0 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which my nose hairs freeze solid when I inhale. I actually can't even tell if it's above or below freezing just by inhaling, but I can tell if it's near 0 degrees Fahrenheit just by inhaling. 98.6 degrees F, just about 100 degrees F, is the average body temperature and is as good a marker as any. You know that 100 degrees F is just barely hotter than body temperature, so you can physically sense it pretty accurately. Same with zero degrees F, the temperature at which your nose hairs freeze solid.
I agree that the metric system usually makes more sense. However, Centigrade is simply defined as the boiling and freezing points of water, which is somewhat arbitrary, but temperature isn't often quickly converted from one type of unit to another. Does anyone use units of "kilodegrees"? Centigrade is sort of the red-headed stepchild of metric. How many joules does it take to raise water one degree Centigrade? 4186 joules? Oh! It's not a power of ten! My world is ruined!
Seriously. Meters and kilograms and liters such make a lot more sense than feet and pounds and gallons, but Centigrade is really lacks the convenience that makes the other metric units so convenient, whereas Fahrenheit is more convenient for many people, especially if you grew up with it for most of your life.
Notice that I said there are no pills which can permanently reverse aging. There are certainly things one can do to slow aging, but not to reverse it entirely.
You know, I thought the same thing. But, perhaps by the time stem cell treatments are developed enough for us to benefit, we will be too old. Remember, our parents thought that if "they" can put a man on the moon, then "they" would have pills that would reverse aging. Well, there are no such pills that can really do that.
I think that one of the biggest reasons this makes people uneasy is that it reminds people of their own mortality.
I guess another thing that we have to realize is that, no matter what, we will eventually die. Even if we had near-immortal bodies (like the elves, perhaps), we would eventually die with the heat death of the universe. Even if there were no heat death, unless we had infinite back ups of our minds and/or reduced the probability of dieing to infinitely small, we would eventually die by random accident, even if it were some almost-infinitely-improbable event like all of the electrons tunneling away from one's body at the same time.
No matter how long one adds to one's lifespan, it will not reduce the length of one's death.
It is realizations like this that lead some people on vain quests to gain immortality and other people to religion. Another thing that this causes people to do is to focus on their offspring or on leaving a legacy in general. I think that it's more helpful to try to help others rather than just to worship at the altar of the Self. You'll ultimately find more meaning outside of yourself.
I'd agree with you, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a human and not a machine. Survival of a species tends to be proportional to the size of its territory and its population. You can't really compare a human mission to Mars with a robotic one, since there has never been a human mission to Mars.
Ultimately, you could send millions of robots to Mars and it wouldn't compare with the amount of knowledge we'd gain from a permanent colony on the planet. That's speaking in terms of hundreds of years, of course. The shuttle system is a poor comparison point. The Russians could probably put together a manned mission to Mars with all the money (billions of dollars) we've spent on just sending robots there. In the near future, companies like SpaceX (which will eventually emerge, even if SpaceX doesn't succeed) will be able to do the same thing for even cheaper.
As far as safety, well, people die every year trying to climb Everest just for the heck of it.
NASA had a robot in development JUST FOR THIS SORT OF THING. In the early 1990s/late 1980s they were working on an autonomous robot that responds to voice commands that would fly around in space near a space station to retrieve tools or astronauts and such. It would be released and lock on to the tool or whatever and fly to it and fly back to the station. I have a picture of it in a kids book about robots, but I can't find one online.
The EVA Retriever concept is an autonomous free flying robot for retrieving equipment or a spacewalking astronaut drifting in separated flight near the Space Station. The device combines the proven manned maneuvering unit (MMU) with a robot latched in where an astronaut normally would be. The MMU was flown eight times from the Space Shuttle's cargo bay in test flights and for satellite repair spacewalks.
Responding to voice commands from the Space Station crew, the EVA Retriever would activate and check itself out, search for and lock onto the "target," thrust toward, rendezvous with and grapple the target -- automatically avoiding any obstacles en route such as Space Station structures. After grappling the target, the EVA Retriever would search for the Space Station and finding it, return home.
I think Obama will give NASA the $2 billion. It's a stimulus to the economy, something it badly needs. Now, I know that 90% of slashdot is libertarian, but Keynesian economics says that you do deficit spending in a recession. You both decrease taxes and increase spending, since the gov't can act as a employer of last resort (when everyone else is firing). There's no question that there's great waste when 10% of the population is unemployed (if that high unemploymentcomes to pass). You'll have millions of people not doing anything for the economy, just sitting at home and draining the government's social spending with nothing to show for it. The only way to quickly reduce that number is by government spending. No other way. He may even reverse Bush's decision to go to the Moon and instead go to Mars first. If he wants Florida in the bag in 2012, he probably will also extend the Shuttle for a couple years.
