many economists threw away what everyone (even Nixon) knew about macroeconomics a few decades ago in an Ahab-esque pursuit of microfoundations at all costs. As a physicist, I understand the desire to view a system based on the sum of its parts, but making the assumption that the economy is made up of an aggregate of fundamentally rational individuals is just unsupported by empirical evidence (let alone common sense).
"A very big report came out last month with very little fanfare. It concluded what we in nuclear science have been saying for decades – radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) are no big deal. The linear no-threshold dose hypothesis (LNT) does not apply to doses less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv), which is the region encompassing background levels around the world, and is the region of most importance to nuclear energy, most medical procedures and most areas affected by accidents like Fukushima."
The summary makes absolutely no mention at all of the next-gen rocket, SLS (capable of well over 100mT to orbit), which is being finished up. The boosters for it have been test-fired already (as have the main engines, which are left-over Shuttle main engines, and the upper stage for now is a big version of the Delta IV upper stage), and it is on-track for CDR. SLS will use LC-39A and the VAB. NASA and Florida are just looking for others who would also like to use the facilities, since they won't be in constant use. Boeing is already using one of the Shuttle processing buildings for their CST-100, which is part of NASA's "commercial crew" program and is already very far along, having tested its parachutes, heatshield, abort thrusters, airbags, etc.
Now, I'm quite skeptical with the idea of going back to 100+mT rockets for exploration instead of multiple commercial 15-30mT rockets (which have other, current customers and so are cheaper and will be around as long as the US is a country and which may shortly be capable of reusable flight), and especially I'm skeptical of the zipcode-engineered SLS, but it IS the current plan and it has lots of Congressional support and I'll cheer it along and enjoy its launches. People deserve to know that it's actually being built and that the VAB and LC-39A are going to be used by it, not all this BS about "oh, 'Bama canceled NASA, so they're having a fire sale." NASA's budget is still about the same (which is only about half of a percent of the federal budget, by the way), and the International Space Station is doing just fine with NASA astronauts in it, being resupplied with cargo by American spacecraft (SpaceX's Dragon right now has made two successful supply runs up and safely back down, soon to be joined by Orbital Science's Cygnus), and soon Dragon will be also shuttling the astronauts up and down to Station. http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/01/yir-part4-iss-new-year-successful-2012/
Oh, another thing is that NASA is currently experimenting with a deep space habitat based on ISS modules and a Space Exploration Vehicle for going to asteroids or the moons of Mars. NASA retired Shuttle, and a dang good thing, too! Now we can really go explore beyond the confines of the Earth's gravitational influence.
Also, NASA's Orion capsule is VERY far along, has done several tests already and will do its first orbital test in the late 2014 time frame. This means by the time President Palin (or whathaveyou) is inaugurated, NASA will have essentially 3 man-rated capsules (Dragon, Orion, and Boeing's CST-100) already flight tested and a big-ass rocket built and prepping for launch (in 2017). NASA is NOT fracking canceled. http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/01/sls-cdr-engineers-work-baffling-issue/
Not a physicist or engineer, are you? Each square meter produces 400Watts (let's say some slight advances are made... there are 42% efficient solar cells, but they're expensive), for (say) 5 hours a day on average, for 365 days a year on average. Each square meter of solar thus produces about 730kWh per year, not your measly 14kWh.
How much roof space is there? Just for urban roofs, this paper ( http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others/HeatIsland+WhiteRfs0911.pdf ) estimates it is about 2E11m^2, growing at last check about 200% per decade (but let's mostly ignore that part). Not counting rural roofs, etc, if each square meter produces about 7.3E5W*hour of solar a year, then you have: 1.46E7Whr, which works out to be about 146,000 TWhr per year. Comparable to your 142,000 TeraWatt-hours per year. Not counting non-urban roofs, which must make up a sizable portion of the total roof area, since land is at less of a premium and much of the world's population is rural.
So, you're wrong. To first order, the total area of the world's roofs is enough to produce as much power as the world currently uses. Of course, it might be more practical to put most of them in the desert.
Why does everything have to be the size of a sardine can?
Because they aren't there for a luxury cruise, that's why.
The module shown is so cramped because of payload restrictions for the launch vehicles. Why can't they send up a handful of these into LEO and assemble the spacecraft there?...
Ummm.... That is the plan. To assemble it at ISS, at least for the prototype. But you are forgetting that it takes a lot of propulsion to move these things around in space... your mission costs are hugely impacted by having a more massive deep space module. It's not the cost of putting it into LEO that is the expensive part. It's all the propellant and propulsive capability and RCS/power systems needed for a larger module. Or, if you have a smaller module with the same size propulsion system, that means you can go a lot more different places (instead of just a tiny near Earth asteroid 10m in diameter, you could explore a sizable 300m diameter one, perhaps, which aren't as common) and/or do the mission a whole lot faster. The idea is to see what the smallest feasible module is, since that means you can go do your mission faster and with less money. I say, the sooner the better!
Or, if you CAN afford one twice as large, why not instead use the extra money for a lander (or SEV) or to do two missions?
Actually, you're exactly correct. Investing enormous resources into digging a shiny metal out of the ground (which is mostly used for investment purposes, not for industrial uses) is a waste of resources. It's far better to use those resources and build better infrastructure than something that just sits in a vault and is never used productively. A central bank is much more efficient, also, because they can control the money supply, theoretically evening out the business cycle (though there are limits to this as we've seen recently... the rates can't really go below zero, so the ability to counter-act a huge decline in aggregate demand is limited).
Macroeconomics and monetary policy... learn it! I mean, End the Fed! Woo, Ayn Rand! Gold!
(and no, I'm not talking about unlimited monetary policy... MMT is not accurate. Deficits do matter, though not quite as much if your country controls its own currency... Going to a gold standard means you lose control over your country's currency and you may end up suffering the downward austerity spiral of countries like Spain who no longer control their currency... Versus the recovering Iceland, who do control their own currency in spite of an epic financial crisis.)
(FWIW, we probably should nationalize the Fed one of these days.)
They are, in fact, used for landing robots on Mars. I worked on a supercomputer with my professor during my physics undergrad working on fluid-structure-interaction (FSI) code. The supersonic parachute used to land Curiosity was simulated using a FSI code, a simulation which my professor helped with. Cars these days often use fluid dynamics during the design process and structure code as well (which can be just as complicated when you're simulating a collision, as is often done these days).
