Lem's (anti-)religious thought was as deep and humane as the rest of his work. Non Serviam, in A Perfect Vaucuum is a profound examination of the proper relationship between a created being and its manifestly imperfect creator. The title means "I will not serve", which should give an indication of the conclusion he reached.
Lem's greatest intellectual theme was the problem of scale, and the possibility that certain types of event were simply inaccessible to humans because of the differences in scale. He explored this theme in Solaris, obviously, where the simple size of the planetary ocean posed an insuperable barrier to communication. Both The Investigation and Chain of Chance look at the problem of the highly improbable, as does his essay (I believe in Imaginary Magnitude) on the impossibility of his own existence.
His scope was enormous, from the lighthearted stories of Ijon Tichy to deep investigations of the human condition. If I were recommending a small selection of his works, I'd say:
His Master's Voice: This is the only book about the scientific process that I think really captures the essential nature of the enterprise, right down to the pscyhological states of the individual scientist. Hogarth's description of how he comes to know he has the solution to a problem--that he is going to solve it--even before he knows exactly what the solution is, is a perfect description of my own experience as a scientist.
Return From The Stars: I think about this as the most human of Lem's stories, dealing with the problems of a man who has come back from a long space voyage to a world he no longer belongs in. I get the urge to re-read it every time I visit my far-distant family, from whom I've grown apart.
Fiasco: The last tale of Pirx the Pilot, who so far as I am concerned must be the man from Burnam Wood. Excellent story-telling and profound mystery, along with Lem's solution to the problem of the silent universe.
Arthur C. Clarke once said that, "The best SF being written today has to be translated from the Polish, and will win a Nobel Prize eventually if only no one tells the selection committee that it's science fiction." Nobels can't be awarded posthumously, so Lem has lost that honour, but his works will live on for centuries to come, and one day people will look back at the late 20th century and the dawn of the cybernetic age and look to him as the interpreter of this time, a single clear, humane, inquiring voice, asking questions, exploring answers, cutting paths for the rest of us to follow.
The fact is, and I only speak for the Christian religion here, is that it is extremely simple to reconcile religion and science.
Religion holds that some questions are not to be asked. Sometimes this is not made explicit, but clearly encoded in the belief that there are certain pre-defined answers to such questions. Examples are: "If God made the universe, what made God?" and "Was Christ divine?" and "Was God talking through Mohammed?"
Science holds that all questions are permissible, and any answers that empirical investigation and theoretical utility support are permissible, and that we are allowed to discard any prior answer to such questions when sufficient evidence accumulates against them.
Religious people hold that an entity called "God" exists. Questions of existence are questions that science is allowed to ask and answer. By the ordinary standard of scientific proof God does not exist--it has none of the properties of things that exist.
This is the fundamental dichotomy between religion and science, and those "religious" folks doing science either keep their faith carefully compartmentalized or in most cases have simply not thought through the consequences of their beliefs. I have worked closely with religious scientists, and in a few cases they have admitted the contradiction and responded to it the way a scientist would, by admitting they don't have all the answers and keeping contingent possibilities open, rather than insisting on the absolute truth of their faith.
Try Canada, if you really want a micro-ISV-friendly environment. The health care system will ensure you get the same mediocre standard of care as everyone else while you start your business, you can easily site your business in the same time zone as your major (American) customers, and you can incorporate both federally and provincially in your pyjamas. I did.
Because the law governing incorporation is mostly federal, Canada doesn't have the same patchwork of incompatible nonsense as the various states. And while the taxes are a bit higher, the health care system is really not terrible, and talking to the American entrepeneurs I know that is a big difference. I have kids, and would never be able to run my own company unless I was sure of access to decent (not exceptional) care. I've always been so-so about the Canadian health care system, but I never realized how small-business-friendly it is until I got in the game myself.
As someone else has pointed out: never hire a friend because you like them. That's something I once did and would never do again. And make sure you have a good accountant. That's probably more important than a good lawyer, because a good accountant can keep you out of a world of trouble before it ever happens.
Watching The Matrix doesn't give you blood lust, but watching sex does give most people the regular kind.
You give no evidence to support either of these claims, which is not surprising because no evidence exists. It is a matter of hot debate as to whether or not violent images encourage violent actions, or sublimate them. It is likewise indeterminant whether explicit sexual depictions encourage or sublimate sexual actions.
To blandly make the assertions you do lets the rest of us know your opinions, but it contributes nothing to the debate because it does not significantly increase our knowledge of the way the world actually is.
One empirical fact that we do have is that on cable and satellite TV you can see damn near anything, and 85% of American homes have one or the other. This was not true thirty years ago. Yet the murder rate (ignoring medical improvements that have actually reduced the rate) is pretty much the same today as it was in 1976, in the 8 - 10 homicides per 100,000 population (in the U.S.) The big rise occurred between 1965 and 1971, long before you could watch Reservoir Dogs on cable.
Likewise, "Between 1990 and 2000, the national teen pregnancy rate fell 27 percent, from 117 to 84.5 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19" (from Planned Parenthood--the drop was mostly due to better educated kids using birth control, but also partly due to a decrease in sexual activity on the part of teens.) And all that while cable TV was poluting the minds of youngsters with depictions of teenage orgies that they would never have any knowledge of otherwise.
Or would they?
Teenagers do talk to each other about sex, sometimes. And wild parties with lots of sex are something they do. I know a guy who grew up in rural Manitoba (on the Canadian prairies) in the early 70's in a town where teen orgies happened. What else do you do on a Friday night when you're sixteen and as far from the bright centre of the universe as you can get?
So the macro-statistics would indicate that violent crimes and sexual activity by teenagers is uncorrelated with cable-TV penetration.
Ergo, anyone wanting to make a case that depictions of violent or sexual behaviour actually leads to violent or sexual behaviour has an uphill battle if they are to move beyond the epistemologically vacuous "it just makes sense that..." view.
That's simply not true. I work on a large Java project that deals with a lot of matrix intensive work. Our Java code has been rigorously architected, engineered, and optimized.
It is meaningless to ask, "Which is faster, Java or C++?" because how the compiler, not the language, has a very large effect on that. People who claim that Java is fast because their favourite JVM happens to have some particular optimization they like are barking even further up the wrong tree, because the only speed that matters is the speed that users actually get, rather than the speed that users would get if they were running a JVM other than the one they were actually running.
It is more meaningful to ask: How easy is it to do things really badly in Java vs C++? The answer to that is: it is very easy to write extremely slow Java code, and very easy to write extremely fragile (and leaky) C++ code. I've managed large Java projects and seen how fast good programmers can make Java go, but I've also seen how slow merely average programmers can make Java go. And how much of a resource hog Java can be in the hands of average programmers (and on average VMs). Likewise, my own C++ code is clean and robust, but I've worked with developers who just aren't safe to let near a C++ compiler. Invalid iterators aren't the half of it.
The fact that extremely good programmers can make Java apps fast does not make Java a "fast language" any more than the fact that extremely good C++ programmers can make C++ apps safe makes C++ a safe language. It will always be really easy to write Java apps that move at the speed grass grows and use up all the memory in the machine, and it will always be really easy to blow you whole leg off with C++. Both languages require really good developers to use them well.
You raise a bunch of interesting points that it would be fruitful to discuss over a beer or three. I've tried to develop a bit of a response here, but my own position is complex, as obviously yours is. I am a humanist, not a Christian, and therefore not a "Person of the Book", despite humanism's Christian roots.
I think the kind of "return to the words of the prophet" you're advocating is actually an example of the process that has continualy morphed Christianity until it is not much like anything Jesus would recognize as such. There is a progressive discounting of the actual words of the founding prophet (semantic debates aside, which are admittedly contentious) to conform to the cultural mores of current day. If you look at Christian orthodoxy over time, it always has far more to do with the political and cultural needs of the day than with anything Jesus actually said. Most people have always believed that Jesus believed pretty much what they believe, yet a modern Christian is more likely to share beliefs with an ancient Buddhist than an ancient Christian.
