Yes, we had functors before, but now you neither need to define functors classes/structs defining 'operator()', nor have to invoke new on them. That is substantially less typing to achieve the same without loss of generality, semantics or performance.
And you save even more typing because the damned things are almost impossible to comment properly.
I'm being a bit facetious, as I think any industrial-strength programming language ought to have lambdas, but I think they are far more useful to library and algorithm developers than application developers. I've been on both sides of that divide, and while I grant lambdas are useful and elegant, I've also seen them used in entirely inappropriate ways by application developers that have made their work hard to understand and even more difficult to debug.
For example, while g++ mostly supports the new standard I'm pretty sure gdb doesn't allow you to set a breakpoint in an anonymous function. Until it does I would say they have no place in application development, or only under the most draconian coding standards that prevent the kind of unpleasantness you get when a junior developer realizes all the kewl stuff they can do with them.
The UN estimates of world population now indicate an increase until around 2075 (9.2 billion), and then a decrease after that.
And given the huge bias that still exists to predict population crises, it is likely that the UN projection is an over-estimate. I don't plan to be around in 2075, but I do expect to be a member of the largest terrestrial human population cohort that will ever exist.
It's not hard to prove that the Earth's temperature is increasing. Measure it at a bunch of different places all over the surface, take the average, weighted by surface area around each measurement, and you get a pretty good measure of the energy in the atmosphere. If you in fact do this, you see that the temperature is increasing
I appreciate you posting such a nice, clear statement of some of the primary false claims regarding global climate change.
Furthermore, the very notion of "average temperature" as you define it is thermodynamically meaningless in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere: humidity changes can result in atmospheric heat content going up even while temperature goes down. Ocean temperatures, which we unfortunately do not have very long-term data for, are a much better measure of global heat content.
Second, it actually is hard to prove the "Earth's temperature" is increasing, even using a far simpler and more legitimate procedure than the problematic and thermodynamically incorrect one you have described. Have a look at this, for example: http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/864/
The claim that GCMs can predict accurately on large scales while getting it wrong for a random selection of widely dispersed stations is untenable. Despite the existence of micro-climates, the reality is that surface temperature measurements are highly correlated on a scale of a hundred kilometers--the very possibility of doing anything like the averaging you are talking about depends on this trivially observable fact. So if GCMs can predict large-scale averages they must also do pretty well with trends at individual stations. There is simply no logical alternative.
The reality is that GCMs do a lousy job of predicting local station trends.
This is not surprising because GCMs are deeply unphysical. One of them I looked at didn't even conserve energy: it required "fixing up" energy conservation after each time step by adjusting the temperatures in each cell of the simulation. As any experienced computational physicist (me, say) will tell you: that kind of ad hockery in a long-time integration of even a relatively simple set of differential equations will almost certainly lead to substantial divergences between model behaviour and system behaviour.
Treatment of ocean surface boundary conditions, and vertical boundary conditions generally, to say nothing of a wealth of sub-scale phenomena like thunderstorms, tornadoes, local rainstorms, etc, are all problematic even in the best GCMs. It would be astonishing if they more than vaguely approximated reality. This is not to say they aren't good science, but let me ask you: how would you feel about using the world's best financial models from 2005 to predict the future development of the global financial system? Because I can tell you, the US Federal Reserve Bank was running those models, and the policies they set on the basis of them didn't work out so well.
GCMs are far worse representations of a far more complex reality than our best financial models are. I would not want to see policy based on them.
All that said: dumping tonnes of garbage into the atmosphere every day and hoping for the best sounds like a really bad policy to me, without the need to justify it via problematic computational claims.
An accident there would pretty much mean the end of Nuclear power.
From your detailed description one could easily argue that nuclear power deserves to come to an end.
You describe a reactor that had well-known issues that was operated by a utility that is by international standards pretty well run and relatively free of corruption. Despite this the issues were never addressed, and that failure led directly to the mess we are in today.
The downside risk of nuclear power is huge and the costs of "power too cheap to meter" are staggeringly large. While nuclear is certainly better than coal, that's setting the bar pretty low.
If they commit fraud on an Enron/Madoff level, life sentences or death would be appropriate.
In this case, people owning and running nuclear plants would basically bet their fortunes and lives that they are running the facilities with integrity and great care.
Neither Buffet nor the Freakonomics guy have ever run an actual business... you know, one that employs thousands of people and produces actual stuff.