There's really a lot of room for processing power and memory growth... Just think about it. If I want to halve the grid spacing, I generally have to double the number of points (or elements) in each dimension, plus I have to generally halve my timestep as well (for numerical stability). So, for every halving of the grid spacing, I need 16 times the processing power and at least 8 times the memory (and 16 times the memory if I want to keep all the timesteps). So, it may take a good 6-10 years between being able to halve your grid spacing (if you include the fact that computers don't scale up in performance--especially at the superconductor level--as fast as Moore's law says you scale in per-transistor cost). And if you're doing a fluid or solids simulation, you usually want as small of a grid spacing as feasible. At this rate, the time between a 1cm grid spacing and a 1mm grid spacing in performance would be 30-40 years, a whole career. And that's assuming Moore's law continues.
That's EXACTLY, EXACTLY what I was thinking. We've solved a lot of the secrets of the atom (and seemed to decide mostly as a society that we don't want to harness that power), the two great superpowers have essentially made peace (superpower defined as a great power that can project regional-great-power-level globally... something that China will not be capable of for decades, hemmed in as they are on all sides by powerful rivals), money for "big science" has started to dry up (partly because of "starve the beast" politics starving the US of greatness, partly by the fact the Cold War is over), and we've just found the Higgs, basically confirming the Standard Model. So, what do we do? Well, theoretical physicists turn out to be really good at modeling arcane, abstract things. They've been moving en masse (remember, they're still a tiny group compared to all the MBAs out there) into quantitative finance. A lot of technology that once went to building faster and faster supercomputers (such as interconnect technology similar to Infiniband) is now being used to reduce latencies for financial transactions, where nanoseconds matter.
And while I've often felt pretty skeptical (as a graduate student physicist myself) about the purpose of string theory, a theoretical physicist-turned quant said, "It turns out that string theory is useful in valuing mortgage backed securities."
Somewhat unlike physical laws, the nature of financial systems changes constantly, so you have to redo your models (not just the constants in your models, but the models themselves) quite often, meaning endless job security for these physicist quants. And we're talking about the world's economy, meaning the potential profits aren't marginal, like they might be for designing a slightly more efficient laser or semiconductor, but is literally all the liquid or semiliquid assets in the world. After the end of the Cold War, physicists have found a way to be indispensable again.
It's an arms race of quantitative finance going on out there. Personally, I think it's unsustainable and will eventually result in an enormous clampdown as we have more flash-crashes or something unforeseen, but even then, there will still be a market for quantitive finance as long as there is money.
Current levels of debt are, outside of a global war, unprecedented in nations that survived economically afterwards. The US isn't as bad as some, but US national debt is approaching $140,000 per taxpayer. All of the money of the top 1% would make only a small dent in that....
That literally dwarfs the US national debt. There's plenty of money in this country. Just not for the little people (see what I did there?).
I miss the Greatest Generation, who at least had the sense to realize that fighting wars without paying for them is insane (they had a shared sense of duty and national purpose and an understanding that what's good for the middle class is good for America). BTW, look up the upper tax bracket rate under my favorite Republican of the last 60 years: Eisenhower. It's over 90%. And, miracle of miracles, we were paying down our debt from WW2. Can't Republicans go back to being at least rational? I used to be Republican, but then read a little about the world around me. I'd like my party to go back to the party of Eisenhower or maybe even Lincoln.
The problem hasn't come so much from technology itself, but the fact that the middle class (in America, at least) has been convinced that they shouldn't band together and fight for their interests. This is why you have productivity increasing, the general economy growing, but wages stagnant as working hours remain the same or increase.
The idea with technology is that we can lower the amount of hours we need to work while having better incomes. Across the board. The only way this can realistically happen is through some sort of collective bargaining, either through something like associations or unions or co-op business models, consumer activism, civil engagement (i.e. democracy), etc. Distributive technology and infrastructure can also help this, but I remain skeptical if the benefits of economy of scale will ever be truly overcome by distributive processes. Why do we have a 40 hour work week? It's because technology allowed us the economic margin to demand that we should only have to work 40 hours a week. If we have technological growth but a broad public that has been convinced to vote and act against their own interests, then we'll continue to have a stagnating middle class (while social mobility continues to drop and inequality rises). This isn't a rail against the rich or capitalism, this is merely an acknowledgement that in order for the vast majority of people's lives to be improved by the benefits of technology, economic growth, and capitalism, it has to be tied to the public actually demanding they share in the growth that those three things allow.
These things are always a balance. On the one hand, mob rule can lead to totalitarianism. On the other, a completely suppressed people is already totalitarianism. What is needed is a balance between liberalism (and by that I mean classical liberalism, i.e. liberty from over-regulation, etc) and democratic welfare. Complete lack of balance is pernicious and leads to both economic ruin and totalitarianism. That includes the right-wing dream of near plutocracy, where there are no parks or roads or libraries or schools except those owned privately and that you must pay a per-use or subscription fee to use (granted, this is a slight exaggeration in that they probably wouldn't outright claim that as an end goal, but it is the end-result of their policies). In a land where everything is privately owned, the poor are born trespassers. So, there's a balance. There must be public goods and there must be basic social services like Hayek proclaimed ("There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.").
But there must be also a free market, a market that can only remain free if monopolistic forces are kept at bay and/or democratized. Or you exchange the totalitarianism of communism with the totalitarianism of private fiefdoms. Democratic forces (i.e. the public acting in their own interests to exert leverage) + free markets (kept free by appropriate regulation) = improving quality of life for all. And the public must first and foremost act against corruption, which can destroy any and every economic political system if not kept in check by the will of the people.
Here's my take: We're burning over a CUBIC MILE of coal every year, and another cubic mile of petroleum every year. Combine that with oxygen (which in the case of coal will cause ~three times the mass in carbon dioxide), and you have a significant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. We are burning it far faster than plants are sequestering it back into the soil (which is how it got there in the first place). The ocean is acting as a big sink of carbon dioxide right now, absorbing a significant portion of the carbon dioxide we are putting back into the atmosphere, but its capacity is somewhat limited and already doesn't keep up with how fast we're pumping out CO2... and adding CO2 to the ocean also changes it chemically, which has other consequences as well. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere, so after decades of this, we can drastically change the percentage of this gas in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, because of its absorption in the far IR that lines up pretty well with the Earth's Blackbody radiation (but doesn't diminish solar radiation coming in), has a disproportionate effect on the temperature balance of the Earth: http://www.sunwindsolar.com/a_images/co2_water_vapour.gif
The amount of carbon dioxide we release (minus that which goes into the ocean and rocks and the biosphere) accounts pretty well for the large increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2, from 280 ppm pre-industrial to over 392 ppm now (and rising). Because of the absorption spectrum of CO2, this really ought to change the temperature of the Earth at least somewhat. This is all basic physics, really. Big models can help us get a better understanding, but they aren't necessary for the underlying phenomenon.