(Of course, the national debt will eventually overwhelm the tax base unless the flip-side of Keynesian economics is also followed: increase taxes and decrease spending during boom cycles.)
"The article speculates that the operators of HerbalKing simply passed on to associates the keys to the automated, 35,000-strong botnet, and the spam flow didn't miss a beat." Whatever. I've seen way too many scifi films to believe that. Obviously, skynet is now self-aware.
The number one reason why white people like not having a TV is so that they can tell you that they don't have a TV. .... It is effective in making other white people feel bad, and making themselves feel good about their life and life choices. Though these people often fill their time by talking with other friends who don't watch TV about how they don't watch TV, looking at leaves, cooking, reading books about left wing politics, and going to concerts/protests/poetry slams.
You're forgetting the "sweetener" that Congress just added to the financial bail-out, a tax credit that Congress is giving consumers for at least $2500 for plug-in hybrid capability, with an additional $417 per kwh capacity past 4 kwh (with a limit of $7500 for small vehicles, and much more on larger vehicles). This evens the playing field much more: http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2008/10/bailout_bill_includes_tax_brea.html
That means up to $7500 for a good plug-in vehicle. This is a big deal. It could totally change the minds of the car manufacturers.
Well, actually, much of Africa (including West Africa) will get an increase in rainfall with an increase in temperature, according to simulations run by some guy from the Netherlands. This may even result in the "greening of the Sahara:" http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/sep/16/highereducation.climatechange
Global warming could significantly increase rainfall in Saharan Africa within a few decades, potentially ending the severe droughts that have devastated the region, a new study suggests.
The discovery was made by climate experts at the Royal Meteorological Institute in De Bilt, the Netherlands, who used a computer model to predict changes in the Sahel region - a wide belt stretching from the Atlantic to the horn of Africa that includes Ethiopia, Somalia and Djibouti.
Global warming will heat the land more than the sea, leading to changes in air pressure and weather. When the Netherlands team simulated this effect and combined it with warming caused by the expected rises in greenhouse gas emissions between 1980 and 2080, they found Sahel rainfall in the July to September period jumped 1-2mm a day.
Some scientists suspected that global warming might increase rainfall in the region, causing the so-called greening of the Sahara, but these are the biggest predicted increases so far.
This definitely affects Democrats, too. My father-in-law is a staunch democrat, and he's also very anxious all the time. It affects his political views because he worries greatly about things like health care and such, things which he thinks the gov't can protect us from.
There's a well-known saying: "A Democrat is a Republican who's been arrested, and a Republican is a Democrat who's been mugged."
I know that the saying works for me, too. My wife and I were the victims of gang violence (well, just some inner-city middle schoolers who broke our car window while we were in the car, causing my wife's face to bleed) and I definitely think it caused me to lean to the right, and more recently I was arrested (charges later dismissed) which caused me to not trust the police and lean to the left.
Now, I don't think I'm really on either side. The police aren't going to really do too much to you as long as you don't make their lives difficult, and I think I can handle myself and my family if the whole economy implodes. Politicians usually don't actually make you safer. Good neighbors, family, and friends do.
The vibrations are not lethal. They are 5-6 Gs, which is enough to temporarily impair the functionality of the astronauts (blurred vision, etc), but not enough to seriously injure or kill.
from the Space.com article:
The main concern centered on astronaut performance during an Ares I launch, said Garry Lyles, NASA's associate director for technical management at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala. The higher vibrations were not a crew health concern, but could prevent astronauts from reading instrument panels or flipping switches precisely due to blurry vision.
Maybe it would cause the United States to get its ass in gear again. We developed a whole lot of stuff in the Cold War pissing match with the CCCP. It would probably do us good to have another.
Can't argue with that! I think some nationalistic competition with Russia or China could prove much more valuable than this idea that we should sell our debt to China and have them buy our companies instead of "trying to get ahead of the Ruskies." It took 14 years between the first experimental nuclear chain reaction (the Chicago Pile) until the first COMMERCIAL power plant. Now, it takes twice that time to get a nuclear power plant finished. Granted, safety is much better now, but that just seems ridiculous to me. We DO need to get our rear in gear. We could subsidize shale oil and coal-to-gasoline for use as mostly a ginormous strategic oil reserve (there's enough oil in there to last at least half a century for the US) while doing an X-Prize for battery/electric car technologies. We don't need to rely on foreign countries for energy. If we subsidized both coal to gas and shale oil, petroleum would drop to probably around $50/gallon and couldn't be used as a political tool by third-world dictators.
The US electrical grid needs to be upgraded... with high-temperature (liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium) superconductors (a coast-to-coast superconducting line would be worth it for the lowered line losses alone), which don't mire the landscape and are developed domestically. This technology, once mature, could lead to significant advances in all different areas of heavy electrical engineering.