The usual way that modern theists pursue this is to point out specific cultural context or historical events that explain the bits of the gospels or whatever that they would like to get rid of. Thus, you correctly point out that Mohammed was reacting to specific events when he said God said Muslims should make war on the infidel (however defined--as noted above, I certainly qualify as an infidel).
This process of selective re-interpretation can be an effective tool for reforming corrupt institutions using exactly the logic you are invoking. Trying to ground your argument in the scriptures gives your position a degree of authority that anyone who is nominally bound to the value of those scriptures must respect. Churches of all stripes have typically been opposed to this, because they are temporal institutions that would like to use those same scriptures to shore up their own power and wealth.
But I believe this effort is fundamentally mistaken. There are only two roads a theist who wants scriptural grounding can take. You can take the fundamentalist approach, which leads to bombing of abortion clinics and office buildings and the like. Or you can take the interpretive approach, which puts you on the slippery slope to humanism. As you are already on that slope, I sincerely hope this note will push you a little further down it, however incrementally.
And I would further note that one very important aspect of the Protestant revolution was non-scriptural: the denial of apostolic succession. This was fundamental to the Protestant critique of the established church, but it was independent of the scriptural reinterpretations that were going on along with it. Yet in terms of political consequences, the belief that the Pope could not trace his ordination back to Christ may have been the most important part of the Protestant puzzle.
One area where we are in full agreement, however, is the unwisdom--to say nothing of the inhumanity--of bombing people, particularly for such specious reasons as have been used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Teachings have strayed far from what the prophet Mohammad wrote,
Actually, they haven's strayed far enough. The Reformation was lead by people who claimed to be returning to the gospel of Christ, but in fact what they were doing was pulling a particular thread from a complex and varied tapestry.
You cite the Koran saying Muslims should argue nicely with other "People of the Book", although you gloss over the caveate "except those that do wrong" (or "evil" in some translations.) The Koran does say this, and many other things that could be taken as fairly liberal: "There shall be no compulsion in religion", for example. But it also says things like (9:123) "Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous."
With regard to women, the Koran is vastly more retrograde than (Paul's) Christianity, which is saying something. A "return to the words of the prophet" would be a return to sub-medieval treatment of women. "Women are your fields--go then into your fields whence you please" (2:223) "Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further actions against them. Surely God is high, supreme." (4:34, emphasis added.)
The last thing this world needs is an Islam that is closer to the words of the prophet. It needs a more liberal, relaxed Islam that has thrown off the yoke of the scriptures just as mainstream Christianity has in the past century, to become a spiritual and social movement that has none of the oppressive trappings that were so clearly expressed by its central prophet and even moreso by his most successful apostle. Early Islam, with it's "itjihad" ("questioning") culture demonstrates that liberal thought is not incompatible with people who call themselves Muslims, just as post-Reformation Christianity has shown that liberal thought is not incompatible with a kind of Christianity. But in both cases it is necessary to ignore a great deal of the foundational texts to do so.
The religion of the inventor had nothing to do with these inventions.
The religion of the inventor doesn't matter so much as the culture they lived in, which is completely unrelated to the predominant religion. This can easily be demonstrated empirically.
Culture in the sense I mean it has far more to do with the specific beliefs and institutions that dominate a given society, not the abstract generalizations that a word like "Islam" or "Christianity" captures. There have throughout history been "Christian" nations that have been violent, oppressive, belligerant totalitarian states (consider the England of Elizabeth I), and "Christian" nations that have been peaceful, enlightened and liberal (consider modern Denmark). Islam has been the dominant religion in a similarly diverse set of cultures, from the relatively enlightened caliphates of the middle ages to dark age tribal societies like Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Empirically, religion has literally nothing to do with culture.
But culture certainly has something to do with intellectual achievement. 20th century Russia was a major force in mathematics not so much because Russians had a genetic proclivity for mathematical prowess (as certain crazed pseudo-evolutionists might want to argue) but because it was a lot harder to get into trouble with Communist Party doctrine as a pure mathematician than as a physicist (who might wind up using "Jewish physics" like relativity or quantum mechanics) or as a biologist (who might run afoul of Lysenko).
And all that "Jewish physics" was done by Jews in part because it was easier for them to get chairs in theoretical physics in early 20th century Europe than in experimental physics, because theoretical physics just wasn't seen as being all that important or interesting.
On the more positive side, I've always felt that Newton was archetypally English, for his time--he had the grandiose sweep of Contential intellectuals combined with the practical, detail-oriented, hair-splitting obsessiveness of the great medieval English logicians and experimentalists. And the world he grew up in was one where all the walls had been torn down, where a king had been beheaded in living memory, where any kind of radically intellectual restructuring must have seemed possible.
But while culture and poltics can contribute to an inventor's success, it is the individual who matters in the end.
Never trust work that moves from the digestion of milk (dependent on a single enzyme in adulthood) to broad cultural generalizations. Why would anyone think that East Asians have been selected for intelligence, unless they buy into a particular cultural stereotype that has been common only in the past few decades, as the East has sent its best and brightest to the West for education? A generation ago East Asians were considered much less mentally capable than Europeans. Both stereotypes are fact-free.
Here's a real howler from the article:
"It is easy to imagine that in societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals would have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common in the population."
Easy to imagine, yes, at least if you are completely ignorant of how societies have actually behaved in history. It's easy to imagine the Earth is flat, if you are sufficiently ignorant.
Trust pays off most in societies that trade under the rule of law, like Rome. And we all know that generation after generation Roman families grew and grew, especially amongst the most properous classes, who benefited the most from trust...
Except they didn't.
Certain types of benefit to individuals result in decreased procreation, as we see in modern developed societies. Rome struggled with declining population amongst the middle and upper classes throughout most of its history, to the extent that laws and other social pressure requiring marriage and progeny were common features even during the late Republic.
Local genetic adaptation to a rice-based diet I can believe. Adaptation to cow's milk is plausbile. But until you show me quantitative, unbiased performance measures of "cultural types" I'll say you're telling the kind of just-so story that faux-evolutionists have been foisting off on the public for generations, starting with Spencer and coming down to the present day in the form of statistically illiterate dunderheads like Charles Murray.
Try checking the menu on the left and activating the Google community tabs, especially "military." Enthusiasts point out things like military bases, notable vehicles or facilities and, yes, nuclear test sites.
Zoom in on the coastline of southern Cuba and you'll see a narrow bay cutting deeply into the shore. With a little imagination you can almost see the IVth, Vth and VIth ammendments of the Constitution of the United States of America being violated.
I don't know if these sorts of out-of-date images of military installations have any practical value, but they do give a certain valuable sense of reality regarding the existence of places that many people would like us to ignore, or forget. It's hard to think of the prison camp where innocent people are being incarcerated without trial[*] as being "out of sight, out of mind" when you can fire up Google Earth and see it plain as day.
[*] Do the math: there are 500+ people there, mostly captured in battlefield conditions in villages and farms. We know the cops, in the best of circumstances, sometimes get the wrong guy. We know the courts, in even better circumstances, sometimes convict the wrong person. So we no with what would be ordinarily called certainty that a non-trivial number of innocent people are being held, indefinitely, without trial, without legal recourse. Even with the most generous assumptions the number comes out to 25 or so. The only question is: are the goals being pursued so valuable and the means being used to pursue them so valuable as to justify the certain incarceration of innocents? "Is life so dear, and peace so sweet..?"
Can you think of a way to win against rootkits without TCPA?
Almost trivially.
The whole point of TCPA is that "trust" is built in to the machine in a fundamentally inaccessbile (to the user) way.
What is needed to defeat rootkits is to allow the user to trust the hardware. This is totally different from application vendors trusting the hardware.
Here's an extreme example: hook a logic analyzer up to the BIOS. Look at the nice bits go by. See if they match expectations. If not, you've been rooted and had your BIOS flashed. "Expectations" are stored in a separate device.
The issue here is strictly one of treating a computer as a fully self-contained block of hardware and software that no one is allowed or able to look inside without going through the terribly civilized interfaces. The solution is to say, "Fuck the fucking interfaces, I'm going to fucking look at what is on the fucking bus." Not civilized at all.