Look at it another way: For eons, the Earth has been undergoing runaway carbon sequestration, as peat moss grows and is buried by sediments and is turned to coal. This has been going on for hundreds of millions of years. Humans are, in a way, the planet's method of restoring the balance of carbon dioxide to more normal levels, where perhaps the biosphere would rather be (if you believe in that sort of talk). The problem, of course, is that humans evolved and ascended to civilization in a time with very, very lower carbon dioxide concentrations, by both a geological perspective and a modern perspective, and there's no guarantee that we'll enjoy or even survive the higher levels. The amount of carbon stored under the ground is much higher than that in the atmosphere, and if we emit all of that stored carbon, we may well return the climate to a very, very different temperature equilibrium.
Does anyone object to any of these facts, particularly the amount of carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere and the fact that we are reversing the long-term planet-wide trend of runaway carbon sequestration?
The propulsion systems of Discovery are being used for the initial flights of SLS, the next NASA rocket which is going beyond LEO (first flight will be around the Moon). Why the heck doesn't at least the summary mention that? That's a far better use than rotting in a museum.
"Durr, now that the Shuttles are retired, NASA is being shutdown, right?" Nope.
Animals do not have "rights", at least not in the sense humans do.
Legal rights are granted by law, they don't have divine provenance....
So there are no "natural rights?" Natural rights are what form the basis of the US government: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
If there are no natural rights and only rights from the legal system, then if certain laws are passed, the governed would have no right to abolish the government.
No, our whole system of government (and internationally as well... hence the concept of human rights violations like genocide) is dependent on the concept of natural rights, whether you think they are granted by any sort of divine being(s) or not (you can certainly be a hard atheist and still acknowledge natural rights). You may not be an American, but if you're not... Is genocide a right in other countries if it simply is done with the right legal process, done entirely within that country's legal framework?
If there are no natural rights, the state's power is legally potentially unlimited. I know many libertarians hold up the Constitution as incredibly important (which it is), but I hope they don't lose sight of the fact that the Constitution's power rests on its ability to enumerate the natural rights of citizens, otherwise all you need to do is get a majority in 38 of the 50 state legislatures and a 2/3s majority in both the US House and Senate and you could take away all the rights of the people in the Constitution. We must not consider the Constitution as if it sprung from the mind of Zeus fully formed and perfect. It helps enumerate the people's rights, but it is not the source of those rights.
Imagine if Israel and all their neighbors (inc. the Arabs) became great allies. They'd be a very powerful force: Israel would have the technology and know-how, everyone else with the land, the human capital, and the energy. This sort of alliance is supposed to happen in the future world of Ender's Game (specifically mentioned as a historical fact in the sequel Shadow Puppets). They are too busy bombing each other and showing how great they are instead of realizing they are simply long-lost cousins of different branches of the Abrahamic Religions with a Lot in common (just realized after editing that's a pretty horrible pun...). It's a shame, really.
I can hold out hope that with the Arab Spring, something is changing, but I fear it will revert back to same old, same old. I can easily see the Arab Spring being used as a weapon against peace, but they do say that democracies do not wage war against each other or only very, VERY rarely... So IF democracy gains a foothold in the Arab world through the "Arab Spring," there may be hope for progress towards peace and a Middle East regarded not as a flee-bitten backwater but as a cultural and economic powerhouse rivaling Europe and America. I'm not holding my breath, though (prove my cynicism wrong, Middle East!).
When I saw the last stage I almost fell out of my chair!. What the hell happened to keeping it simple!
It's no worse than the various lunar landers. The real question is whether they can get the budget to send that much mass to Mars.
Landing anything big on Mars turns out to be quite hard. There's not enough atmosphere for a soft parachute landing. But there's enough atmosphere to require a heat shield while plowing through it. Then there's not enough atmosphere to brake from Mach 5 to Mach 1 before running out of altitude. There's too much gravity for a full rocket-powered descent. A rocket facing into the atmosphere won't work until the craft has slowed below supersonic speeds.
That's what leads to what looks like an overly complex system.
There's not too much gravity for a full rocket-powered descent; fully-propulsive Mars entry is a perfectly valid option, it just requires a lot more mass. Supersonic retropropulsion, even without much thought put into how you do it, is certainly no worse than retropropulsion in a full vacuum, it's just that it tend to decrease the drag... but it does still slow you down! "A rocket facing into the atmosphere" most certainly DOES work, just not as well as we would like (for the simplest case).
And besides, there are definitely ways of doing supersonic retropropulsion that work better than the naive method of just a single rocket engine firing straight down (multiple nozzles around the perimeter of a heatshield and pointing down work much better, allowing you to take advantage of most of the drag you otherwise would).
But yes, the skycrane method is the most efficient one yet for placing a rover on Mars... the biggest advantage is you don't need a platform; you can land the rover directly on its wheels, which saves a lot of weight.
There are ways of increasing the efficiency (say for a larger rover), like perhaps using a bipropellant rocket engine (the descent stage, sometimes semi-erroneously called the "skycrane", is monopropellant and has a relatively low Isp) or other propulsion system optimizations (the thrusters are small, so suffer from things like minimum gauge issues, etc, that might not be as big of an issue for larger systems).
Also, the skycrane method is also intended to allow landing at higher altitudes. If you picked a very low altitude, it should be possible to design a system which can land a much larger payload to the surface for the same Mars-insertion payload. Hellas Basin is my favorite place, with almost twice the average Martian surface atmospheric density.
But yes, landing large payloads on Mars is hard. Research into deployable heatshields (like ballutes) and parachutes able to deploy at higher supersonic speeds really would help any future, human missions.
It couldn't possibly be worse than Facebook. With Google's transparency with privacy, and already working business model (has facebook ever posted a profit?), I'd trust them over Facebook in a heartbeat.
Facebook screws me over daily. No, I don't want any facebook credits. No, I don't want to play farmville. Disgusting...
Is the lone red dot remaining in the Sick & Poor quadrant North Korea by chance?
Nope, it's Afghanistan. (I know because I replicated this graph using their website gapminder.org)... Just so you know, GapMinder World will color Afghanistan turquoise, not red.