The wind-belt running North-to-South through the prairie states needs to be mined for wind energy.
The Federal government should invest a portion of the Dept. of Energy's budget to buying up useful energy technology patents and making them available for free for any domestic production. (I'm thinking of Nanosolar, here.)
Domestic manufacturing needs to be encouraged, and cheap electricity will help. Cheap nuclear is definitely possible.
Honestly, appeasement is what let Hitler take over Europe in WWII. I don't think this will come down to another world war, but what do you think of the possibility of another Soviet Union? The fact is, Russia hasn't changed much since the Cold War.
I completely agree. This has gone on far enough. Russia wants to annex parts of another country, so it backs "freedom fighters" and makes them Russian citizens, allowing Russia to claim that they're just trying to protect the interests of Russians in Georgia. Has anyone noticed that this is THE SAME EXCUSE THAT HITLER USED WHEN HE STARTED WWII??? Why, Russia is just trying to bring other Russians under the wings of the motherland! How NOBLE of them!
Seriously, if the separatists in Georgia actually wanted to form their own country, I could say that it is ARGUABLE that Russia's actions are justified, but this situation if FUCKING STRAIGHT-UP IMPERIALISM! Russia wants to have complete control over energy in this region, and so they're going to annex parts of Georgia (actually, all of it, if the West doesn't do anything).
In the United States, public transport is not always more fuel efficient (per passenger-mile) than driving an automobile. (Of course, public transport does reduce congestion during rush hour, which can be just as important.) Also, car-pooling will very likely help out.
Biking is a good idea for saving fuel basically anytime, since it uses virtually zero carbon-intensive energy to use (not counting food), and has the very real and important side-benefit of physical exercise. Biking in congested areas is much faster than driving, even if you strictly obey traffic laws. One thing about biking is that you can pretty much always tell how long it will take to get to your destination, since it is more directly related to distance and hills than any transient events like horrible congestion caused by who-knows-what.
I've also found that keeping your tires inflated to their maximum safe rated pressure can improve gas mileage considerably, and driving hyper-efficiently along with maximum pressure can increase gas mileage by about 5 mpg. Hyper-efficiency means coasting when you are going down-hill. I even shut my engine off if, for example, I'm stopped at a red light. Stopping the engine while idling is a most of what mild-hybrids tend to do anyways, so you can get much of the benefit of having a mild hybrid by just doing this manually. (Be careful trying to do this if you have power-steering and brakes!!!)
Getting a job closer to home is a really good idea, no matter what your mode of transportation. It will save you time. Take this distance into consideration when getting a job. For instance, if your commute is half an hour for a full-time job, take your salary and minus 12.5% of your salary and also the price of gas for such a commute (probably about 2 gallons a day, or $7-8 in the US right now) to get your equivalent salary of the time spent in commute working at that job instead of driving. So: for $20/hour: ($20*8-$8)/9 = $16.89
So, really, you're "working" 9 hours but getting paid $3.11 less per hour than the advertised rate.
A similar calculation could work into finding out which grocery store to use, etc. By keeping my computer on all night, I waste about 1 kilowatt-hour, so I take the 3 seconds it takes to hibernate it (And ten seconds to un-hibernate it).
Being green by just watching your buying decisions is pretty easy where I live (Minnesota). You can choose to pay extra in order to get all your electricity from wind power. For all of its bad rap, you can buy e85 easily all over the place and run just on that (or run a mix of it, if you have a car not designed for ethanol... this works best if your car runs best on like 93 octane fuel). If you're pretty handy, you can convert your small car or small pickup to electric power for between $4000 and $10,000 depending on how far you want to go, how big your car is, and how fast you want to go. Double that price if you want someone else to convert it for you (plus the cost of the vehicle). And you can convert your diesel into a greaser (running on used vegetable oil).
Perhaps the smartest thing you can do if you own a house is to get your house super-insulated. Besides just cutting down on A/C and heating energy across the board, it makes running the A/C during the night time possible, allowing you to take advantage of cheap off-peak electricity. ($0.015 per kwh in my area. You read that right. It's less than two cents per kwh at non-peak hours)
Compact fluorescent bulbs are a no-brainer (unless you're paranoid about toxic heavy metals) and will pay for themselves.
Also, in the summertime, you can use a swamp-cooler instead of A/C. It uses like less than 1/10 the electricity of A/C. These only work when it's not really humid out, though.
Also, get a new refrigerator and use a gas (methane) stove (more efficient use of the fuel than to burn it at %50 efficiency and loose energy in transmission to your electric range). Air-dry your clothes or buy a gas powered dryer.
In Sweden, there are male quotas as well. As a result, a couple of hundred women that were denied entry to vet school are suing the country's government for discrimnation.
Needless to say, men can not sue.