Take the BP disaster for example. The people on that rig were highly trained engineers who were going to die if they misinterpreted the results of the well integrity test. Their objective, rational, economic interests were as closely aligned with safety and environmental stewardship as you could possible get, but that didn't stop them from engaging in wishful thinking in their interpretation of results, which according to experts who reviewed the same data after the fact were clearly and obviously unsatisfactory. Yet the people on the spot and at risk made what appears in retrospect to be a willfully wrong call, and paid for it with their lives.
Human beings are "probability blind", which is like colour blindness but with probabilities. Our perceptions of chance are in terms of muted greys, while the world is spattered with vibrant greens and reds. Intelligent people understand this and design systems accordingly. Unintelligent people thump their chests and threat to kill colour-blind people for not being able to tell the difference between red and green.
Advocating punitive responses to human weakness is like shouting at a deaf man to listen more clearly: it isn't going to work, and after a while it makes the people doing it look really, really stupid.
External discipline of the form provided by the market and law enforcement works well when probability distribution functions are narrow, or when the cost of failure is low. Where "low" means "nobody dies". Safety is an area where the PDF is always broad--the risk of catastrophe is a tiny blip on the long tail--and the costs are always high. There is every reason to expect external discipline to fail in this case, as indeed it does. So on both theoretical and practical grounds punitive measures are never going to be sufficient regulators of human behavior.
Safety requires independent oversight of the kind found in the airline industry, which ought to be used as a model for the nuclear industry. Punitive measures have a place in such a framework, but regulatory oversight is far more important, as it puts the detection of probability distributions into the hands of trained professionals rather than hopeful amateurs.
Oh, and in both the Enron and Madoff cases, life sentences were handed out, so you are advocating a solution that is known not to prevent the behaviour you claim to want to prevent. Since you are advocating a solution that is known not to prevent the problem, and you clearly know it does not prevent the problem, one is left to infer that you simply like punishing people, since there is no rational motive for doing what you are advocating in this case.
If you asked somebody in 2007 what the chances of a major economic meltdown as a result of a housing price decline, every economist would have said "super low - it will never happen."
False. The meltdown was predicted. Any number of economists predicted the failure. Google it. Major newspapers were raising concerns about it as early at 2005 in Canada and 2006 in the US based on economists who were raising concerns.
The thing is, hardly anyone was paying attention to the warnings, and retrospectively people are now denying the warnings existed, as if things ceased to exist simply because they couldn't see them.
Any time I hear someone say, "No one could have predicted this!" I'm pretty sure they are trying to distract from the reality that people DID predict it, but they ignored the warnings and don't want to be reminded of that.
In all cases, they reacted with the hot steam to produce hydrogen gas, which has then posed a non-insignificant threat to the containment structure.
My understanding of the chemistry inovlved is that there's nothing special about zircalloy in this regard. Any crystalline metal will have similar issues, as the basic process is that when there is neutron capture it is followed by beta decay, which gives you an atom of the wrong element sitting in the lattice. These sites eventually lead to micro-cracking, creating a high surface area of exposed reactive sites where the lattice is damanged, which contributes significantly to the hydrogen production. I may be all wrong about this--I'm a physicist, not a chemist--but that's what I've inferred from discusions of the phenomenon.
As such, unless we go with ceramic cladding or something equally clever, it seems unlikely to be a problem that is going to go away any time soon.
This is the fundamental problem with nuclear power: in a non-nuclear plant you would simply schedule periodic maintenance (once every five years would probably be sufficient given how slowly the damage builds up) and pull the old tubes out, stick new ones in, and refurb the old ones for insertion on the next maintenance cycle. With a nuclear plant you can't do that because the damned things are radioactive.
I really don't see why we aren't building these things underground. To my certain knowledge Russia had plutonium-producing reactors in caverns several hundred metres down during the Cold War. That's where we should be building nuclear power plants.
But the contamination only occurs when you open up the closed system.
You say that like it's somehow interesting or gemane. Why?
Since the closed system will always be opened, by accident or design, it is completely uninteresting that the reactor can only heavily contamintate its surroundings when something untoward happens. In case you've missed it this whole discussion is being driven by an incident that occured because of a series of unforeseen circumstances. This is what makes Fukushima so much more damning for the nuclear industry than Chernobyl: it is a well-designed (for its day) reactor run by a respectable utility under a reasonably honest regulatory regime.
So your comment amounts to, "WIth this design an accident can only happen if something unexpected occurs!" While that wins you a Tautology Award, it just isn't very interesting.