There ought to be some evolutionary advantage to religious thinking (or an evolutionary advantage which has religious thinking as a difficult-to-avoid side-effect), since (from the atheist's perspective) belief in God is a somewhat arbitrary belief, yet it is so incredibly widespread (including societies cut off from each other for decades or centuries, like tribes in South America, etc.), in spite of the large amount of energy/time that is spent by human society on religious activities.
In my experience, religious (especially fundamentalist religious) people, whether Muslim or Christian, etc, tend to have more children while atheists tend not to have as many children. Since parents tend to influence their children (over and above children picking a random belief system), it's not unreasonable to suggest that this should manifest in evolutionary pressure promoting religious belief.
A study from the Mayo Clinic states: http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/content/76/12/1225.abstract "Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide."
As irrational as it may be, religious belief may be a healthy human trait. That's not to say some religious beliefs won't cause quite negative health outcomes (i.e. refusing certain treatments, etc). And, of course, this does not establish the truth of any religious beliefs.
Russia is reverting to its industry-over-humans ways.
That always was my favorite part about the Soviet Union. None of this whiny "but we'll get cancer" crap. In Russia, a guy would be lucky to see his sixties and not die of alcohol-related disease.
My favorite was Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy, which was a much bigger version(i.e. over 200 nuclear explosions!) of the US's Operation Plowshare (a mere 28). They made a lake, went prospecting for diamonds and oil and gas and all sorts of neat things to do with "peaceful nuclear explosions." I believe the Soviets also found a way to make cattle feed directly out of petroleum (though I haven't been able to source this), I suppose in case of nuclear winter. I think the Soviets were also thinking of working with the USA to intentionally melt the Arctic ice sheet via damming up the Bering Strait or something. They were going to use the Energia rocket (designed for their Buran Space Shuttle) to orbit a giant orbiting mirror to illuminate arctic/Siberian towns during the cold, dark winters there.
You learn how to fight to win in the struggle of Man vs Nature when you live in a place as cold and desolate as Russia.
I think the Russians actually WANT global warming. I doubt they'll ever start doing anything meaningful to stop it. Heck, an ice-free Arctic would mean a lot more viable trading ports for Russia, something it has always been in very short supply of (compared to the United States, which has ginormous, ice-free trading ports on the two busiest oceans... this has been an enormous engine of growth and geopolitical power for the USA). Also, they would likely substantially increase how much arable land they have available if the temperature rose a few degrees. The only people who have more to gain from Global Warming is probably Canada.
And if global warming is ever a big enough problem that we just HAVE TO lower the temperature a few degrees via some geoengineering scheme, the Russians are the ones to go to who have the gonads to do it and the industrial capability to pull it off, although China could probably do it just as well.
Back when oil was $145 a barrel (i.e. last year), I read quite a bit about oil shale. It is thought by many that oil shale is, if you start from scratch with no investment on both sides, easier to extract than tar sands (political/environmental issues aside), or at least they are very close to equal. However, after decades of consistent investment (and, yes, libertarians, even government subsidies), tar sand oil extraction is far ahead of oil shale oil extraction. Oil shale investment has waxed and waned primarily with the price of oil, instead of being upheld by the government during the lean years, like tar sands development was.
I do agree, though, with your point that you can get oil from coal, etc.
The point of all this is that I think that the US government should put resources into developing oil shale (or coal-to-oil, whatever) as the mother-of-all strategic reserves. It should be funded like the national security priority that it is. We should extract a token amount every year (maybe enough to fund maintenance on the infrastructure), with the capability of ramping up production before our Strategic Petroleum Reserve dries up, in case of war or a spike in the price of oil. This should be done while also funding research into other sorts of energy solutions which don't exact as much of an environmental toll (i.e. nuclear power, cheap solar/wind, cheap/energy-dense/resilient batteries, etc.). In fact, if oil shale is profitable enough (currently costs $60 per barrel for oil shale production, but this would decrease with investment), the funds can be directed in that direction. Even if it isn't profitable, though, it should still be there as a strategic reserve.
Although this makes the most sense, it would never happen because of libertarians on one side and environmentalists on the other.
"The flip side is that I've heard that Apple's file systems team is full steam ahead on their own next-generation file system. And, perhaps not coincidentally, they're hiring." from http://daringfireball.net/linked/2009/10/23/zfs
This is pretty shitty because it'll fragment the momentum ZFS had in being the next-gen ubiquitous file system. When it was clear ZFS wasn't coming to Linux, those guys got btrfs going, now Apple is doing their own, while ZFS obviously will stay around too. Microsoft obviously wasnt on board for any of this, and without the momentum behind ZFS it never will. This nonsense isnt helping, and I think the best Oracle could do it release it under all the licenses that'll get it into OSX/Linux and perhaps even Windows. Can Oracle go over Sun's head on this or Sun==Oracle?
(emphasis mine)
Unfortunately, btrfs isn't "going" anywhere. Guess who their development was funded by? That's right, Oracle! Notice that they haven't released anything new since BEFORE Sun's shareholders approved the acquisition? (Latest release on the btrfs wiki is v.19, released in June 2009) It's not exactly improving at a breakneck pace... If btrfs is going to go anywhere, they need some real development money.
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Well, macro has worked pretty well until the last three or so decades when they forgot everything they learned about the large-scale dynamics of an economy and tried to model it instead on a completely false premise, i.e. that humans are fundamentally rational (and also that thus the market is always right). I understand the desire to be reductionist in science, I am a physicist after all, but you have to make sure that your small-scale behavior mirrors your large-scale behavior in the "macro" or "classical" limit. If anything, the anti-Keynesian economics has completely failed to do that, living in a parallel world where austerity in a recession is somehow expansionary when reality is saying completely the opposite.
But back on the "Out of Africa" thing, I really think geography makes a huge difference... South Africa has a climate very similar to Europe, and thus similar lifestyles and foodstuffs are possible there. In the heart of Africa, without any navigable (from the sea) rivers and not even a good highway system (let alone rail) and multiple borders to cross to get to the world market, your imports are expensive and so are your exports, so having a modern economy is almost impossible. This explains pretty well much of the lack of development of Africa.
And by the way, Africa has some of the greatest genetic diversity of any continent.
LOL, advocating a bubble... If someone is calling something a bubble, obviously he's saying it's unsustainable. But you know. Gold standard. voteronpaul.
The Austrians are always predicting failure because they think anything besides a hard-money (usually gold-based) system is on the verge of collapsing. What they get wrong is that collapses and bubbles and depressions were just as bad (nay, worse) before fiat currency. So yeah, if you always predict failure, you're likely to be right /eventually/. What they still haven't got right is the complete lack of an increase in inflation (compared to its pre-crisis rate) even after a huge increase in the money supply. They keep predicting Zimbabwe any minute now, but they're STILL wrong!