Feminism is not about gender equality, it's gender war, and they are winning.
That's interesting. I certainly have talked to a few women feminists who seem to hate men (well, dislike them very much). In fact, this one woman who spoke at the Feminist Forum at my school got married to a man, but he was the only man in the whole ceremony. Every person at the wedding, besides the groom, was female, including the priest. Now, I don't know about you, but that can't be natural and certainly isn't equality-minded. I'm sure that quite a few of the people who are motivated enough to constantly lobby for legislation like this are probably misguided like that woman was--bent the opposite way that a redneck is. Perhaps some of these uber-feminists (post-feminists?) really do hate men, and no doubt for some of them it IS a gender war. But, for most people this is still about equality.
I tend to be pretty equality-minded myself, but I'm also aware that there are REAL biological differences between men and women, and that reflects itself in the social system. See, it's not just social conditioning that determines behavior: biology partly determines social behavior! Perhaps care-taking occupational fields are more common for women because that also happens to be a major genetic imperative for women, even more so than men (yes, breasts are for more than just sexual objects, in fact in some cultures they are not considered more sexual objects than the neck or the navel). How come animal behavior is considered almost entirely genetically determined by PC people cannot admit that human behavior may be even somewhat determined by genes?
(I was a member of the feminist forum, even though I'm a guy... Hey, I was single!)
There's really no way around cooling the sensor for photon counting, especially if you use near-infrared or lower. If the sensor itself is giving off black-body radiation of the type you're looking for, then it's pretty much worthless to try to count photons because the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics conspire against you. I can imagine visible or UV photon counting with uncooled sensors, but certainly not far-infrared. These thermally-generated photons are what cause the "dark count rate" of a device, and cooling the device can help reduce the dark count rate. Here you are, from wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-Photon_Avalanche_Diode
What about near-earth asteroids? If I found a large, metallic asteroid made of, say, 50% nickel, I would just have to steer it into Greenland or some other uninhabited place. Sure, it's packing a few megatons of kinetic energy, but metallic asteroids often survive reentry. With a couple billion pounds of nickel at my disposal (and with nickel at over $10 a pound), I could probably recoup my costs if I was smart enough in designing the craft and was good enough with orbital mechanics to only need a small amount of fuel. And that's with today's level of technology.
Obviously this would be a lot easier if you were to find a (smaller) asteroid made up of platinum, gold, or something else.
NAS devices don't always suck. If you scrape the bottom of the barrel, you'll get scum, but if you invest in quality software written by people who know what they're doing and hardware that isn't just what's on pricewatch this month, you'll do well.
Here's a little advertisement for the company http://massmountain.com/ I work for (it's a family company, BTW, with experience in the industry since the early 1970s):
Well, I work for a company that uses an embedded linux with a customized web interface for our SAN/NAS boxes. We use quality hardware, not POS Dell stuff. We use hot-swap components (Hard-drive, power-supply, fan...) and quality RAID cards (recommend hardware RAID 6). The software we use is capable of automatic iSCSI failover using virtual IPs, and NFS/Samba/iSCSI/etc volume replication (which is like block-level mirroring two devices together). The snapshot capabilities are excellent (and will often save you from many software mistakes... like accidentally deleting everything), and everything is configured using the slick web GUI. FTP and lots of other protocols are available (like AFP, rsync, and support for backup from veritas, retroclient, brightstor, etc.), and are configured all using the web GUI. Anti-virus scanning on the NAS volumes is available. Also, our box works with FibreChannel, both initiator and target (but we mostly use iSCSI, which the software supports being a target or an initiator).
Our boxes usually sell at around $1250/Terabyte (we can bargain) as a complete solution, but often cost less per terabyte the more storage you get.
Re:RAID5 is stupid, RAID 10 or no RAID
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What NAS To Buy?
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· Score: 4, Informative
Not to be pedantic, but RAID10 will only guarantee data security with one drive failure. With RAID 10, there's an approximately 1/3 chance that the second drive to fail will cause you to lose all your data.
Of course, with RAID6, any two drives can fail while ensuring the safety of your data. Hot spares are a good idea and will minimize the chances of having a three drive failure.
This is a very interesting post. Although I am not anything like an atheist, I always thought it was funny how someone who calls themselves an "atheist" would advocate the "technological singularity." I mean, if we achieve this singularity, wouldn't we basically be gods who could create worlds at a whim, even simulations of our own world, at any point in its previous history? If this artificial intelligence singularity is so certain, then how can one be so certain that it hasn't already happened and that one is not merely a result of that singularity, living in an artificial world produced by the post-singularity god(s)? A "strong atheist" (i.e. one who believes firmly that God must not exist, or has approaching zero chance of existing) is a fool who so strongly advocates the inevitability of the singularity!