But that only occurs if you open up the closed system.
Like can happen in a sufficiently large earthquake, or due to a bad valve in the cooling system, or...
The only way to get power out of a reactor is to create weak points in the containment, unless you put all the turbo-generating machinery inside and transfer energy by electromagenetic induction (tricky through the steel reinforcing of the containment, but probably actually do-able...)
It is most worrisome that there are reports of radiation level near Tokyo is increasing.
Why is something that is completely predictable the most worrisome thing? It would be worrisome if levels near Tokyo were not increasing, as that would imply something incredible and unexpected was going on. Radioactives spread by what amout to diffusive processes, so when you have a major release of the kind seen in Fukushima you expect to see radiation levels rise in the subsequent weeks and months and maybe even years, as those are the timescales for mass transport in the atmosphere and surface water.
Furthermore, remember that the psychological fallout from nuclear accidents makes far more people far sicker than the radioactive fallout, so it is important to keep information like the purely speculative report TFA is talking about in context.
I mean the fucking inevitableirresponsible behavior from profit-driven plant operators has never been a significant problem.
Right, if only we could take the profit motive away the world would be full of unicorns!
I mean, it'snot like the worst nuclear disasters have occured in government-run plants in Canada, England the Ukraine.
What you're doing here is a classic "this disaster proves my politics are true" move, hijacking a real problem to make it all about some stupid political dispute that only wankers interested in nothing but power care about.
Is an intellectual somebody who has memorized a lot of information, or is it somebody who is adept at learning?
Although both are necessary to be an intellectual, neither is sufficient.
An intellectual is someone who values and pursues the life of the mind in all its diverse forms. Such people necessarily end up knowing a lot, and the only way to learn some important things is through memorization, so they will necessarily be adept at various ways of learning, including memorization, which is of course an important tool in any learning toolkit.
On the other hand, the work of intellectuals needs to be distinguished from sterile mental gymnastics like philosophy, whose practitioners seem to believe they can think without having actual detailed, scientific, empirical knowledge to think about.
Learning--including learning by memorization--is necessary to know things, and intellectuals value knowledge because it gives them stuff to think about (as opposed to the sterile contents of their own reflective self-impressions, which is all that philosophers think about.)
Stop making HTML harder to validate and process, and start making browsers better conform--and developers more completely use--the many existing features in it and its underlying SGML or XML.
This has been the lament of markup nerds (I was one once, but I got better) since 1995, which tells us that it isn't going to happen. There has never been any incentive for companies to be validation-centric, because users aren't capable of creating validating code. Neither are tool-vendors.
This has been the strength of HTML as a "standard": it's a consultant. You ask it to do something, it'll go ahead and do it, regardless of whether what you're asking for makes any sense.
And because the consumers of HTML documents are humans who mostly aren't paying attention anyway, any processing that basically gets the text on the screen is adequate. So by being profoundly promiscuous and relaxed about standards compliance, HTML owns the Web, despite the (quite justifiable) howls of markup purists.
"He who warned uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."
What Revere said:
"I observed a wood at a small distance, and made for that. When I got there, out started six officers on horseback, and ordered me to dismount. One of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me where I came from and what my name was: I told him. He asked if I was an express: I answered in the affirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston: I told him; and added that their troops had catched aground in passing the river, and that there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time for I had alarmed the country all the way up."
Really, does anyone recognize Palin's account as being remotely based on Revere's?
Palin: Revere was riding his horse through town ringing bells and firing guns to (somehow) announce to the British that Americans were going to be free and armed.
Revere: after being captured on his stealth mission to raise American troops he informs the British that they are facing a prepared countryside.
What exactly do these accounts have in common? Palin doesn't mention Revere's capture. She does mention him firing guns and ringing bells, which there is no documentary evidence for and which would be weird for someone on a clandestine mission to do. Palin seems to be aware that Revere rode a horse, so there is one point of factual agreement at least.
You do realize that Paul Revere was captured on his ride and did warn the British that they would not be able to take away the colonists' guns?
False. After his capture Revere told the British that the country was raised against them. Not one word about taking away the colonist's guns.