When the crisis hit big time in 2007, I read up on a lot of economics, starting with Austrian economics (I was skeptical), then reading a mainstream macro textbook from a few decades ago (which talked about how lack of demand can keep an economy depressed even if the productive capacity is high). The latter made much more sense. Too bad so many economists threw away what everyone (even Nixon) knew about macroeconomics a few decades ago in an Ahab-esque pursuit of microfoundations at all costs. As a physicist, I understand the desire to view a system based on the sum of its parts, but making the assumption that the economy is made up of an aggregate of fundamentally rational individuals is just unsupported by empirical evidence (let alone common sense).
http://www.forbes.com/sites/jamesconca/2013/01/11/like-weve-been-saying-radiation-is-not-a-big-deal/
"A very big report came out last month with very little fanfare. It concluded what we in nuclear science have been saying for decades – radiation doses less than about 10 rem (0.1 Sv) are no big deal. The linear no-threshold dose hypothesis (LNT) does not apply to doses less than 10 rem (0.1 Sv), which is the region encompassing background levels around the world, and is the region of most importance to nuclear energy, most medical procedures and most areas affected by accidents like Fukushima."
The summary makes absolutely no mention at all of the next-gen rocket, SLS (capable of well over 100mT to orbit), which is being finished up. The boosters for it have been test-fired already (as have the main engines, which are left-over Shuttle main engines, and the upper stage for now is a big version of the Delta IV upper stage), and it is on-track for CDR. SLS will use LC-39A and the VAB. NASA and Florida are just looking for others who would also like to use the facilities, since they won't be in constant use. Boeing is already using one of the Shuttle processing buildings for their CST-100, which is part of NASA's "commercial crew" program and is already very far along, having tested its parachutes, heatshield, abort thrusters, airbags, etc.
Now, I'm quite skeptical with the idea of going back to 100+mT rockets for exploration instead of multiple commercial 15-30mT rockets (which have other, current customers and so are cheaper and will be around as long as the US is a country and which may shortly be capable of reusable flight), and especially I'm skeptical of the zipcode-engineered SLS, but it IS the current plan and it has lots of Congressional support and I'll cheer it along and enjoy its launches. People deserve to know that it's actually being built and that the VAB and LC-39A are going to be used by it, not all this BS about "oh, 'Bama canceled NASA, so they're having a fire sale." NASA's budget is still about the same (which is only about half of a percent of the federal budget, by the way), and the International Space Station is doing just fine with NASA astronauts in it, being resupplied with cargo by American spacecraft (SpaceX's Dragon right now has made two successful supply runs up and safely back down, soon to be joined by Orbital Science's Cygnus), and soon Dragon will be also shuttling the astronauts up and down to Station. http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/01/yir-part4-iss-new-year-successful-2012/
Oh, another thing is that NASA is currently experimenting with a deep space habitat based on ISS modules and a Space Exploration Vehicle for going to asteroids or the moons of Mars. NASA retired Shuttle, and a dang good thing, too! Now we can really go explore beyond the confines of the Earth's gravitational influence.
Also, NASA's Orion capsule is VERY far along, has done several tests already and will do its first orbital test in the late 2014 time frame. This means by the time President Palin (or whathaveyou) is inaugurated, NASA will have essentially 3 man-rated capsules (Dragon, Orion, and Boeing's CST-100) already flight tested and a big-ass rocket built and prepping for launch (in 2017). NASA is NOT fracking canceled.
http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/01/sls-cdr-engineers-work-baffling-issue/
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About the SEV: http://www.nasa.gov/exploration/technology/space_exploration_vehicle/index.html
About the Deep Space Hab using ISS heritage or possibly even just existing ISS spares: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/03/dsh-module-concepts-outlined-beo-exploration/
Not a physicist or engineer, are you? Each square meter produces 400Watts (let's say some slight advances are made... there are 42% efficient solar cells, but they're expensive), for (say) 5 hours a day on average, for 365 days a year on average. Each square meter of solar thus produces about 730kWh per year, not your measly 14kWh.
How much roof space is there? Just for urban roofs, this paper ( http://www.stanford.edu/group/efmh/jacobson/Articles/Others/HeatIsland+WhiteRfs0911.pdf ) estimates it is about 2E11m^2, growing at last check about 200% per decade (but let's mostly ignore that part). Not counting rural roofs, etc, if each square meter produces about 7.3E5W*hour of solar a year, then you have: 1.46E7Whr, which works out to be about 146,000 TWhr per year. Comparable to your 142,000 TeraWatt-hours per year. Not counting non-urban roofs, which must make up a sizable portion of the total roof area, since land is at less of a premium and much of the world's population is rural.
So, you're wrong. To first order, the total area of the world's roofs is enough to produce as much power as the world currently uses. Of course, it might be more practical to put most of them in the desert.
Why does everything have to be the size of a sardine can?
Because they aren't there for a luxury cruise, that's why.
The module shown is so cramped because of payload restrictions for the launch vehicles. Why can't they send up a handful of these into LEO and assemble the spacecraft there? ...
Ummm.... That is the plan. To assemble it at ISS, at least for the prototype. But you are forgetting that it takes a lot of propulsion to move these things around in space... your mission costs are hugely impacted by having a more massive deep space module. It's not the cost of putting it into LEO that is the expensive part. It's all the propellant and propulsive capability and RCS/power systems needed for a larger module. Or, if you have a smaller module with the same size propulsion system, that means you can go a lot more different places (instead of just a tiny near Earth asteroid 10m in diameter, you could explore a sizable 300m diameter one, perhaps, which aren't as common) and/or do the mission a whole lot faster. The idea is to see what the smallest feasible module is, since that means you can go do your mission faster and with less money. I say, the sooner the better!
Or, if you CAN afford one twice as large, why not instead use the extra money for a lander (or SEV) or to do two missions?
Here's a much more informative article: http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2012/03/dsh-module-concepts-outlined-beo-exploration/
Actually, you're exactly correct. Investing enormous resources into digging a shiny metal out of the ground (which is mostly used for investment purposes, not for industrial uses) is a waste of resources. It's far better to use those resources and build better infrastructure than something that just sits in a vault and is never used productively. A central bank is much more efficient, also, because they can control the money supply, theoretically evening out the business cycle (though there are limits to this as we've seen recently... the rates can't really go below zero, so the ability to counter-act a huge decline in aggregate demand is limited).