I've debugged embedded code this way, by hooking a logic analyzer up to the hardware and watching the bits go by. It's educational. It would be simple to build this kind of exposure of hardware internals in to the motherboard, to make it easy to plug in an external integrity checker to ensure that the basic state of the machine is as expected.
"Trusted" computing is all about hiding the hardware state from the user. Beating VM-based rootkits is all about exposing hardware state to the user. The two are diametrically opposed.
Every room has it's own air return and heat/cool zone with their own thermostats. That way you can "turn off" unused rooms to save energy.
And in general, a way of moving air from one room to another efficiently. My basement is warm in winter and cool in summer. The loft is the opposite (duh) and it would be nice to be about to suck some of that subterranean air upstairs efficiently. The natural chimney effect of the stairwell helps a lot, but more would be better, especially in winter when the upstairs windows aren't open. Ceiling fans also help, but I'd like to be able to use the existing duct work for this, and not just turn the furnance fan on to blow air everywhere. I want it directable.
I'm in the midst of renovations to replace my loft with a full second story, and one of the things I want to do is put in a well that drops from the top to the bottom, just a couple of feet on a side, that will carry plumbing, power, network cables, and whatever else comes along later. Just having that kind of conduit available is a big thing to keep future integration options open.
I think most people want a house that is reasonably energy efficient today, and able to take advantage of future tech to become more energy efficent in the future. We know that we're facing a few decades of more expensive power, and would like our homes to be flexible enough to adapt to the changing energy environment without having to commit a huge amount of money to every upgrade.
Translation of article abstract: Hot ionized gas (plasma) generates soft x-rays as it cools. The output x-ray energy is greater than the kinetic energy of the plasma that generates it, but there are other things going on. In particular, there is a rapidly decaying magnetic field involved. The paper presents a theoretical model that explains how the plasma converts energy from the collapsing magnetic field into heat, explaining the result.
The trick is understanding that the magnetic field stores a lot of energy, so the accounting that pays attention only to the kinetic energy of the plasma is not correct.
The problem with conservation as a solution to CO2 emmissions is industrial energy use and the economy.
There are probably ways via market prices or the tax system or whatever to motivate individuals to use less energy. But industrial users, who account for something like half of all energy use, aren't having any. Charge them more for energy and they will move to places where cheap energy is available.
Here in Ontario, industrial growth for 50 years or more has been driven by cheap energy. Now that energy is getting scarce, people are getting scared. I'd love to see market prices in energy as means of promoting conservation and helping open up the market to alternative sources that are too expensive under the current capped-rate system. But the political reality is that if this was done across the board, major industrial users would up stakes and head for Mexico or where-ever the kW*hr's are more affordable.
I don't have a clue what to do about this. No one worthy of the name of green wants to engage in such obviously unsustainable policies as trying to put artificial controls on the movement of capital and industry. That was tried by the socialists in the century just past, and all that happened is people refused to invest, and rightly so.
When was the last nuclear power plant accident that happened while its operators were following all prescribed safety procedures? Nuclear power is extremely safe, even more so than traditional coal plants. As long as the operators are trained properly, they perform maintenance as required, etc. there isn't much of a problem.
I agree completely.
Now, prove to me that every nuclear reactor will always be well-designed and that the operators will never make a mistake.
The real problem with nuclear is not health-related but economic. Coal-fired plants are operated as incompetently as nuclear plants, and accidents in them kill people, but they hardly ever write-off the whole damned plant. Nuclear has proven thus far to be a very unforgiving technology, both because the energy density in the core is very high, so relatively small excursions tend to melt everything, and because everything in the core is radioactive, making it really hard to send in a gang of navvies to fix things when they do go wrong.
So coal, oil and gas are forgiving technologies, and nuclear is unforgiving. This is important, because as you correctly point out nuclear accidents happen when operators make mistakes, and operators, being human, will always make mistakes. And automatic control systems, being ultimately designed by humans, will always contain flaws.
Reading the replies here the disagreement seems to be about who is the most corrupt: congress or the patent system. Defenders of RIM say the patent system is corrupt because NTP was gaming the system to extort unearned money. Defenders of NTP say congress was corrupt for putting pressure on the USPTO to invalidate NTP's patents.
Anyone sane would say: a plague on both your houses.
In abstract I think most people on/. recognize that the patent system is out of control, especially with regard to software. People who are either crazy or ignorant are claiming that patent rights are property rights rather than temporary monopoly rights. And trivialities are being granted patents all the time.
Given this, any patent dispute is likely to be as releveant to sane concepts of justice as the outcome of a WWF bout. The whole thing is a staged, noisey ritual intended to incite fans, and promulgate the idea that getting into the ring is first and foremost a very dangerous activity. The purpose of the patent system and high-profile patent disputes such as this one is to stifle innovation and scare off inventors.
Personally, if someone told me I was allowed to spend my whole time studying physics or math or producing silly flash animations, I'd be overjoyed
You are in the minority. Most humans are incapable of handling an environment where they are not integrated into some hierarchy that makes them feel both wanted and to some extent powerful. Different social systems are merely different ways of apportioning the wanted/powerful ratio amongst individuals. Totalitarian and free-market systems are based on different sets of rules to concentrate power in the hands of a few, while attempting to make the masses feel either sufficiently wanted or sufficiently hopeful regarding getting a little power for themselves to support the whole ugly mess. Social democratic systems attempt to flatten the power/want distribution so the peaks and valleys are lower (they can easily become totalitarian if they try to rub the peaks and valleys out altogether.)
Greed is not a primary human motivation. Put Bill Gates alone on an island and he won't care about accumulating vast wealth. The accumulation of wealth results in enhanced social status, and that is what every monkey is tuned up to pursue. People are happier when they have more than their neighbours. This is empirical fact. Greed--the endless desire for more wealth--is a consequence of a deeper monkey need for social status.
Most people need hierachy, and in market-based societies, including social democracies, they get that hierarchy from their work environment. So there will be all kinds of opposition to robotic wealth production because it threatens the monkey hierarchies that give our lives meaning.
But there is hope. Capitalism and markets are games we play, shared illusions that allow us to create hierarchies out of nothing, based on the exchange of economic tokens rather than force of arms. Market societies have been successful because they are able to satisfy our need for hierarchy and also produce wealth. The sucessful post-market societies will have other means of creating heirarchies that will look as silly and artificial to us as Bill Gates' means of gaining wealth would look to a medieval warlord.
I think it is wrong to assume the Star Trek definition of transportation is the correct one. If you are confused by what experiments are actually showing: read the article or ask a physicist.
It's nice that you think that. However, I know for a fact that the use of the word "teleportation" confuses laypeople, and popular articles that describe the process of quantum teleportation often contain quotes from physicists who use the term in a clearly and obviously misleading way. I conclude that this is simply to garner more attention for their work.
The rest of your critique is strange. You don't actually address any of my points, which are to do with the use of language. Surely you aren't claiming that a classical notion of "on" and "off" are applicable to a single photon interacting with a beamsplitter. This would be bizzare, because classically "on" and "off" are mutually exclusive, whereas the photon wavefunction after interaction with a beamsplitter has non-zero amplitude in both branches. So you can use the words "on" and "off" for those amplitudes, but if you then make claims that appear to be in plain English like, "The computer runs better when off" I have no problem calling bullshit--simply labelling two amplitudes with classical terms does not give you a warrant to use classical language and grammar to describe them.
An honest scientist would say, "The computer runs better when it is quantum-off" to make clear that "off" is by no means mutually exclusive with "on". Anything else is just lame PR by people who either don't understand QM or are deliberately misleading laypeople to gain attention for their work.
Pebble bed reactors are designed to fail safely. If the flow of coolent stops, so does the reaction. The fuel is safely encased in tennis ball-sized graphite "pebbles" which are dropped in the top of the reactor and retrieved at the bottom. For there to be a release of the radioactive material, the pebble has to be broken open. Even if that happens, the amount that's released is very tiny.