And while it is true that "you can't take their guns" is a reasonable inference from "they are ready and waiting for you", it is also a reasonable inference that "you can't take their trousers" or "you can't quarter soldiers in their homes", but for some reason you don't mention either of those, nor the dozens of other things you could reasonably infer from what Revere reported telling them, which was not "you can't take their guns" but "the country is raised against you."
since they've to date confined less than 400 anti-atoms, there is no danger of any kind of weapon being built with this kind of technology in the next few decades
I believe the term you're looking for is "moonshine". That is the traditional way of dismissing a scientific discovery still in it's infancy yet only twenty years away from changing the world.
It seems more likely to me that life develops in more ideal conditions, then migrates to areas where conditions are more harsh. Am I being too skeptical or pessimistic?
It seems more likely to me that the Sun and planets move around the Earth.
It seems more likely to me that the continents stay put.
It seems more likely to me that humans were created by a conscious act of a supreme being rather than evolved by chance over billions of years.
It seems to me that motion just naturally comes to rest after a time.
It seems to me that if I spin around and throw something it will follow a curved path for a while before straightening out.
It seems to me that people might have learned from the past three hundred years that what seems likely to them is unrelated to what actually is.
If the worker fucks up, his salary is wasted. If a manager fucks up, his salary and the salaries of all his workers are wasted. And good managers are rarer in the marketplace than equally good workers.
If any of that was true you would expect managerial salaries to vary with competency, which they don't. They vary with industry and with company based on overall management culture and productivity, but within companies they vary based on political connections.
The reality is: a good worker can make up for the incompetence of a bad manager, and the manager will take the credit. But when a bad manager screws up, the worker takes the blame.
So while economic rationality would dictate that what you are saying is correct, no one who has been paying any attention to actual facts in the past couple of decades believes that economic rationality is only--or even the primary--driver of human behaviour in the marketplace.
It is irrational to believe that economic rationality is the primary driver of human behaviour in the marketplace.
give him a break: he's being home schooled. Which probably explains word processing being CS...
I'm not sure how being given a better than average education, better socialization and a broader range of experience qualifies him for a "break".
Nor am I sure why repeating a prejudice of the ignorant that has been debunked so many times it's not funny qualifies as "insightful".
And no, I wasn't home schooled and nor were my kids, but they have friends who were and anyone with a passing familiarity with the data knows that homeschooling is a perfectly sensible educational choice that works at least as well as the "warehouse your kids for 12 years" public school system.
Seriously, "homeschooling = bad education" makes as much sense as "diversity of creatures = separate creation".
I live in Tunisia, north of Africa, one country with a "moderate" climate.
Tunisia is only around 36 deg N, so the effects of anthropogenic climate change there are expected to be very small. It would be astonishing if the changes you're observing had anything to do with AGW, unless all the models are completely wrong (which is quite possible, given how unphysical and highly parameterized they are.)
Reducing carbon dioxide emissions dramatically is not something that can be done by individuals.
False, if by "dramatically" you mean "a factor of two or so". [OK, long pause as I try to find this comment again because the totally broken/. garbage broken UI brokenly jumps a few screens any time anything is selected or something broken like that...]
While social/governmental initiatives and policies can and should be used to capture externalities--and should use the generally successful mechanism of markets to do so via the kind of cap and trade scheme that worked so well for sulpher emissions--individuals can still do a huge amount to reduce their own energy bills... err... I mean "carbon footprint."
For myself, my energy bills, including transportation, are a good factor of two lower than the average. I live in a smallish town, downtown, within walking distance to work. This isn't quite as energy efficient as living in a city, but it's still pretty good. I live in a modest house with decent insulation and no air conditioning (which isn't required in my climate, but YMMV). I have put barely any effort into saving energy, really: I don't have high-efficiency appliances, I drive a ten-year-old mini-van, and I haven't been particularly aggressive on power management in my home.
And yet I'm a factor of two below the average energy usage in my area... which admittedly doesn't have quite such a huge impact on carbon emissions as 60% of our energy here comes from nuclear and hydro power, but then, I'm not about reducing carbon emissions, I'm about saving money.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, we had functors before, but now you neither need to define functors classes/structs defining 'operator()', nor have to invoke new on them. That is substantially less typing to achieve the same without loss of generality, semantics or performance.
And you save even more typing because the damned things are almost impossible to comment properly.
I'm being a bit facetious, as I think any industrial-strength programming language ought to have lambdas, but I think they are far more useful to library and algorithm developers than application developers. I've been on both sides of that divide, and while I grant lambdas are useful and elegant, I've also seen them used in entirely inappropriate ways by application developers that have made their work hard to understand and even more difficult to debug.