Macroeconomics and monetary policy... learn it! I mean, End the Fed! Woo, Ayn Rand! Gold!
(and no, I'm not talking about unlimited monetary policy... MMT is not accurate. Deficits do matter, though not quite as much if your country controls its own currency... Going to a gold standard means you lose control over your country's currency and you may end up suffering the downward austerity spiral of countries like Spain who no longer control their currency... Versus the recovering Iceland, who do control their own currency in spite of an epic financial crisis.)
(FWIW, we probably should nationalize the Fed one of these days.)
They are, in fact, used for landing robots on Mars. I worked on a supercomputer with my professor during my physics undergrad working on fluid-structure-interaction (FSI) code. The supersonic parachute used to land Curiosity was simulated using a FSI code, a simulation which my professor helped with. Cars these days often use fluid dynamics during the design process and structure code as well (which can be just as complicated when you're simulating a collision, as is often done these days).
There's really a lot of room for processing power and memory growth... Just think about it. If I want to halve the grid spacing, I generally have to double the number of points (or elements) in each dimension, plus I have to generally halve my timestep as well (for numerical stability). So, for every halving of the grid spacing, I need 16 times the processing power and at least 8 times the memory (and 16 times the memory if I want to keep all the timesteps). So, it may take a good 6-10 years between being able to halve your grid spacing (if you include the fact that computers don't scale up in performance--especially at the superconductor level--as fast as Moore's law says you scale in per-transistor cost). And if you're doing a fluid or solids simulation, you usually want as small of a grid spacing as feasible. At this rate, the time between a 1cm grid spacing and a 1mm grid spacing in performance would be 30-40 years, a whole career. And that's assuming Moore's law continues.
Sounds like algorithmic trading.
That's EXACTLY, EXACTLY what I was thinking. We've solved a lot of the secrets of the atom (and seemed to decide mostly as a society that we don't want to harness that power), the two great superpowers have essentially made peace (superpower defined as a great power that can project regional-great-power-level globally... something that China will not be capable of for decades, hemmed in as they are on all sides by powerful rivals), money for "big science" has started to dry up (partly because of "starve the beast" politics starving the US of greatness, partly by the fact the Cold War is over), and we've just found the Higgs, basically confirming the Standard Model. So, what do we do? Well, theoretical physicists turn out to be really good at modeling arcane, abstract things. They've been moving en masse (remember, they're still a tiny group compared to all the MBAs out there) into quantitative finance. A lot of technology that once went to building faster and faster supercomputers (such as interconnect technology similar to Infiniband) is now being used to reduce latencies for financial transactions, where nanoseconds matter.
And while I've often felt pretty skeptical (as a graduate student physicist myself) about the purpose of string theory, a theoretical physicist-turned quant said, "It turns out that string theory is useful in valuing mortgage backed securities."
Somewhat unlike physical laws, the nature of financial systems changes constantly, so you have to redo your models (not just the constants in your models, but the models themselves) quite often, meaning endless job security for these physicist quants. And we're talking about the world's economy, meaning the potential profits aren't marginal, like they might be for designing a slightly more efficient laser or semiconductor, but is literally all the liquid or semiliquid assets in the world. After the end of the Cold War, physicists have found a way to be indispensable again.
It's an arms race of quantitative finance going on out there. Personally, I think it's unsustainable and will eventually result in an enormous clampdown as we have more flash-crashes or something unforeseen, but even then, there will still be a market for quantitive finance as long as there is money.
Current levels of debt are, outside of a global war, unprecedented in nations that survived economically afterwards. The US isn't as bad as some, but US national debt is approaching $140,000 per taxpayer. All of the money of the top 1% would make only a small dent in that. ...
ABSOLUTELY WRONG. The top 1% control a very large portion of the US's wealth: "In total, US millionaire households have at least $45.9 trillion in wealth, the majority of this wealth is held within the upper one-tenth of one percent of the population." http://ampedstatus.org/exclusive-analysis-of-financial-terrorism-in-america-over-1-million-deaths-annually-62-million-people-with-zero-net-worth-as-the-economic-elite-make-off-with-46-trillion/
That literally dwarfs the US national debt. There's plenty of money in this country. Just not for the little people (see what I did there?).
I miss the Greatest Generation, who at least had the sense to realize that fighting wars without paying for them is insane (they had a shared sense of duty and national purpose and an understanding that what's good for the middle class is good for America). BTW, look up the upper tax bracket rate under my favorite Republican of the last 60 years: Eisenhower. It's over 90%. And, miracle of miracles, we were paying down our debt from WW2. Can't Republicans go back to being at least rational? I used to be Republican, but then read a little about the world around me. I'd like my party to go back to the party of Eisenhower or maybe even Lincoln.
The problem hasn't come so much from technology itself, but the fact that the middle class (in America, at least) has been convinced that they shouldn't band together and fight for their interests. This is why you have productivity increasing, the general economy growing, but wages stagnant as working hours remain the same or increase.
The idea with technology is that we can lower the amount of hours we need to work while having better incomes. Across the board. The only way this can realistically happen is through some sort of collective bargaining, either through something like associations or unions or co-op business models, consumer activism, civil engagement (i.e. democracy), etc. Distributive technology and infrastructure can also help this, but I remain skeptical if the benefits of economy of scale will ever be truly overcome by distributive processes. Why do we have a 40 hour work week? It's because technology allowed us the economic margin to demand that we should only have to work 40 hours a week. If we have technological growth but a broad public that has been convinced to vote and act against their own interests, then we'll continue to have a stagnating middle class (while social mobility continues to drop and inequality rises). This isn't a rail against the rich or capitalism, this is merely an acknowledgement that in order for the vast majority of people's lives to be improved by the benefits of technology, economic growth, and capitalism, it has to be tied to the public actually demanding they share in the growth that those three things allow.
These things are always a balance. On the one hand, mob rule can lead to totalitarianism. On the other, a completely suppressed people is already totalitarianism. What is needed is a balance between liberalism (and by that I mean classical liberalism, i.e. liberty from over-regulation, etc) and democratic welfare. Complete lack of balance is pernicious and leads to both economic ruin and totalitarianism. That includes the right-wing dream of near plutocracy, where there are no parks or roads or libraries or schools except those owned privately and that you must pay a per-use or subscription fee to use (granted, this is a slight exaggeration in that they probably wouldn't outright claim that as an end goal, but it is the end-result of their policies). In a land where everything is privately owned, the poor are born trespassers. So, there's a balance. There must be public goods and there must be basic social services like Hayek proclaimed ("There is no reason why, in a society which has reached the general level of wealth ours has, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all without endangering general freedom; that is: some minimum of food, shelter and clothing, sufficient to preserve health. Nor is there any reason why the state should not help to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance in providing for those common hazards of life against which few can make adequate provision.").