There's just a huge amount of justifiable skepticism regarding claims like this. The pebble-bed design clearly has some strengths, but it has been around since the 50's, which makes one wonder why it hasn't been more seriously developed. There has also been at least one accident, as mentioned in the wikipedia article.
The problem, of course, is that post-TMI and Chernobyl, there has been so little development on new nuclear technologies that if we go the pebble-bed route then we will once again be building new nuclear plants based on unproven technologies. There are bound to be unanticipated issues, despite the "inherently safe" design. CANDUs are "inherently safe" as well (I can't remember which, but either the void or temperature coefficient of reactivity is negative, which makes core meltdown extremely improbable.) But that didn't stop us from getting into a mess with the calandria tubes due is misplaced garter springs and the poorly understood effects of neutron damage to hot, stressed, metal. Retubing was tremendously expensive and time-consuming, which is true of any maintenace work on the hot components of reactors. "Power too cheap to meter" it ain't.
So the sunny-days description of the pebble-bed technology is worriesome. For example, the article mentions that the primary gas may be used to drive the turbines because it may be non-radioactive. Nitrogen won't do, but 4He for example has an activation cross-section of zero. Sounds good. But the gas won't be pure 4He. Nothing is. This is an industrial site, so we can expect that there will be contamination on the order of 0.1% at least. What is the effect of that 0.1% on the equilibrium level of radioactivity in the turbines?
That's just pulling one odd thought off the top of my head. The thing is, I'm sure there are lots of other issues with this technology that we don't know about because we haven't been using it for decades. It's like any other new technology adoption--think of all the projects that came to a halt in the late '90's because the people working on them decided that moving everything to Java was the right thing to do. There were all kinds of issues with that move that didn't show up until it was well under way.
The relatively small scale of pebble-bed reactors is a good thing, as there won't have to be quite the same degree of plunging in as there was with PWRs. But I think it's reasonable for people to be very doubtful about the claims made by any new technology until it has had a decade or so of real economic performance behind it.
I'll admidt I really don't understand what the article is talking about,
Neither did whoever wrote the article.
It works like this:
1) Define some classical terms, like "running" and "actually" 2) Apply them incorrectly to quantum situations 3) ob. ???? 4) Profit!
The components of the photon wavefunction that are "not actually running the program" become entangled with the components of the photon wavefunction that "are actully running the program", and therefore they carry information regarding the state of those components.
If we think about this in classical terms, where we incorrectly and falsely imagine that each component of the wavefunction represents a classical trajectory through the apparatus, we could incorrectly and falsely say that photons that have not followed classical trajectories through the part of the apparatus that does the quantum computation have not run the program.
But the clear contradiction of that statement makes the slippery bullshit marketing-speak of the article clear: of course a photon that has followed any classical trajectory whatsoever has not run the quantum program. And to claim that "a photon whose wavefunction is entangled with the program has not run the program" too obviously has the same epistemological and moral status as giving away "free" products that only require a "small" processing fee to claim.
One is motivated to ask, "Why doesn't entanglement with the program state count as 'really' running the program? What is this 'real' thing you keep talking about?" Admittedly, entangling things in this way is a different way of running the program, and is really rather clever, but to promote the results in this way is just attention-grabbing marketing, unworthy of the name of science.
This kind of abuse of language is similar to that of the "quantum teleportation" folks, whose deliberately misleading claims often make it sound like something other than the ontologically-problematic quantum state is being "teleported."
There is no doubt we were about the enter another ice age.
This is a religious statement, not a scientific one. There is most certainly doubt as to where the climate is heading. Many global circulation models predict a hotter, drier climate in the next few hundred years. Some ice core data suggests that the interglacial climate is bimodal, with the second mode having an average global temperature 5 C or so warmer than the historical average, and we may be heading into a (possibly human-induced) mode change.
And given that the large (million-year) scale of climate change is extremly poorly understood, there is no reason to believe that the current interglacial is not the end of the ice-age that has dominated Earth's climate for the last million years or so. So there is doubt all round, and the only thing that is certain is that people who have no doubts about the correctness of their own position are contributing nothing but noise to a very complex debate.
if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?
The Chief should be required to defecate in public for a year. Since there is nothing wrong with the act of defecation, he has nothing to worry about.
Unless, of course, the human need for privacy extends beyond just hiding things that are illegal or immoral, and instead extends to things that are merely, well, private.
but when an action to the benefit of everyone - namely checking up on the environment - is undertaken using the same technology that those same people start commenting on artificial climate change: "what about the power usage", "this will cause more rapid climate change"
The reason this comes up is that when the topic is climate-change-related people have climate change on their minds. Consider the mind as a disorganized collection of files with links between them whose strength is based on the number of items the files have on common. Most people are incapable of holding more than two files in their heads at once, so any two things must be no more than one strongly-linked step apart to be considered at the same time.
If you are thinking about climate modeling, you are holding a file that has a lot of stuff about the environment, effects of things on climate, etc. So there are a lot of climate-related files that are only one link away, and it is easy for you to be "clever" and bring one of them up. Because danger is more interesting than pleasure, you will tend to bring up things that appear to be dangerous. It will catch people's attention, and primate social structure is very strongly conditioned by who has the troop's attention.
SETI is relatively unrelated to climate change, so most files to do with climate change are many links away, and the average person just does not have the mental capability of seeing any association between the two at all. An exceptional person might.
You have to remember: we are trying to think logically with a bundle of nerves that was primarily evolved for us to be able to avoid predators, find food, have sex, and rear young, and the means of doing all those things was to fit into the social heirarchy of a bunch of monkeys. Given that, we should probably be thankful we can think at all rather than annoyed that we think so badly.
Wind power has an energy density of about 30 W/m**2, maybe as high at 100 W/m**2 in windy areas.
Reviewing my own estimate, this number is obviously very sensitive to the average wind velocity, which comes in as the cube. It turns out that average wind speed data for Ontario are available, and my estimate of 5 m/s is on the low side for coastal regions. But even with a more optimistic 8 m/s we are still talking 125 W/m**2 after efficiency considerations, which is only a little higher than my 100 W/m**2 high-end value.
It is also clear that placing wind turbines along the shore will have the lowest environmental impact, because the wind is giving up a lot of energy there in any case.
What happens when you start extracting mega watts out of the wind pattern? What about changes to the micro climate just down wind from the wind farm?
The latter is irrelevant to all but the people who live there, in the same way the shadow effects of any industrial plant are irrelevant to any but the people who live there. It is not an environmental issue as normally understood--it is a land use or zoning issue. This is not to say it isn't important--it is--but we have centuries of law dealing with things like this, so there are really no signficant unknows with regard to wind farms except for the possibility that they do not have any significant negative downstream effects. That's a pretty good kind of uncertainty to have: "Nothing bad might happen! We just don't know!"
With regard to the question of what happens when we start extracting megawatts from the wind, this is a question that can be answered on the back of an envelope, which I will now proceed to do. Air has a density (rho) of about 1 kg/m**3. Consider wind at 10 kn, which is about 5 m/s. The power per square meter is 0.5*rho*v**3, or about 60 W, of which about half is available to windmills. Wind power has an energy density of about 30 W/m**2, maybe as high at 100 W/m**2 in windy areas. The Canadian province of Ontario has a winter load of about 20 GW and a summer load of about 25 GW. So we're talking about at least 200 million square meters of swept area to accomodate all of it, and maybe over three times this much. This is equivalent to a line of windmills with 100 meter span, 2000 km long removing half the kinetic energy from all the air that passes through them. This is not a small environmental influence. It is hard to imagine that this would not quite fundamentally change energy transport and therefore weather patterns over hundreds of kilometers.
I didn't expect that result when I started writing the paragraph above, but since I'm a scientific rather than a religious environmentalist, I can't simply ignore it. Wind power is still worth pursuing, but it is very clear that it is never going to be more than one element in a mix of alternatives, and is very unlikely to ever generate more than 10% of our power if its environmental impact is to be kept moderate.
Slashdot Mirror
Lem's (anti-)religious thought was as deep and humane as the rest of his work. Non Serviam, in A Perfect Vaucuum is a profound examination of the proper relationship between a created being and its manifestly imperfect creator. The title means "I will not serve", which should give an indication of the conclusion he reached.