For example, while g++ mostly supports the new standard I'm pretty sure gdb doesn't allow you to set a breakpoint in an anonymous function. Until it does I would say they have no place in application development, or only under the most draconian coding standards that prevent the kind of unpleasantness you get when a junior developer realizes all the kewl stuff they can do with them.
The UN estimates of world population now indicate an increase until around 2075 (9.2 billion), and then a decrease after that.
And given the huge bias that still exists to predict population crises, it is likely that the UN projection is an over-estimate. I don't plan to be around in 2075, but I do expect to be a member of the largest terrestrial human population cohort that will ever exist.
Well, that's proof enough for me that he must be wrong, and the carrying capacity of the earth must indeed be infinite.
No, it's proof that he doesn't take his own arguments seriously. So why should anyone else?
It's not hard to prove that the Earth's temperature is increasing. Measure it at a bunch of different places all over the surface, take the average, weighted by surface area around each measurement, and you get a pretty good measure of the energy in the atmosphere. If you in fact do this, you see that the temperature is increasing
I appreciate you posting such a nice, clear statement of some of the primary false claims regarding global climate change.
First, the procedure you describe is a terrible measure of the energy in the atmosphere: http://pielkeclimatesci.files.wordpress.com/2009/10/r-321.pdf
Furthermore, the very notion of "average temperature" as you define it is thermodynamically meaningless in an inhomogeneous medium like the atmosphere: humidity changes can result in atmospheric heat content going up even while temperature goes down. Ocean temperatures, which we unfortunately do not have very long-term data for, are a much better measure of global heat content.
Second, it actually is hard to prove the "Earth's temperature" is increasing, even using a far simpler and more legitimate procedure than the problematic and thermodynamically incorrect one you have described. Have a look at this, for example: http://itia.ntua.gr/en/docinfo/864/
The claim that GCMs can predict accurately on large scales while getting it wrong for a random selection of widely dispersed stations is untenable. Despite the existence of micro-climates, the reality is that surface temperature measurements are highly correlated on a scale of a hundred kilometers--the very possibility of doing anything like the averaging you are talking about depends on this trivially observable fact. So if GCMs can predict large-scale averages they must also do pretty well with trends at individual stations. There is simply no logical alternative.
The reality is that GCMs do a lousy job of predicting local station trends.
This is not surprising because GCMs are deeply unphysical. One of them I looked at didn't even conserve energy: it required "fixing up" energy conservation after each time step by adjusting the temperatures in each cell of the simulation. As any experienced computational physicist (me, say) will tell you: that kind of ad hockery in a long-time integration of even a relatively simple set of differential equations will almost certainly lead to substantial divergences between model behaviour and system behaviour.
Treatment of ocean surface boundary conditions, and vertical boundary conditions generally, to say nothing of a wealth of sub-scale phenomena like thunderstorms, tornadoes, local rainstorms, etc, are all problematic even in the best GCMs. It would be astonishing if they more than vaguely approximated reality. This is not to say they aren't good science, but let me ask you: how would you feel about using the world's best financial models from 2005 to predict the future development of the global financial system? Because I can tell you, the US Federal Reserve Bank was running those models, and the policies they set on the basis of them didn't work out so well.
GCMs are far worse representations of a far more complex reality than our best financial models are. I would not want to see policy based on them.
All that said: dumping tonnes of garbage into the atmosphere every day and hoping for the best sounds like a really bad policy to me, without the need to justify it via problematic computational claims.
An accident there would pretty much mean the end of Nuclear power.
From your detailed description one could easily argue that nuclear power deserves to come to an end.
You describe a reactor that had well-known issues that was operated by a utility that is by international standards pretty well run and relatively free of corruption. Despite this the issues were never addressed, and that failure led directly to the mess we are in today.
The downside risk of nuclear power is huge and the costs of "power too cheap to meter" are staggeringly large. While nuclear is certainly better than coal, that's setting the bar pretty low.
If they commit fraud on an Enron/Madoff level, life sentences or death would be appropriate.
In this case, people owning and running nuclear plants would basically bet their fortunes and lives that they are running the facilities with integrity and great care.
Neither Buffet nor the Freakonomics guy have ever run an actual business... you know, one that employs thousands of people and produces actual stuff.
Take the BP disaster for example. The people on that rig were highly trained engineers who were going to die if they misinterpreted the results of the well integrity test. Their objective, rational, economic interests were as closely aligned with safety and environmental stewardship as you could possible get, but that didn't stop them from engaging in wishful thinking in their interpretation of results, which according to experts who reviewed the same data after the fact were clearly and obviously unsatisfactory. Yet the people on the spot and at risk made what appears in retrospect to be a willfully wrong call, and paid for it with their lives.