Anyways, I think that humans have a biological predisposition to believe in something like God, partly for the reasons that you give. At very least, any atheist must acknowledge that, since there appears no other logical (non-conspiracy-theory) explanation for the widespread belief of God throughout all human cultures (even isolated ones).
Sorry, I forgot to post the link to the combined heat and power plant in my city of St. Paul: http://www.districtenergy.com/
The district energy also has a cooling plant that distributes cold water to the downtown area and 300 nearby homes. The chilled water is produced overnight and stored in tanks so that it can be produced with off-peak electricity. The nearby heat and power plant is run on waste wood collected from yards and parks and produces heat and power (much is used for the distributed cold water refrigeration). So... four birds (cold water, hot water, electricity generation and wood waste disposal) with one stone.
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0 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which my nose hairs freeze solid when I inhale. I actually can't even tell if it's above or below freezing just by inhaling, but I can tell if it's near 0 degrees Fahrenheit just by inhaling. 98.6 degrees F, just about 100 degrees F, is the average body temperature and is as good a marker as any. You know that 100 degrees F is just barely hotter than body temperature, so you can physically sense it pretty accurately. Same with zero degrees F, the temperature at which your nose hairs freeze solid.
I agree that the metric system usually makes more sense. However, Centigrade is simply defined as the boiling and freezing points of water, which is somewhat arbitrary, but temperature isn't often quickly converted from one type of unit to another. Does anyone use units of "kilodegrees"? Centigrade is sort of the red-headed stepchild of metric. How many joules does it take to raise water one degree Centigrade? 4186 joules? Oh! It's not a power of ten! My world is ruined!
Seriously. Meters and kilograms and liters such make a lot more sense than feet and pounds and gallons, but Centigrade is really lacks the convenience that makes the other metric units so convenient, whereas Fahrenheit is more convenient for many people, especially if you grew up with it for most of your life.
Notice that I said there are no pills which can permanently reverse aging. There are certainly things one can do to slow aging, but not to reverse it entirely.
You know, I thought the same thing. But, perhaps by the time stem cell treatments are developed enough for us to benefit, we will be too old. Remember, our parents thought that if "they" can put a man on the moon, then "they" would have pills that would reverse aging. Well, there are no such pills that can really do that.
I think that one of the biggest reasons this makes people uneasy is that it reminds people of their own mortality.
I guess another thing that we have to realize is that, no matter what, we will eventually die. Even if we had near-immortal bodies (like the elves, perhaps), we would eventually die with the heat death of the universe. Even if there were no heat death, unless we had infinite back ups of our minds and/or reduced the probability of dieing to infinitely small, we would eventually die by random accident, even if it were some almost-infinitely-improbable event like all of the electrons tunneling away from one's body at the same time.
No matter how long one adds to one's lifespan, it will not reduce the length of one's death.
It is realizations like this that lead some people on vain quests to gain immortality and other people to religion. Another thing that this causes people to do is to focus on their offspring or on leaving a legacy in general. I think that it's more helpful to try to help others rather than just to worship at the altar of the Self. You'll ultimately find more meaning outside of yourself.
I'd agree with you, if it wasn't for the fact that I'm a human and not a machine. Survival of a species tends to be proportional to the size of its territory and its population. You can't really compare a human mission to Mars with a robotic one, since there has never been a human mission to Mars.
Ultimately, you could send millions of robots to Mars and it wouldn't compare with the amount of knowledge we'd gain from a permanent colony on the planet. That's speaking in terms of hundreds of years, of course. The shuttle system is a poor comparison point. The Russians could probably put together a manned mission to Mars with all the money (billions of dollars) we've spent on just sending robots there. In the near future, companies like SpaceX (which will eventually emerge, even if SpaceX doesn't succeed) will be able to do the same thing for even cheaper.
As far as safety, well, people die every year trying to climb Everest just for the heck of it.
EVA means "Extra-Vehicular Activity" or, colloquially, space-walking.
NASA had a robot in development JUST FOR THIS SORT OF THING. In the early 1990s/late 1980s they were working on an autonomous robot that responds to voice commands that would fly around in space near a space station to retrieve tools or astronauts and such. It would be released and lock on to the tool or whatever and fly to it and fly back to the station. I have a picture of it in a kids book about robots, but I can't find one online.
Here's a fact sheet on the project:
http://cd.textfiles.com/spaceandast/TEXT/STATION/STF_EVA.TXT
I think Obama will give NASA the $2 billion. It's a stimulus to the economy, something it badly needs. Now, I know that 90% of slashdot is libertarian, but Keynesian economics says that you do deficit spending in a recession. You both decrease taxes and increase spending, since the gov't can act as a employer of last resort (when everyone else is firing). There's no question that there's great waste when 10% of the population is unemployed (if that high unemploymentcomes to pass). You'll have millions of people not doing anything for the economy, just sitting at home and draining the government's social spending with nothing to show for it. The only way to quickly reduce that number is by government spending. No other way. He may even reverse Bush's decision to go to the Moon and instead go to Mars first. If he wants Florida in the bag in 2012, he probably will also extend the Shuttle for a couple years.