But there must be also a free market, a market that can only remain free if monopolistic forces are kept at bay and/or democratized. Or you exchange the totalitarianism of communism with the totalitarianism of private fiefdoms. Democratic forces (i.e. the public acting in their own interests to exert leverage) + free markets (kept free by appropriate regulation) = improving quality of life for all. And the public must first and foremost act against corruption, which can destroy any and every economic political system if not kept in check by the will of the people.
Here's my take:
We're burning over a CUBIC MILE of coal every year, and another cubic mile of petroleum every year. Combine that with oxygen (which in the case of coal will cause ~three times the mass in carbon dioxide), and you have a significant addition of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. We are burning it far faster than plants are sequestering it back into the soil (which is how it got there in the first place). The ocean is acting as a big sink of carbon dioxide right now, absorbing a significant portion of the carbon dioxide we are putting back into the atmosphere, but its capacity is somewhat limited and already doesn't keep up with how fast we're pumping out CO2... and adding CO2 to the ocean also changes it chemically, which has other consequences as well. Carbon dioxide is a trace gas in the atmosphere, so after decades of this, we can drastically change the percentage of this gas in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide, because of its absorption in the far IR that lines up pretty well with the Earth's Blackbody radiation (but doesn't diminish solar radiation coming in), has a disproportionate effect on the temperature balance of the Earth:
http://www.sunwindsolar.com/a_images/co2_water_vapour.gif
The amount of carbon dioxide we release (minus that which goes into the ocean and rocks and the biosphere) accounts pretty well for the large increase in the atmospheric concentration of CO2, from 280 ppm pre-industrial to over 392 ppm now (and rising). Because of the absorption spectrum of CO2, this really ought to change the temperature of the Earth at least somewhat. This is all basic physics, really. Big models can help us get a better understanding, but they aren't necessary for the underlying phenomenon.
Look at it another way: For eons, the Earth has been undergoing runaway carbon sequestration, as peat moss grows and is buried by sediments and is turned to coal. This has been going on for hundreds of millions of years. Humans are, in a way, the planet's method of restoring the balance of carbon dioxide to more normal levels, where perhaps the biosphere would rather be (if you believe in that sort of talk). The problem, of course, is that humans evolved and ascended to civilization in a time with very, very lower carbon dioxide concentrations, by both a geological perspective and a modern perspective, and there's no guarantee that we'll enjoy or even survive the higher levels. The amount of carbon stored under the ground is much higher than that in the atmosphere, and if we emit all of that stored carbon, we may well return the climate to a very, very different temperature equilibrium.
Does anyone object to any of these facts, particularly the amount of carbon we're releasing into the atmosphere and the fact that we are reversing the long-term planet-wide trend of runaway carbon sequestration?
Reminds me of http://xkcd.com/505/
Free to walk in...
...$1000 to walk out. ;)
The propulsion systems of Discovery are being used for the initial flights of SLS, the next NASA rocket which is going beyond LEO (first flight will be around the Moon). Why the heck doesn't at least the summary mention that? That's a far better use than rotting in a museum.
"Durr, now that the Shuttles are retired, NASA is being shutdown, right?" Nope.
Animals do not have "rights", at least not in the sense humans do.
Legal rights are granted by law, they don't have divine provenance....
So there are no "natural rights?" Natural rights are what form the basis of the US government:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."
If there are no natural rights and only rights from the legal system, then if certain laws are passed, the governed would have no right to abolish the government.
No, our whole system of government (and internationally as well... hence the concept of human rights violations like genocide) is dependent on the concept of natural rights, whether you think they are granted by any sort of divine being(s) or not (you can certainly be a hard atheist and still acknowledge natural rights). You may not be an American, but if you're not... Is genocide a right in other countries if it simply is done with the right legal process, done entirely within that country's legal framework?
If there are no natural rights, the state's power is legally potentially unlimited. I know many libertarians hold up the Constitution as incredibly important (which it is), but I hope they don't lose sight of the fact that the Constitution's power rests on its ability to enumerate the natural rights of citizens, otherwise all you need to do is get a majority in 38 of the 50 state legislatures and a 2/3s majority in both the US House and Senate and you could take away all the rights of the people in the Constitution. We must not consider the Constitution as if it sprung from the mind of Zeus fully formed and perfect. It helps enumerate the people's rights, but it is not the source of those rights.
Imagine if Israel and all their neighbors (inc. the Arabs) became great allies. They'd be a very powerful force: Israel would have the technology and know-how, everyone else with the land, the human capital, and the energy. This sort of alliance is supposed to happen in the future world of Ender's Game (specifically mentioned as a historical fact in the sequel Shadow Puppets). They are too busy bombing each other and showing how great they are instead of realizing they are simply long-lost cousins of different branches of the Abrahamic Religions with a Lot in common (just realized after editing that's a pretty horrible pun...). It's a shame, really.
I can hold out hope that with the Arab Spring, something is changing, but I fear it will revert back to same old, same old. I can easily see the Arab Spring being used as a weapon against peace, but they do say that democracies do not wage war against each other or only very, VERY rarely... So IF democracy gains a foothold in the Arab world through the "Arab Spring," there may be hope for progress towards peace and a Middle East regarded not as a flee-bitten backwater but as a cultural and economic powerhouse rivaling Europe and America. I'm not holding my breath, though (prove my cynicism wrong, Middle East!).
When I saw the last stage I almost fell out of my chair!. What the hell happened to keeping it simple!
It's no worse than the various lunar landers.
The real question is whether they can get the budget to send that much mass to Mars.
Landing anything big on Mars turns out to be quite hard. There's not enough atmosphere for a soft parachute landing. But there's enough atmosphere to require a heat shield while plowing through it. Then there's not enough atmosphere to brake from Mach 5 to Mach 1 before running out of altitude. There's too much gravity for a full rocket-powered descent. A rocket facing into the atmosphere won't work until the craft has slowed below supersonic speeds.
That's what leads to what looks like an overly complex system.
There's not too much gravity for a full rocket-powered descent; fully-propulsive Mars entry is a perfectly valid option, it just requires a lot more mass. Supersonic retropropulsion, even without much thought put into how you do it, is certainly no worse than retropropulsion in a full vacuum, it's just that it tend to decrease the drag... but it does still slow you down! "A rocket facing into the atmosphere" most certainly DOES work, just not as well as we would like (for the simplest case).