Human beings are "probability blind", which is like colour blindness but with probabilities. Our perceptions of chance are in terms of muted greys, while the world is spattered with vibrant greens and reds. Intelligent people understand this and design systems accordingly. Unintelligent people thump their chests and threat to kill colour-blind people for not being able to tell the difference between red and green.
Advocating punitive responses to human weakness is like shouting at a deaf man to listen more clearly: it isn't going to work, and after a while it makes the people doing it look really, really stupid.
External discipline of the form provided by the market and law enforcement works well when probability distribution functions are narrow, or when the cost of failure is low. Where "low" means "nobody dies". Safety is an area where the PDF is always broad--the risk of catastrophe is a tiny blip on the long tail--and the costs are always high. There is every reason to expect external discipline to fail in this case, as indeed it does. So on both theoretical and practical grounds punitive measures are never going to be sufficient regulators of human behavior.
Safety requires independent oversight of the kind found in the airline industry, which ought to be used as a model for the nuclear industry. Punitive measures have a place in such a framework, but regulatory oversight is far more important, as it puts the detection of probability distributions into the hands of trained professionals rather than hopeful amateurs.
Oh, and in both the Enron and Madoff cases, life sentences were handed out, so you are advocating a solution that is known not to prevent the behaviour you claim to want to prevent. Since you are advocating a solution that is known not to prevent the problem, and you clearly know it does not prevent the problem, one is left to infer that you simply like punishing people, since there is no rational motive for doing what you are advocating in this case.
If you asked somebody in 2007 what the chances of a major economic meltdown as a result of a housing price decline, every economist would have said "super low - it will never happen."
False. The meltdown was predicted. Any number of economists predicted the failure. Google it. Major newspapers were raising concerns about it as early at 2005 in Canada and 2006 in the US based on economists who were raising concerns.
The thing is, hardly anyone was paying attention to the warnings, and retrospectively people are now denying the warnings existed, as if things ceased to exist simply because they couldn't see them.
Any time I hear someone say, "No one could have predicted this!" I'm pretty sure they are trying to distract from the reality that people DID predict it, but they ignored the warnings and don't want to be reminded of that.
In all cases, they reacted with the hot steam to produce hydrogen gas, which has then posed a non-insignificant threat to the containment structure.
My understanding of the chemistry inovlved is that there's nothing special about zircalloy in this regard. Any crystalline metal will have similar issues, as the basic process is that when there is neutron capture it is followed by beta decay, which gives you an atom of the wrong element sitting in the lattice. These sites eventually lead to micro-cracking, creating a high surface area of exposed reactive sites where the lattice is damanged, which contributes significantly to the hydrogen production. I may be all wrong about this--I'm a physicist, not a chemist--but that's what I've inferred from discusions of the phenomenon.
As such, unless we go with ceramic cladding or something equally clever, it seems unlikely to be a problem that is going to go away any time soon.
This is the fundamental problem with nuclear power: in a non-nuclear plant you would simply schedule periodic maintenance (once every five years would probably be sufficient given how slowly the damage builds up) and pull the old tubes out, stick new ones in, and refurb the old ones for insertion on the next maintenance cycle. With a nuclear plant you can't do that because the damned things are radioactive.
I really don't see why we aren't building these things underground. To my certain knowledge Russia had plutonium-producing reactors in caverns several hundred metres down during the Cold War. That's where we should be building nuclear power plants.
But the contamination only occurs when you open up the closed system.
You say that like it's somehow interesting or gemane. Why?
Since the closed system will always be opened, by accident or design, it is completely uninteresting that the reactor can only heavily contamintate its surroundings when something untoward happens. In case you've missed it this whole discussion is being driven by an incident that occured because of a series of unforeseen circumstances. This is what makes Fukushima so much more damning for the nuclear industry than Chernobyl: it is a well-designed (for its day) reactor run by a respectable utility under a reasonably honest regulatory regime.
So your comment amounts to, "WIth this design an accident can only happen if something unexpected occurs!" While that wins you a Tautology Award, it just isn't very interesting.
But that only occurs if you open up the closed system.
Like can happen in a sufficiently large earthquake, or due to a bad valve in the cooling system, or...