(Of course, the national debt will eventually overwhelm the tax base unless the flip-side of Keynesian economics is also followed: increase taxes and decrease spending during boom cycles.)
"The article speculates that the operators of HerbalKing simply passed on to associates the keys to the automated, 35,000-strong botnet, and the spam flow didn't miss a beat."
Whatever. I've seen way too many scifi films to believe that. Obviously, skynet is now self-aware.
I for one... (etc.)
This is actually #28 on the list of "Stuff White People Like."
http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2008/01/26/28-not-having-a-tv/
You're forgetting the "sweetener" that Congress just added to the financial bail-out, a tax credit that Congress is giving consumers for at least $2500 for plug-in hybrid capability, with an additional $417 per kwh capacity past 4 kwh (with a limit of $7500 for small vehicles, and much more on larger vehicles). This evens the playing field much more: http://blog.cleveland.com/business/2008/10/bailout_bill_includes_tax_brea.html
That means up to $7500 for a good plug-in vehicle. This is a big deal. It could totally change the minds of the car manufacturers.
The only result I found was about how Sarah Palin was approached by hippies to try to get weed legalized (for both smoking and industrial use):
http://web.archive.org/web/20010208164916/www.adn.com/elex/story/0,3109,207133,00.html
The group had driven to Wasilla on hemp oil.
Well, actually, much of Africa (including West Africa) will get an increase in rainfall with an increase in temperature, according to simulations run by some guy from the Netherlands. This may even result in the "greening of the Sahara:"
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/sep/16/highereducation.climatechange
This definitely affects Democrats, too. My father-in-law is a staunch democrat, and he's also very anxious all the time. It affects his political views because he worries greatly about things like health care and such, things which he thinks the gov't can protect us from.
There's a well-known saying: "A Democrat is a Republican who's been arrested, and a Republican is a Democrat who's been mugged."
I know that the saying works for me, too. My wife and I were the victims of gang violence (well, just some inner-city middle schoolers who broke our car window while we were in the car, causing my wife's face to bleed) and I definitely think it caused me to lean to the right, and more recently I was arrested (charges later dismissed) which caused me to not trust the police and lean to the left.
Now, I don't think I'm really on either side. The police aren't going to really do too much to you as long as you don't make their lives difficult, and I think I can handle myself and my family if the whole economy implodes. Politicians usually don't actually make you safer. Good neighbors, family, and friends do.
The vibrations are not lethal. They are 5-6 Gs, which is enough to temporarily impair the functionality of the astronauts (blurred vision, etc), but not enough to seriously injure or kill.
from the Space.com article:
Can't argue with that! I think some nationalistic competition with Russia or China could prove much more valuable than this idea that we should sell our debt to China and have them buy our companies instead of "trying to get ahead of the Ruskies." It took 14 years between the first experimental nuclear chain reaction (the Chicago Pile) until the first COMMERCIAL power plant. Now, it takes twice that time to get a nuclear power plant finished. Granted, safety is much better now, but that just seems ridiculous to me. We DO need to get our rear in gear. We could subsidize shale oil and coal-to-gasoline for use as mostly a ginormous strategic oil reserve (there's enough oil in there to last at least half a century for the US) while doing an X-Prize for battery/electric car technologies. We don't need to rely on foreign countries for energy. If we subsidized both coal to gas and shale oil, petroleum would drop to probably around $50/gallon and couldn't be used as a political tool by third-world dictators.
The US electrical grid needs to be upgraded... with high-temperature (liquid nitrogen instead of liquid helium) superconductors (a coast-to-coast superconducting line would be worth it for the lowered line losses alone), which don't mire the landscape and are developed domestically. This technology, once mature, could lead to significant advances in all different areas of heavy electrical engineering.
The wind-belt running North-to-South through the prairie states needs to be mined for wind energy.
The Federal government should invest a portion of the Dept. of Energy's budget to buying up useful energy technology patents and making them available for free for any domestic production. (I'm thinking of Nanosolar, here.)
Domestic manufacturing needs to be encouraged, and cheap electricity will help. Cheap nuclear is definitely possible.
Honestly, appeasement is what let Hitler take over Europe in WWII. I don't think this will come down to another world war, but what do you think of the possibility of another Soviet Union? The fact is, Russia hasn't changed much since the Cold War.
I completely agree. This has gone on far enough. Russia wants to annex parts of another country, so it backs "freedom fighters" and makes them Russian citizens, allowing Russia to claim that they're just trying to protect the interests of Russians in Georgia. Has anyone noticed that this is THE SAME EXCUSE THAT HITLER USED WHEN HE STARTED WWII??? Why, Russia is just trying to bring other Russians under the wings of the motherland! How NOBLE of them!