And besides, there are definitely ways of doing supersonic retropropulsion that work better than the naive method of just a single rocket engine firing straight down (multiple nozzles around the perimeter of a heatshield and pointing down work much better, allowing you to take advantage of most of the drag you otherwise would).
But yes, the skycrane method is the most efficient one yet for placing a rover on Mars... the biggest advantage is you don't need a platform; you can land the rover directly on its wheels, which saves a lot of weight.
There are ways of increasing the efficiency (say for a larger rover), like perhaps using a bipropellant rocket engine (the descent stage, sometimes semi-erroneously called the "skycrane", is monopropellant and has a relatively low Isp) or other propulsion system optimizations (the thrusters are small, so suffer from things like minimum gauge issues, etc, that might not be as big of an issue for larger systems).
Also, the skycrane method is also intended to allow landing at higher altitudes. If you picked a very low altitude, it should be possible to design a system which can land a much larger payload to the surface for the same Mars-insertion payload. Hellas Basin is my favorite place, with almost twice the average Martian surface atmospheric density.
But yes, landing large payloads on Mars is hard. Research into deployable heatshields (like ballutes) and parachutes able to deploy at higher supersonic speeds really would help any future, human missions.
It couldn't possibly be worse than Facebook. With Google's transparency with privacy, and already working business model (has facebook ever posted a profit?), I'd trust them over Facebook in a heartbeat.
Facebook screws me over daily. No, I don't want any facebook credits. No, I don't want to play farmville. Disgusting...
And yet you still use Facebook, daily?
Is the lone red dot remaining in the Sick & Poor quadrant North Korea by chance?
Nope, it's Afghanistan. (I know because I replicated this graph using their website gapminder.org)... Just so you know, GapMinder World will color Afghanistan turquoise, not red.
There ought to be some evolutionary advantage to religious thinking (or an evolutionary advantage which has religious thinking as a difficult-to-avoid side-effect), since (from the atheist's perspective) belief in God is a somewhat arbitrary belief, yet it is so incredibly widespread (including societies cut off from each other for decades or centuries, like tribes in South America, etc.), in spite of the large amount of energy/time that is spent by human society on religious activities.
In my experience, religious (especially fundamentalist religious) people, whether Muslim or Christian, etc, tend to have more children while atheists tend not to have as many children. Since parents tend to influence their children (over and above children picking a random belief system), it's not unreasonable to suggest that this should manifest in evolutionary pressure promoting religious belief.
A study from the Mayo Clinic states:
http://www.mayoclinicproceedings.com/content/76/12/1225.abstract
"Most studies have shown that religious involvement and spirituality are associated with better health outcomes, including greater longevity, coping skills, and health-related quality of life (even during terminal illness) and less anxiety, depression, and suicide."
As irrational as it may be, religious belief may be a healthy human trait. That's not to say some religious beliefs won't cause quite negative health outcomes (i.e. refusing certain treatments, etc). And, of course, this does not establish the truth of any religious beliefs.
That always was my favorite part about the Soviet Union. None of this whiny "but we'll get cancer" crap. In Russia, a guy would be lucky to see his sixties and not die of alcohol-related disease.
My favorite was Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy, which was a much bigger version(i.e. over 200 nuclear explosions!) of the US's Operation Plowshare (a mere 28). They made a lake, went prospecting for diamonds and oil and gas and all sorts of neat things to do with "peaceful nuclear explosions." I believe the Soviets also found a way to make cattle feed directly out of petroleum (though I haven't been able to source this), I suppose in case of nuclear winter. I think the Soviets were also thinking of working with the USA to intentionally melt the Arctic ice sheet via damming up the Bering Strait or something. They were going to use the Energia rocket (designed for their Buran Space Shuttle) to orbit a giant orbiting mirror to illuminate arctic/Siberian towns during the cold, dark winters there.
You learn how to fight to win in the struggle of Man vs Nature when you live in a place as cold and desolate as Russia.
I think the Russians actually WANT global warming. I doubt they'll ever start doing anything meaningful to stop it. Heck, an ice-free Arctic would mean a lot more viable trading ports for Russia, something it has always been in very short supply of (compared to the United States, which has ginormous, ice-free trading ports on the two busiest oceans... this has been an enormous engine of growth and geopolitical power for the USA). Also, they would likely substantially increase how much arable land they have available if the temperature rose a few degrees. The only people who have more to gain from Global Warming is probably Canada.
And if global warming is ever a big enough problem that we just HAVE TO lower the temperature a few degrees via some geoengineering scheme, the Russians are the ones to go to who have the gonads to do it and the industrial capability to pull it off, although China could probably do it just as well.
Back when oil was $145 a barrel (i.e. last year), I read quite a bit about oil shale. It is thought by many that oil shale is, if you start from scratch with no investment on both sides, easier to extract than tar sands (political/environmental issues aside), or at least they are very close to equal. However, after decades of consistent investment (and, yes, libertarians, even government subsidies), tar sand oil extraction is far ahead of oil shale oil extraction. Oil shale investment has waxed and waned primarily with the price of oil, instead of being upheld by the government during the lean years, like tar sands development was.
I do agree, though, with your point that you can get oil from coal, etc.
The point of all this is that I think that the US government should put resources into developing oil shale (or coal-to-oil, whatever) as the mother-of-all strategic reserves. It should be funded like the national security priority that it is. We should extract a token amount every year (maybe enough to fund maintenance on the infrastructure), with the capability of ramping up production before our Strategic Petroleum Reserve dries up, in case of war or a spike in the price of oil. This should be done while also funding research into other sorts of energy solutions which don't exact as much of an environmental toll (i.e. nuclear power, cheap solar/wind, cheap/energy-dense/resilient batteries, etc.). In fact, if oil shale is profitable enough (currently costs $60 per barrel for oil shale production, but this would decrease with investment), the funds can be directed in that direction. Even if it isn't profitable, though, it should still be there as a strategic reserve.
Although this makes the most sense, it would never happen because of libertarians on one side and environmentalists on the other.
(emphasis mine)
Unfortunately, btrfs isn't "going" anywhere. Guess who their development was funded by? That's right, Oracle! Notice that they haven't released anything new since BEFORE Sun's shareholders approved the acquisition? (Latest release on the btrfs wiki is v .19, released in June 2009) It's not exactly improving at a breakneck pace... If btrfs is going to go anywhere, they need some real development money.
Dang Oracle.