The only way to get power out of a reactor is to create weak points in the containment, unless you put all the turbo-generating machinery inside and transfer energy by electromagenetic induction (tricky through the steel reinforcing of the containment, but probably actually do-able...)
It is most worrisome that there are reports of radiation level near Tokyo is increasing.
Why is something that is completely predictable the most worrisome thing? It would be worrisome if levels near Tokyo were not increasing, as that would imply something incredible and unexpected was going on. Radioactives spread by what amout to diffusive processes, so when you have a major release of the kind seen in Fukushima you expect to see radiation levels rise in the subsequent weeks and months and maybe even years, as those are the timescales for mass transport in the atmosphere and surface water.
Furthermore, remember that the psychological fallout from nuclear accidents makes far more people far sicker than the radioactive fallout, so it is important to keep information like the purely speculative report TFA is talking about in context.
I mean the fucking inevitableirresponsible behavior from profit-driven plant operators has never been a significant problem.
Right, if only we could take the profit motive away the world would be full of unicorns!
I mean, it'snot like the worst nuclear disasters have occured in government-run plants in Canada, England the Ukraine.
What you're doing here is a classic "this disaster proves my politics are true" move, hijacking a real problem to make it all about some stupid political dispute that only wankers interested in nothing but power care about.
Is an intellectual somebody who has memorized a lot of information, or is it somebody who is adept at learning?
Although both are necessary to be an intellectual, neither is sufficient.
An intellectual is someone who values and pursues the life of the mind in all its diverse forms. Such people necessarily end up knowing a lot, and the only way to learn some important things is through memorization, so they will necessarily be adept at various ways of learning, including memorization, which is of course an important tool in any learning toolkit.
On the other hand, the work of intellectuals needs to be distinguished from sterile mental gymnastics like philosophy, whose practitioners seem to believe they can think without having actual detailed, scientific, empirical knowledge to think about.
Learning--including learning by memorization--is necessary to know things, and intellectuals value knowledge because it gives them stuff to think about (as opposed to the sterile contents of their own reflective self-impressions, which is all that philosophers think about.)
Stop making HTML harder to validate and process, and start making browsers better conform--and developers more completely use--the many existing features in it and its underlying SGML or XML.
This has been the lament of markup nerds (I was one once, but I got better) since 1995, which tells us that it isn't going to happen. There has never been any incentive for companies to be validation-centric, because users aren't capable of creating validating code. Neither are tool-vendors.
This has been the strength of HTML as a "standard": it's a consultant. You ask it to do something, it'll go ahead and do it, regardless of whether what you're asking for makes any sense.
And because the consumers of HTML documents are humans who mostly aren't paying attention anyway, any processing that basically gets the text on the screen is adequate. So by being profoundly promiscuous and relaxed about standards compliance, HTML owns the Web, despite the (quite justifiable) howls of markup purists.
What Palin said:
"He who warned uh, the British that they weren't gonna be takin' away our arms, uh by ringing those bells, and um, makin' sure as he's riding his horse through town to send those warning shots and bells that we were going to be sure and we were going to be free, and we were going to be armed."
What Revere said:
"I observed a wood at a small distance, and made for that. When I got there, out started six officers on horseback, and ordered me to dismount. One of them, who appeared to have the command, examined me where I came from and what my name was: I told him. He asked if I was an express: I answered in the affirmative. He demanded what time I left Boston: I told him; and added that their troops had catched aground in passing the river, and that there would be five hundred Americans there in a short time for I had alarmed the country all the way up."
Really, does anyone recognize Palin's account as being remotely based on Revere's?
Palin: Revere was riding his horse through town ringing bells and firing guns to (somehow) announce to the British that Americans were going to be free and armed.
Revere: after being captured on his stealth mission to raise American troops he informs the British that they are facing a prepared countryside.
What exactly do these accounts have in common? Palin doesn't mention Revere's capture. She does mention him firing guns and ringing bells, which there is no documentary evidence for and which would be weird for someone on a clandestine mission to do. Palin seems to be aware that Revere rode a horse, so there is one point of factual agreement at least.
You do realize that Paul Revere was captured on his ride and did warn the British that they would not be able to take away the colonists' guns?
False. After his capture Revere told the British that the country was raised against them. Not one word about taking away the colonist's guns.