Lem's greatest intellectual theme was the problem of scale, and the possibility that certain types of event were simply inaccessible to humans because of the differences in scale. He explored this theme in Solaris, obviously, where the simple size of the planetary ocean posed an insuperable barrier to communication. Both The Investigation and Chain of Chance look at the problem of the highly improbable, as does his essay (I believe in Imaginary Magnitude) on the impossibility of his own existence.
His scope was enormous, from the lighthearted stories of Ijon Tichy to deep investigations of the human condition. If I were recommending a small selection of his works, I'd say:
His Master's Voice: This is the only book about the scientific process that I think really captures the essential nature of the enterprise, right down to the pscyhological states of the individual scientist. Hogarth's description of how he comes to know he has the solution to a problem--that he is going to solve it--even before he knows exactly what the solution is, is a perfect description of my own experience as a scientist.
Return From The Stars: I think about this as the most human of Lem's stories, dealing with the problems of a man who has come back from a long space voyage to a world he no longer belongs in. I get the urge to re-read it every time I visit my far-distant family, from whom I've grown apart.
Fiasco: The last tale of Pirx the Pilot, who so far as I am concerned must be the man from Burnam Wood. Excellent story-telling and profound mystery, along with Lem's solution to the problem of the silent universe.
Arthur C. Clarke once said that, "The best SF being written today has to be translated from the Polish, and will win a Nobel Prize eventually if only no one tells the selection committee that it's science fiction." Nobels can't be awarded posthumously, so Lem has lost that honour, but his works will live on for centuries to come, and one day people will look back at the late 20th century and the dawn of the cybernetic age and look to him as the interpreter of this time, a single clear, humane, inquiring voice, asking questions, exploring answers, cutting paths for the rest of us to follow.
The fact is, and I only speak for the Christian religion here, is that it is extremely simple to reconcile religion and science.
Religion holds that some questions are not to be asked. Sometimes this is not made explicit, but clearly encoded in the belief that there are certain pre-defined answers to such questions. Examples are: "If God made the universe, what made God?" and "Was Christ divine?" and "Was God talking through Mohammed?"
Science holds that all questions are permissible, and any answers that empirical investigation and theoretical utility support are permissible, and that we are allowed to discard any prior answer to such questions when sufficient evidence accumulates against them.
Religious people hold that an entity called "God" exists. Questions of existence are questions that science is allowed to ask and answer. By the ordinary standard of scientific proof God does not exist--it has none of the properties of things that exist.
This is the fundamental dichotomy between religion and science, and those "religious" folks doing science either keep their faith carefully compartmentalized or in most cases have simply not thought through the consequences of their beliefs. I have worked closely with religious scientists, and in a few cases they have admitted the contradiction and responded to it the way a scientist would, by admitting they don't have all the answers and keeping contingent possibilities open, rather than insisting on the absolute truth of their faith.
Try Canada, if you really want a micro-ISV-friendly environment. The health care system will ensure you get the same mediocre standard of care as everyone else while you start your business, you can easily site your business in the same time zone as your major (American) customers, and you can incorporate both federally and provincially in your pyjamas. I did.
Because the law governing incorporation is mostly federal, Canada doesn't have the same patchwork of incompatible nonsense as the various states. And while the taxes are a bit higher, the health care system is really not terrible, and talking to the American entrepeneurs I know that is a big difference. I have kids, and would never be able to run my own company unless I was sure of access to decent (not exceptional) care. I've always been so-so about the Canadian health care system, but I never realized how small-business-friendly it is until I got in the game myself.
As someone else has pointed out: never hire a friend because you like them. That's something I once did and would never do again. And make sure you have a good accountant. That's probably more important than a good lawyer, because a good accountant can keep you out of a world of trouble before it ever happens.
Watching The Matrix doesn't give you blood lust, but watching sex does give most people the regular kind.
You give no evidence to support either of these claims, which is not surprising because no evidence exists. It is a matter of hot debate as to whether or not violent images encourage violent actions, or sublimate them. It is likewise indeterminant whether explicit sexual depictions encourage or sublimate sexual actions.
To blandly make the assertions you do lets the rest of us know your opinions, but it contributes nothing to the debate because it does not significantly increase our knowledge of the way the world actually is.
One empirical fact that we do have is that on cable and satellite TV you can see damn near anything, and 85% of American homes have one or the other. This was not true thirty years ago. Yet the murder rate (ignoring medical improvements that have actually reduced the rate) is pretty much the same today as it was in 1976, in the 8 - 10 homicides per 100,000 population (in the U.S.) The big rise occurred between 1965 and 1971, long before you could watch Reservoir Dogs on cable.
Likewise, "Between 1990 and 2000, the national teen pregnancy rate fell 27 percent, from 117 to 84.5 pregnancies per 1,000 women aged 15-19" (from Planned Parenthood--the drop was mostly due to better educated kids using birth control, but also partly due to a decrease in sexual activity on the part of teens.) And all that while cable TV was poluting the minds of youngsters with depictions of teenage orgies that they would never have any knowledge of otherwise.
Or would they?
Teenagers do talk to each other about sex, sometimes. And wild parties with lots of sex are something they do. I know a guy who grew up in rural Manitoba (on the Canadian prairies) in the early 70's in a town where teen orgies happened. What else do you do on a Friday night when you're sixteen and as far from the bright centre of the universe as you can get?
So the macro-statistics would indicate that violent crimes and sexual activity by teenagers is uncorrelated with cable-TV penetration.
Ergo, anyone wanting to make a case that depictions of violent or sexual behaviour actually leads to violent or sexual behaviour has an uphill battle if they are to move beyond the epistemologically vacuous "it just makes sense that..." view.
That's simply not true. I work on a large Java project that deals with a lot of matrix intensive work. Our Java code has been rigorously architected, engineered, and optimized.
It is meaningless to ask, "Which is faster, Java or C++?" because how the compiler, not the language, has a very large effect on that. People who claim that Java is fast because their favourite JVM happens to have some particular optimization they like are barking even further up the wrong tree, because the only speed that matters is the speed that users actually get, rather than the speed that users would get if they were running a JVM other than the one they were actually running.
It is more meaningful to ask: How easy is it to do things really badly in Java vs C++? The answer to that is: it is very easy to write extremely slow Java code, and very easy to write extremely fragile (and leaky) C++ code. I've managed large Java projects and seen how fast good programmers can make Java go, but I've also seen how slow merely average programmers can make Java go. And how much of a resource hog Java can be in the hands of average programmers (and on average VMs). Likewise, my own C++ code is clean and robust, but I've worked with developers who just aren't safe to let near a C++ compiler. Invalid iterators aren't the half of it.
The fact that extremely good programmers can make Java apps fast does not make Java a "fast language" any more than the fact that extremely good C++ programmers can make C++ apps safe makes C++ a safe language. It will always be really easy to write Java apps that move at the speed grass grows and use up all the memory in the machine, and it will always be really easy to blow you whole leg off with C++. Both languages require really good developers to use them well.
You raise a bunch of interesting points that it would be fruitful to discuss over a beer or three. I've tried to develop a bit of a response here, but my own position is complex, as obviously yours is. I am a humanist, not a Christian, and therefore not a "Person of the Book", despite humanism's Christian roots.
I think the kind of "return to the words of the prophet" you're advocating is actually an example of the process that has continualy morphed Christianity until it is not much like anything Jesus would recognize as such. There is a progressive discounting of the actual words of the founding prophet (semantic debates aside, which are admittedly contentious) to conform to the cultural mores of current day. If you look at Christian orthodoxy over time, it always has far more to do with the political and cultural needs of the day than with anything Jesus actually said. Most people have always believed that Jesus believed pretty much what they believe, yet a modern Christian is more likely to share beliefs with an ancient Buddhist than an ancient Christian.
The usual way that modern theists pursue this is to point out specific cultural context or historical events that explain the bits of the gospels or whatever that they would like to get rid of. Thus, you correctly point out that Mohammed was reacting to specific events when he said God said Muslims should make war on the infidel (however defined--as noted above, I certainly qualify as an infidel).