Seriously, if the separatists in Georgia actually wanted to form their own country, I could say that it is ARGUABLE that Russia's actions are justified, but this situation if FUCKING STRAIGHT-UP IMPERIALISM! Russia wants to have complete control over energy in this region, and so they're going to annex parts of Georgia (actually, all of it, if the West doesn't do anything).
In the United States, public transport is not always more fuel efficient (per passenger-mile) than driving an automobile. (Of course, public transport does reduce congestion during rush hour, which can be just as important.) Also, car-pooling will very likely help out.
Biking is a good idea for saving fuel basically anytime, since it uses virtually zero carbon-intensive energy to use (not counting food), and has the very real and important side-benefit of physical exercise. Biking in congested areas is much faster than driving, even if you strictly obey traffic laws. One thing about biking is that you can pretty much always tell how long it will take to get to your destination, since it is more directly related to distance and hills than any transient events like horrible congestion caused by who-knows-what.
I've also found that keeping your tires inflated to their maximum safe rated pressure can improve gas mileage considerably, and driving hyper-efficiently along with maximum pressure can increase gas mileage by about 5 mpg. Hyper-efficiency means coasting when you are going down-hill. I even shut my engine off if, for example, I'm stopped at a red light. Stopping the engine while idling is a most of what mild-hybrids tend to do anyways, so you can get much of the benefit of having a mild hybrid by just doing this manually. (Be careful trying to do this if you have power-steering and brakes!!!)
Getting a job closer to home is a really good idea, no matter what your mode of transportation. It will save you time. Take this distance into consideration when getting a job. For instance, if your commute is half an hour for a full-time job, take your salary and minus 12.5% of your salary and also the price of gas for such a commute (probably about 2 gallons a day, or $7-8 in the US right now) to get your equivalent salary of the time spent in commute working at that job instead of driving. So: for $20/hour:
($20*8-$8)/9 = $16.89
So, really, you're "working" 9 hours but getting paid $3.11 less per hour than the advertised rate.
A similar calculation could work into finding out which grocery store to use, etc. By keeping my computer on all night, I waste about 1 kilowatt-hour, so I take the 3 seconds it takes to hibernate it (And ten seconds to un-hibernate it).
Being green by just watching your buying decisions is pretty easy where I live (Minnesota). You can choose to pay extra in order to get all your electricity from wind power. For all of its bad rap, you can buy e85 easily all over the place and run just on that (or run a mix of it, if you have a car not designed for ethanol... this works best if your car runs best on like 93 octane fuel). If you're pretty handy, you can convert your small car or small pickup to electric power for between $4000 and $10,000 depending on how far you want to go, how big your car is, and how fast you want to go. Double that price if you want someone else to convert it for you (plus the cost of the vehicle). And you can convert your diesel into a greaser (running on used vegetable oil).
Perhaps the smartest thing you can do if you own a house is to get your house super-insulated. Besides just cutting down on A/C and heating energy across the board, it makes running the A/C during the night time possible, allowing you to take advantage of cheap off-peak electricity. ($0.015 per kwh in my area. You read that right. It's less than two cents per kwh at non-peak hours)
Compact fluorescent bulbs are a no-brainer (unless you're paranoid about toxic heavy metals) and will pay for themselves.
Also, in the summertime, you can use a swamp-cooler instead of A/C. It uses like less than 1/10 the electricity of A/C. These only work when it's not really humid out, though.
Also, get a new refrigerator and use a gas (methane) stove (more efficient use of the fuel than to burn it at %50 efficiency and loose energy in transmission to your electric range). Air-dry your clothes or buy a gas powered dryer.
Also, consume less meat. You don't have
That's interesting. I certainly have talked to a few women feminists who seem to hate men (well, dislike them very much). In fact, this one woman who spoke at the Feminist Forum at my school got married to a man, but he was the only man in the whole ceremony. Every person at the wedding, besides the groom, was female, including the priest. Now, I don't know about you, but that can't be natural and certainly isn't equality-minded. I'm sure that quite a few of the people who are motivated enough to constantly lobby for legislation like this are probably misguided like that woman was--bent the opposite way that a redneck is. Perhaps some of these uber-feminists (post-feminists?) really do hate men, and no doubt for some of them it IS a gender war. But, for most people this is still about equality.
I tend to be pretty equality-minded myself, but I'm also aware that there are REAL biological differences between men and women, and that reflects itself in the social system. See, it's not just social conditioning that determines behavior: biology partly determines social behavior! Perhaps care-taking occupational fields are more common for women because that also happens to be a major genetic imperative for women, even more so than men (yes, breasts are for more than just sexual objects, in fact in some cultures they are not considered more sexual objects than the neck or the navel). How come animal behavior is considered almost entirely genetically determined by PC people cannot admit that human behavior may be even somewhat determined by genes?