And while it is true that "you can't take their guns" is a reasonable inference from "they are ready and waiting for you", it is also a reasonable inference that "you can't take their trousers" or "you can't quarter soldiers in their homes", but for some reason you don't mention either of those, nor the dozens of other things you could reasonably infer from what Revere reported telling them, which was not "you can't take their guns" but "the country is raised against you."
since they've to date confined less than 400 anti-atoms, there is no danger of any kind of weapon being built with this kind of technology in the next few decades
I believe the term you're looking for is "moonshine". That is the traditional way of dismissing a scientific discovery still in it's infancy yet only twenty years away from changing the world.
It seems more likely to me that life develops in more ideal conditions, then migrates to areas where conditions are more harsh. Am I being too skeptical or pessimistic?
It seems more likely to me that the Sun and planets move around the Earth.
It seems more likely to me that the continents stay put.
It seems more likely to me that humans were created by a conscious act of a supreme being rather than evolved by chance over billions of years.
It seems to me that motion just naturally comes to rest after a time.
It seems to me that if I spin around and throw something it will follow a curved path for a while before straightening out.
It seems to me that people might have learned from the past three hundred years that what seems likely to them is unrelated to what actually is.
You never refer to fetus as a blastocyst, parasite,
No kidding! A parasite reduces the host's reproductive efficacy!
You'd have to be a gibbering idiot or completely ignorant of the foundations of evolutionary biology to refer to a fetus as a parasite.
Why don't these alternative energy/power storage articles ever include cost comparisons?
For the same reason they are telling us the size of the flywheel in miles per hour (20 MW of "energy" storage? What?)
we know that there's no perfect energy retaining system
Actually, we know you are ignorant of superconducting solenoids.
If the worker fucks up, his salary is wasted. If a manager fucks up, his salary and the salaries of all his workers are wasted. And good managers are rarer in the marketplace than equally good workers.
If any of that was true you would expect managerial salaries to vary with competency, which they don't. They vary with industry and with company based on overall management culture and productivity, but within companies they vary based on political connections.
The reality is: a good worker can make up for the incompetence of a bad manager, and the manager will take the credit. But when a bad manager screws up, the worker takes the blame.
So while economic rationality would dictate that what you are saying is correct, no one who has been paying any attention to actual facts in the past couple of decades believes that economic rationality is only--or even the primary--driver of human behaviour in the marketplace.
It is irrational to believe that economic rationality is the primary driver of human behaviour in the marketplace.
give him a break: he's being home schooled. Which probably explains word processing being CS...
I'm not sure how being given a better than average education, better socialization and a broader range of experience qualifies him for a "break".
Nor am I sure why repeating a prejudice of the ignorant that has been debunked so many times it's not funny qualifies as "insightful".
And no, I wasn't home schooled and nor were my kids, but they have friends who were and anyone with a passing familiarity with the data knows that homeschooling is a perfectly sensible educational choice that works at least as well as the "warehouse your kids for 12 years" public school system.
Seriously, "homeschooling = bad education" makes as much sense as "diversity of creatures = separate creation".
I live in Tunisia, north of Africa, one country with a "moderate" climate.
Tunisia is only around 36 deg N, so the effects of anthropogenic climate change there are expected to be very small. It would be astonishing if the changes you're observing had anything to do with AGW, unless all the models are completely wrong (which is quite possible, given how unphysical and highly parameterized they are.)
Reducing carbon dioxide emissions dramatically is not something that can be done by individuals.
False, if by "dramatically" you mean "a factor of two or so". [OK, long pause as I try to find this comment again because the totally broken /. garbage broken UI brokenly jumps a few screens any time anything is selected or something broken like that...]
While social/governmental initiatives and policies can and should be used to capture externalities--and should use the generally successful mechanism of markets to do so via the kind of cap and trade scheme that worked so well for sulpher emissions--individuals can still do a huge amount to reduce their own energy bills... err... I mean "carbon footprint."
For myself, my energy bills, including transportation, are a good factor of two lower than the average. I live in a smallish town, downtown, within walking distance to work. This isn't quite as energy efficient as living in a city, but it's still pretty good. I live in a modest house with decent insulation and no air conditioning (which isn't required in my climate, but YMMV). I have put barely any effort into saving energy, really: I don't have high-efficiency appliances, I drive a ten-year-old mini-van, and I haven't been particularly aggressive on power management in my home.
And yet I'm a factor of two below the average energy usage in my area... which admittedly doesn't have quite such a huge impact on carbon emissions as 60% of our energy here comes from nuclear and hydro power, but then, I'm not about reducing carbon emissions, I'm about saving money.