This process of selective re-interpretation can be an effective tool for reforming corrupt institutions using exactly the logic you are invoking. Trying to ground your argument in the scriptures gives your position a degree of authority that anyone who is nominally bound to the value of those scriptures must respect. Churches of all stripes have typically been opposed to this, because they are temporal institutions that would like to use those same scriptures to shore up their own power and wealth.
But I believe this effort is fundamentally mistaken. There are only two roads a theist who wants scriptural grounding can take. You can take the fundamentalist approach, which leads to bombing of abortion clinics and office buildings and the like. Or you can take the interpretive approach, which puts you on the slippery slope to humanism. As you are already on that slope, I sincerely hope this note will push you a little further down it, however incrementally.
And I would further note that one very important aspect of the Protestant revolution was non-scriptural: the denial of apostolic succession. This was fundamental to the Protestant critique of the established church, but it was independent of the scriptural reinterpretations that were going on along with it. Yet in terms of political consequences, the belief that the Pope could not trace his ordination back to Christ may have been the most important part of the Protestant puzzle.
One area where we are in full agreement, however, is the unwisdom--to say nothing of the inhumanity--of bombing people, particularly for such specious reasons as have been used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
Teachings have strayed far from what the prophet Mohammad wrote,
Actually, they haven's strayed far enough. The Reformation was lead by people who claimed to be returning to the gospel of Christ, but in fact what they were doing was pulling a particular thread from a complex and varied tapestry.
You cite the Koran saying Muslims should argue nicely with other "People of the Book", although you gloss over the caveate "except those that do wrong" (or "evil" in some translations.) The Koran does say this, and many other things that could be taken as fairly liberal: "There shall be no compulsion in religion", for example. But it also says things like (9:123) "Believers, make war on the infidels who dwell around you. Deal firmly with them. Know that God is with the righteous."
With regard to women, the Koran is vastly more retrograde than (Paul's) Christianity, which is saying something. A "return to the words of the prophet" would be a return to sub-medieval treatment of women. "Women are your fields--go then into your fields whence you please" (2:223) "Men have authority over women because God has made the one superior to the other, and because they spend their wealth to maintain them. Good women are obedient. They guard their unseen parts because God has guarded them. As for those from whom you fear disobedience, admonish them, forsake them in beds apart, and beat them. Then if they obey you, take no further actions against them. Surely God is high, supreme." (4:34, emphasis added.)
The last thing this world needs is an Islam that is closer to the words of the prophet. It needs a more liberal, relaxed Islam that has thrown off the yoke of the scriptures just as mainstream Christianity has in the past century, to become a spiritual and social movement that has none of the oppressive trappings that were so clearly expressed by its central prophet and even moreso by his most successful apostle. Early Islam, with it's "itjihad" ("questioning") culture demonstrates that liberal thought is not incompatible with people who call themselves Muslims, just as post-Reformation Christianity has shown that liberal thought is not incompatible with a kind of Christianity. But in both cases it is necessary to ignore a great deal of the foundational texts to do so.
The religion of the inventor had nothing to do with these inventions.
The religion of the inventor doesn't matter so much as the culture they lived in, which is completely unrelated to the predominant religion. This can easily be demonstrated empirically.
Culture in the sense I mean it has far more to do with the specific beliefs and institutions that dominate a given society, not the abstract generalizations that a word like "Islam" or "Christianity" captures. There have throughout history been "Christian" nations that have been violent, oppressive, belligerant totalitarian states (consider the England of Elizabeth I), and "Christian" nations that have been peaceful, enlightened and liberal (consider modern Denmark). Islam has been the dominant religion in a similarly diverse set of cultures, from the relatively enlightened caliphates of the middle ages to dark age tribal societies like Afghanistan under the Taliban.
Empirically, religion has literally nothing to do with culture.
But culture certainly has something to do with intellectual achievement. 20th century Russia was a major force in mathematics not so much because Russians had a genetic proclivity for mathematical prowess (as certain crazed pseudo-evolutionists might want to argue) but because it was a lot harder to get into trouble with Communist Party doctrine as a pure mathematician than as a physicist (who might wind up using "Jewish physics" like relativity or quantum mechanics) or as a biologist (who might run afoul of Lysenko).
And all that "Jewish physics" was done by Jews in part because it was easier for them to get chairs in theoretical physics in early 20th century Europe than in experimental physics, because theoretical physics just wasn't seen as being all that important or interesting.
On the more positive side, I've always felt that Newton was archetypally English, for his time--he had the grandiose sweep of Contential intellectuals combined with the practical, detail-oriented, hair-splitting obsessiveness of the great medieval English logicians and experimentalists. And the world he grew up in was one where all the walls had been torn down, where a king had been beheaded in living memory, where any kind of radically intellectual restructuring must have seemed possible.
But while culture and poltics can contribute to an inventor's success, it is the individual who matters in the end.
Never trust work that moves from the digestion of milk (dependent on a single enzyme in adulthood) to broad cultural generalizations. Why would anyone think that East Asians have been selected for intelligence, unless they buy into a particular cultural stereotype that has been common only in the past few decades, as the East has sent its best and brightest to the West for education? A generation ago East Asians were considered much less mentally capable than Europeans. Both stereotypes are fact-free.
Here's a real howler from the article:
"It is easy to imagine that in societies where trust pays off, generation after generation, the more trusting individuals would have more progeny and the oxytocin-promoting genes would become more common in the population."
Easy to imagine, yes, at least if you are completely ignorant of how societies have actually behaved in history. It's easy to imagine the Earth is flat, if you are sufficiently ignorant.
Trust pays off most in societies that trade under the rule of law, like Rome. And we all know that generation after generation Roman families grew and grew, especially amongst the most properous classes, who benefited the most from trust...
Except they didn't.
Certain types of benefit to individuals result in decreased procreation, as we see in modern developed societies. Rome struggled with declining population amongst the middle and upper classes throughout most of its history, to the extent that laws and other social pressure requiring marriage and progeny were common features even during the late Republic.
Local genetic adaptation to a rice-based diet I can believe. Adaptation to cow's milk is plausbile. But until you show me quantitative, unbiased performance measures of "cultural types" I'll say you're telling the kind of just-so story that faux-evolutionists have been foisting off on the public for generations, starting with Spencer and coming down to the present day in the form of statistically illiterate dunderheads like Charles Murray.
Try checking the menu on the left and activating the Google community tabs, especially "military." Enthusiasts point out things like military bases, notable vehicles or facilities and, yes, nuclear test sites.
Zoom in on the coastline of southern Cuba and you'll see a narrow bay cutting deeply into the shore. With a little imagination you can almost see the IVth, Vth and VIth ammendments of the Constitution of the United States of America being violated.
I don't know if these sorts of out-of-date images of military installations have any practical value, but they do give a certain valuable sense of reality regarding the existence of places that many people would like us to ignore, or forget. It's hard to think of the prison camp where innocent people are being incarcerated without trial[*] as being "out of sight, out of mind" when you can fire up Google Earth and see it plain as day.
[*] Do the math: there are 500+ people there, mostly captured in battlefield conditions in villages and farms. We know the cops, in the best of circumstances, sometimes get the wrong guy. We know the courts, in even better circumstances, sometimes convict the wrong person. So we no with what would be ordinarily called certainty that a non-trivial number of innocent people are being held, indefinitely, without trial, without legal recourse. Even with the most generous assumptions the number comes out to 25 or so. The only question is: are the goals being pursued so valuable and the means being used to pursue them so valuable as to justify the certain incarceration of innocents? "Is life so dear, and peace so sweet..?"
Can you think of a way to win against rootkits without TCPA?
Almost trivially.
The whole point of TCPA is that "trust" is built in to the machine in a fundamentally inaccessbile (to the user) way.
What is needed to defeat rootkits is to allow the user to trust the hardware. This is totally different from application vendors trusting the hardware.
Here's an extreme example: hook a logic analyzer up to the BIOS. Look at the nice bits go by. See if they match expectations. If not, you've been rooted and had your BIOS flashed. "Expectations" are stored in a separate device.