(I was a member of the feminist forum, even though I'm a guy... Hey, I was single!)
There's really no way around cooling the sensor for photon counting, especially if you use near-infrared or lower. If the sensor itself is giving off black-body radiation of the type you're looking for, then it's pretty much worthless to try to count photons because the laws of thermodynamics and quantum mechanics conspire against you. I can imagine visible or UV photon counting with uncooled sensors, but certainly not far-infrared. These thermally-generated photons are what cause the "dark count rate" of a device, and cooling the device can help reduce the dark count rate. Here you are, from wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single-Photon_Avalanche_Diode
What about near-earth asteroids? If I found a large, metallic asteroid made of, say, 50% nickel, I would just have to steer it into Greenland or some other uninhabited place. Sure, it's packing a few megatons of kinetic energy, but metallic asteroids often survive reentry. With a couple billion pounds of nickel at my disposal (and with nickel at over $10 a pound), I could probably recoup my costs if I was smart enough in designing the craft and was good enough with orbital mechanics to only need a small amount of fuel. And that's with today's level of technology.
Obviously this would be a lot easier if you were to find a (smaller) asteroid made up of platinum, gold, or something else.
NAS devices don't always suck. If you scrape the bottom of the barrel, you'll get scum, but if you invest in quality software written by people who know what they're doing and hardware that isn't just what's on pricewatch this month, you'll do well.
Here's a little advertisement for the company http://massmountain.com/ I work for (it's a family company, BTW, with experience in the industry since the early 1970s):
Well, I work for a company that uses an embedded linux with a customized web interface for our SAN/NAS boxes. We use quality hardware, not POS Dell stuff. We use hot-swap components (Hard-drive, power-supply, fan...) and quality RAID cards (recommend hardware RAID 6). The software we use is capable of automatic iSCSI failover using virtual IPs, and NFS/Samba/iSCSI/etc volume replication (which is like block-level mirroring two devices together). The snapshot capabilities are excellent (and will often save you from many software mistakes... like accidentally deleting everything), and everything is configured using the slick web GUI. FTP and lots of other protocols are available (like AFP, rsync, and support for backup from veritas, retroclient, brightstor, etc.), and are configured all using the web GUI. Anti-virus scanning on the NAS volumes is available. Also, our box works with FibreChannel, both initiator and target (but we mostly use iSCSI, which the software supports being a target or an initiator).
Our boxes usually sell at around $1250/Terabyte (we can bargain) as a complete solution, but often cost less per terabyte the more storage you get.
Here's a link to one of our lower-end boxes:
http://cgi.ebay.com/SAN-Disk-SAN-4TB-iSCSI-NAS-FC-Mass-Mountain-NEW_W0QQitemZ200229310426QQihZ010QQcategoryZ80217QQcmdZViewItem
Not to be pedantic, but RAID10 will only guarantee data security with one drive failure. With RAID 10, there's an approximately 1/3 chance that the second drive to fail will cause you to lose all your data.
Of course, with RAID6, any two drives can fail while ensuring the safety of your data. Hot spares are a good idea and will minimize the chances of having a three drive failure.
This is a very interesting post. Although I am not anything like an atheist, I always thought it was funny how someone who calls themselves an "atheist" would advocate the "technological singularity." I mean, if we achieve this singularity, wouldn't we basically be gods who could create worlds at a whim, even simulations of our own world, at any point in its previous history? If this artificial intelligence singularity is so certain, then how can one be so certain that it hasn't already happened and that one is not merely a result of that singularity, living in an artificial world produced by the post-singularity god(s)? A "strong atheist" (i.e. one who believes firmly that God must not exist, or has approaching zero chance of existing) is a fool who so strongly advocates the inevitability of the singularity!
Anyways, I think that humans have a biological predisposition to believe in something like God, partly for the reasons that you give. At very least, any atheist must acknowledge that, since there appears no other logical (non-conspiracy-theory) explanation for the widespread belief of God throughout all human cultures (even isolated ones).
Sorry, I forgot to post the link to the combined heat and power plant in my city of St. Paul: http://www.districtenergy.com/
The district energy also has a cooling plant that distributes cold water to the downtown area and 300 nearby homes. The chilled water is produced overnight and stored in tanks so that it can be produced with off-peak electricity. The nearby heat and power plant is run on waste wood collected from yards and parks and produces heat and power (much is used for the distributed cold water refrigeration). So... four birds (cold water, hot water, electricity generation and wood waste disposal) with one stone.
It is "the largest hot water district heating system in North America," according to http://www.districtenergy.com/