The issue here is strictly one of treating a computer as a fully self-contained block of hardware and software that no one is allowed or able to look inside without going through the terribly civilized interfaces. The solution is to say, "Fuck the fucking interfaces, I'm going to fucking look at what is on the fucking bus." Not civilized at all.
I've debugged embedded code this way, by hooking a logic analyzer up to the hardware and watching the bits go by. It's educational. It would be simple to build this kind of exposure of hardware internals in to the motherboard, to make it easy to plug in an external integrity checker to ensure that the basic state of the machine is as expected.
"Trusted" computing is all about hiding the hardware state from the user. Beating VM-based rootkits is all about exposing hardware state to the user. The two are diametrically opposed.
Every room has it's own air return and heat/cool zone with their own thermostats. That way you can "turn off" unused rooms to save energy.
And in general, a way of moving air from one room to another efficiently. My basement is warm in winter and cool in summer. The loft is the opposite (duh) and it would be nice to be about to suck some of that subterranean air upstairs efficiently. The natural chimney effect of the stairwell helps a lot, but more would be better, especially in winter when the upstairs windows aren't open. Ceiling fans also help, but I'd like to be able to use the existing duct work for this, and not just turn the furnance fan on to blow air everywhere. I want it directable.
I'm in the midst of renovations to replace my loft with a full second story, and one of the things I want to do is put in a well that drops from the top to the bottom, just a couple of feet on a side, that will carry plumbing, power, network cables, and whatever else comes along later. Just having that kind of conduit available is a big thing to keep future integration options open.
I think most people want a house that is reasonably energy efficient today, and able to take advantage of future tech to become more energy efficent in the future. We know that we're facing a few decades of more expensive power, and would like our homes to be flexible enough to adapt to the changing energy environment without having to commit a huge amount of money to every upgrade.
Translation of article abstract: Hot ionized gas (plasma) generates soft x-rays as it cools. The output x-ray energy is greater than the kinetic energy of the plasma that generates it, but there are other things going on. In particular, there is a rapidly decaying magnetic field involved. The paper presents a theoretical model that explains how the plasma converts energy from the collapsing magnetic field into heat, explaining the result.
The trick is understanding that the magnetic field stores a lot of energy, so the accounting that pays attention only to the kinetic energy of the plasma is not correct.
The problem with conservation as a solution to CO2 emmissions is industrial energy use and the economy.
There are probably ways via market prices or the tax system or whatever to motivate individuals to use less energy. But industrial users, who account for something like half of all energy use, aren't having any. Charge them more for energy and they will move to places where cheap energy is available.
Here in Ontario, industrial growth for 50 years or more has been driven by cheap energy. Now that energy is getting scarce, people are getting scared. I'd love to see market prices in energy as means of promoting conservation and helping open up the market to alternative sources that are too expensive under the current capped-rate system. But the political reality is that if this was done across the board, major industrial users would up stakes and head for Mexico or where-ever the kW*hr's are more affordable.
I don't have a clue what to do about this. No one worthy of the name of green wants to engage in such obviously unsustainable policies as trying to put artificial controls on the movement of capital and industry. That was tried by the socialists in the century just past, and all that happened is people refused to invest, and rightly so.
When was the last nuclear power plant accident that happened while its operators were following all prescribed safety procedures? Nuclear power is extremely safe, even more so than traditional coal plants. As long as the operators are trained properly, they perform maintenance as required, etc. there isn't much of a problem.
I agree completely.
Now, prove to me that every nuclear reactor will always be well-designed and that the operators will never make a mistake.
The real problem with nuclear is not health-related but economic. Coal-fired plants are operated as incompetently as nuclear plants, and accidents in them kill people, but they hardly ever write-off the whole damned plant. Nuclear has proven thus far to be a very unforgiving technology, both because the energy density in the core is very high, so relatively small excursions tend to melt everything, and because everything in the core is radioactive, making it really hard to send in a gang of navvies to fix things when they do go wrong.
So coal, oil and gas are forgiving technologies, and nuclear is unforgiving. This is important, because as you correctly point out nuclear accidents happen when operators make mistakes, and operators, being human, will always make mistakes. And automatic control systems, being ultimately designed by humans, will always contain flaws.
Reading the replies here the disagreement seems to be about who is the most corrupt: congress or the patent system. Defenders of RIM say the patent system is corrupt because NTP was gaming the system to extort unearned money. Defenders of NTP say congress was corrupt for putting pressure on the USPTO to invalidate NTP's patents.
Anyone sane would say: a plague on both your houses.
In abstract I think most people on
Given this, any patent dispute is likely to be as releveant to sane concepts of justice as the outcome of a WWF bout. The whole thing is a staged, noisey ritual intended to incite fans, and promulgate the idea that getting into the ring is first and foremost a very dangerous activity. The purpose of the patent system and high-profile patent disputes such as this one is to stifle innovation and scare off inventors.
Personally, if someone told me I was allowed to spend my whole time studying physics or math or producing silly flash animations, I'd be overjoyed
You are in the minority. Most humans are incapable of handling an environment where they are not integrated into some hierarchy that makes them feel both wanted and to some extent powerful. Different social systems are merely different ways of apportioning the wanted/powerful ratio amongst individuals. Totalitarian and free-market systems are based on different sets of rules to concentrate power in the hands of a few, while attempting to make the masses feel either sufficiently wanted or sufficiently hopeful regarding getting a little power for themselves to support the whole ugly mess. Social democratic systems attempt to flatten the power/want distribution so the peaks and valleys are lower (they can easily become totalitarian if they try to rub the peaks and valleys out altogether.)
Greed is not a primary human motivation. Put Bill Gates alone on an island and he won't care about accumulating vast wealth. The accumulation of wealth results in enhanced social status, and that is what every monkey is tuned up to pursue. People are happier when they have more than their neighbours. This is empirical fact. Greed--the endless desire for more wealth--is a consequence of a deeper monkey need for social status.
Most people need hierachy, and in market-based societies, including social democracies, they get that hierarchy from their work environment. So there will be all kinds of opposition to robotic wealth production because it threatens the monkey hierarchies that give our lives meaning.
But there is hope. Capitalism and markets are games we play, shared illusions that allow us to create hierarchies out of nothing, based on the exchange of economic tokens rather than force of arms. Market societies have been successful because they are able to satisfy our need for hierarchy and also produce wealth. The sucessful post-market societies will have other means of creating heirarchies that will look as silly and artificial to us as Bill Gates' means of gaining wealth would look to a medieval warlord.
I think it is wrong to assume the Star Trek definition of transportation is the correct one. If you are confused by what experiments are actually showing: read the article or ask a physicist.
It's nice that you think that. However, I know for a fact that the use of the word "teleportation" confuses laypeople, and popular articles that describe the process of quantum teleportation often contain quotes from physicists who use the term in a clearly and obviously misleading way. I conclude that this is simply to garner more attention for their work.
The rest of your critique is strange. You don't actually address any of my points, which are to do with the use of language. Surely you aren't claiming that a classical notion of "on" and "off" are applicable to a single photon interacting with a beamsplitter. This would be bizzare, because classically "on" and "off" are mutually exclusive, whereas the photon wavefunction after interaction with a beamsplitter has non-zero amplitude in both branches. So you can use the words "on" and "off" for those amplitudes, but if you then make claims that appear to be in plain English like, "The computer runs better when off" I have no problem calling bullshit--simply labelling two amplitudes with classical terms does not give you a warrant to use classical language and grammar to describe them.
An honest scientist would say, "The computer runs better when it is quantum-off" to make clear that "off" is by no means mutually exclusive with "on". Anything else is just lame PR by people who either don't understand QM or are deliberately misleading laypeople to gain attention for their work.
Pebble bed reactors are designed to fail safely. If the flow of coolent stops, so does the reaction. The fuel is safely encased in tennis ball-sized graphite "pebbles" which are dropped in the top of the reactor and retrieved at the bottom. For there to be a release of the radioactive material, the pebble has to be broken open. Even if that happens, the amount that's released is very tiny.
There's just a huge amount of justifiable skepticism regarding claims like this. The pebble-bed design clearly has some strengths, but it has been around since the 50's, which makes one wonder why it hasn't been more seriously developed. There has also been at least one accident, as mentioned in the wikipedia article.
The problem, of course, is that post-TMI and Chernobyl, there has been so little development on new nuclear technologies that if we go the pebble-bed route then we will once again be building new nuclear plants based on unproven technologies. There are bound to be unanticipated issues, despite the "inherently safe" design. CANDUs are "inherently safe" as well (I can't remember which, but either the void or temperature coefficient of reactivity is negative, which makes core meltdown extremely improbable.) But that didn't stop us from getting into a mess with the calandria tubes due is misplaced garter springs and the poorly understood effects of neutron damage to hot, stressed, metal. Retubing was tremendously expensive and time-consuming, which is true of any maintenace work on the hot components of reactors. "Power too cheap to meter" it ain't.
So the sunny-days description of the pebble-bed technology is worriesome. For example, the article mentions that the primary gas may be used to drive the turbines because it may be non-radioactive. Nitrogen won't do, but 4He for example has an activation cross-section of zero. Sounds good. But the gas won't be pure 4He. Nothing is. This is an industrial site, so we can expect that there will be contamination on the order of 0.1% at least. What is the effect of that 0.1% on the equilibrium level of radioactivity in the turbines?
That's just pulling one odd thought off the top of my head. The thing is, I'm sure there are lots of other issues with this technology that we don't know about because we haven't been using it for decades. It's like any other new technology adoption--think of all the projects that came to a halt in the late '90's because the people working on them decided that moving everything to Java was the right thing to do. There were all kinds of issues with that move that didn't show up until it was well under way.
The relatively small scale of pebble-bed reactors is a good thing, as there won't have to be quite the same degree of plunging in as there was with PWRs. But I think it's reasonable for people to be very doubtful about the claims made by any new technology until it has had a decade or so of real economic performance behind it.
I'll admidt I really don't understand what the article is talking about,
Neither did whoever wrote the article.
It works like this:
1) Define some classical terms, like "running" and "actually"
2) Apply them incorrectly to quantum situations
3) ob. ????
4) Profit!
The components of the photon wavefunction that are "not actually running the program" become entangled with the components of the photon wavefunction that "are actully running the program", and therefore they carry information regarding the state of those components.
If we think about this in classical terms, where we incorrectly and falsely imagine that each component of the wavefunction represents a classical trajectory through the apparatus, we could incorrectly and falsely say that photons that have not followed classical trajectories through the part of the apparatus that does the quantum computation have not run the program.
But the clear contradiction of that statement makes the slippery bullshit marketing-speak of the article clear: of course a photon that has followed any classical trajectory whatsoever has not run the quantum program. And to claim that "a photon whose wavefunction is entangled with the program has not run the program" too obviously has the same epistemological and moral status as giving away "free" products that only require a "small" processing fee to claim.
One is motivated to ask, "Why doesn't entanglement with the program state count as 'really' running the program? What is this 'real' thing you keep talking about?" Admittedly, entangling things in this way is a different way of running the program, and is really rather clever, but to promote the results in this way is just attention-grabbing marketing, unworthy of the name of science.
This kind of abuse of language is similar to that of the "quantum teleportation" folks, whose deliberately misleading claims often make it sound like something other than the ontologically-problematic quantum state is being "teleported."
There is no doubt we were about the enter another ice age.
This is a religious statement, not a scientific one. There is most certainly doubt as to where the climate is heading. Many global circulation models predict a hotter, drier climate in the next few hundred years. Some ice core data suggests that the interglacial climate is bimodal, with the second mode having an average global temperature 5 C or so warmer than the historical average, and we may be heading into a (possibly human-induced) mode change.
And given that the large (million-year) scale of climate change is extremly poorly understood, there is no reason to believe that the current interglacial is not the end of the ice-age that has dominated Earth's climate for the last million years or so. So there is doubt all round, and the only thing that is certain is that people who have no doubts about the correctness of their own position are contributing nothing but noise to a very complex debate.
if you are not doing anything wrong, why should you worry about it?
The Chief should be required to defecate in public for a year. Since there is nothing wrong with the act of defecation, he has nothing to worry about.
Unless, of course, the human need for privacy extends beyond just hiding things that are illegal or immoral, and instead extends to things that are merely, well, private.
but when an action to the benefit of everyone - namely checking up on the environment - is undertaken using the same technology that those same people start commenting on artificial climate change: "what about the power usage", "this will cause more rapid climate change"
The reason this comes up is that when the topic is climate-change-related people have climate change on their minds. Consider the mind as a disorganized collection of files with links between them whose strength is based on the number of items the files have on common. Most people are incapable of holding more than two files in their heads at once, so any two things must be no more than one strongly-linked step apart to be considered at the same time.
If you are thinking about climate modeling, you are holding a file that has a lot of stuff about the environment, effects of things on climate, etc. So there are a lot of climate-related files that are only one link away, and it is easy for you to be "clever" and bring one of them up. Because danger is more interesting than pleasure, you will tend to bring up things that appear to be dangerous. It will catch people's attention, and primate social structure is very strongly conditioned by who has the troop's attention.
SETI is relatively unrelated to climate change, so most files to do with climate change are many links away, and the average person just does not have the mental capability of seeing any association between the two at all. An exceptional person might.
You have to remember: we are trying to think logically with a bundle of nerves that was primarily evolved for us to be able to avoid predators, find food, have sex, and rear young, and the means of doing all those things was to fit into the social heirarchy of a bunch of monkeys. Given that, we should probably be thankful we can think at all rather than annoyed that we think so badly.
Wind power has an energy density of about 30 W/m**2, maybe as high at 100 W/m**2 in windy areas.
Reviewing my own estimate, this number is obviously very sensitive to the average wind velocity, which comes in as the cube. It turns out that average wind speed data for Ontario are available, and my estimate of 5 m/s is on the low side for coastal regions. But even with a more optimistic 8 m/s we are still talking 125 W/m**2 after efficiency considerations, which is only a little higher than my 100 W/m**2 high-end value.
It is also clear that placing wind turbines along the shore will have the lowest environmental impact, because the wind is giving up a lot of energy there in any case.
What happens when you start extracting mega watts out of the wind pattern? What about changes to the micro climate just down wind from the wind farm?
The latter is irrelevant to all but the people who live there, in the same way the shadow effects of any industrial plant are irrelevant to any but the people who live there. It is not an environmental issue as normally understood--it is a land use or zoning issue. This is not to say it isn't important--it is--but we have centuries of law dealing with things like this, so there are really no signficant unknows with regard to wind farms except for the possibility that they do not have any significant negative downstream effects. That's a pretty good kind of uncertainty to have: "Nothing bad might happen! We just don't know!"
With regard to the question of what happens when we start extracting megawatts from the wind, this is a question that can be answered on the back of an envelope, which I will now proceed to do. Air has a density (rho) of about 1 kg/m**3. Consider wind at 10 kn, which is about 5 m/s. The power per square meter is 0.5*rho*v**3, or about 60 W, of which about half is available to windmills. Wind power has an energy density of about 30 W/m**2, maybe as high at 100 W/m**2 in windy areas. The Canadian province of Ontario has a winter load of about 20 GW and a summer load of about 25 GW. So we're talking about at least 200 million square meters of swept area to accomodate all of it, and maybe over three times this much. This is equivalent to a line of windmills with 100 meter span, 2000 km long removing half the kinetic energy from all the air that passes through them. This is not a small environmental influence. It is hard to imagine that this would not quite fundamentally change energy transport and therefore weather patterns over hundreds of kilometers.
I didn't expect that result when I started writing the paragraph above, but since I'm a scientific rather than a religious environmentalist, I can't simply ignore it. Wind power is still worth pursuing, but it is very clear that it is never going to be more than one element in a mix of alternatives, and is very unlikely to ever generate more than 10% of our power if its environmental impact is to be kept moderate.