Then your (our, really) problem is not the agreements but your dickless administration. In my native Finland it is legally forbidden for the state to turn a finnish citizen over to a foreign state for any reason.
What?! No, there is no such law. We turn over Finnish criminals to foreign states all the time.
(The reason behind this "no turning over finnish citizens" law is, surprise surprise, those few hundred jews and communists and such that were turned over to Nazi Germany. Bit of an embarrassment to say the least.)
What?! No Jews who were Finnish citizens were turned over to Nazi Germany. For the story on Finnish Jews during WWII:
The embarrasment is about the authorities turning back some refugees and exchanging Soviet prisoners of war, including some Jews who then perished in the camps. That's embarrassing, but hardly as ludicrous as deporting our own Jewish citizens into Nazi Germany would've been!
Where did you come up with this stuff?
Besides, the most embarrassing deportations of Finnish history are the Soviet defectors who were turned back after jumping the border - demanded both by those communists (and the moderate left - can't have people walking around telling the truth about the socialist wonderland).
To be fair, WWII was a series of events. Though several of them (Hitler invading Poland, Pearl Harbor, and the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki) rival or beat 9/11 in terms of how they changed the world.
Sorry, but so far 9/11 goes to the same class for *the world* as, say, the death of princess Diana: a big news story. It's a definite "where were you when..?" thing for a generation, but it's just too early to tell whether it'll even be known to non-history-geeks outside America in 60 years. (This jihad thing turns out to be a big fizzle? It'll be a footnote. Otherwise, perhaps not.)
Americans are extraordinarily fortunate with geography and have been shielded from even the threat of nasty stuff happening on your own soil, so the attack seems more significant, but most of us in the rest of the world look at this stuff with a background of having our cities terror-bombed the second someone invented terror-bombing, occasionally razed to the ground, taken and cleansed of our people, occupied with the usual terror that goes with conventional occupations and so on. This stuff just happens a couple of times per century and it'll probably happen a couple of times this century, unless this time we manage to do it to someone else. Something that only takes out 1/10000th of the population isn't a serious blow; it's a tragedy, yes, but even greatest tragedies come and get forgotten if they didn't lead to anything else.
The two wars it sparked are rather minor - again, certainly major events for those involved, but globally, they don't rise above the background noise. They're not much for the United States, even: you don't even need conscription to fight them! And so far it looks like those wars changed very little over there.
During the quarter-century that I've existed, the only historical world moment has been the collapse of communism, really. My grandfather, who lived to be over 90, could remember dozens of things of equal significance (he could remember the communists coming to power, actually...).
4. There were odd glowing clouds seen over the area in the nights leading up to the explosion which could be explained by methane collecting in the sky.
Reports on the Tunguska event I have seen report glowing clouds in the sky afterward, not before.
...and in any case, it was midsummer, the prime spotting time on the prime latitudes for noctilucent clouds. I live on about the latitude the Tunguska blast happened at and it's an unusual June if you don't spot odd glowing clouds in the sky on several nights.
I didn't say all of Europe, I said all the countries on the list.
It is not banned in almost all of the countries on the list.
Heck, if it's banned in one, how is that a good thing?
It isn't - but why would you insist that every country on the same continent is guilty by association? Similarily, I "assumed" that the United States is just as dysfunctional as the worst hellholes down south just because it's connected to them by land. Trust me, if we could cut out the country and move it to the middle of the ocean where we wouldn't have to deal so closely with the Germans or the even more hated closer neighbours, every sane Finn would immediately vote for the move. But, no. "We cannot change geography" is the proverbial foundation of Finnish foreign policy.
(If you think the EU exists because Europeans would like each other, you're very seriously mistaken. The EU exists because we hate each other.)
Doesn't the EU have treaties that try to "normalize" the speech laws amongst its members?
No. There's a supposed commitment to freedom of expression, but that's not as strong as the wording in the US constitution (obviously Germany and France wouldn't have agreed on that) and the EU doesn't have any actual power to do much against any member state in such issues. The EU enforces a common market, other treaties are mostly meaningless word candy.
To believe that the EU might normalize something like anti-Nazi laws is ridiculously misinformed. Nazism is a real cultural issue only for France, a few Germanic countries and the Anglosphere. In Finland, Nazism is just ridiculous. Those guys who dress up like Nazis are taken as seriously as those who like dressing up as Darth Vader and imagining that they're scary. This is not to say that far-right ethnic bigotry wouldn't be a problem in Finland, it's just that most local bigots are so different from Nazis - they like Russia-hating Slavs, they despise those Germanic peoples that were considered the ideal by Nazis and they usually either don't care about Jews either way or believe them to be on the same side (ie. against Muslims). Nazism is just too alien to be taken seriously. Similarily, eg. a Polish "Nazi" would be even more confused - they'd get killed if they showed up at a real Polish far right meeting.
An attempt to make Nazism such a big deal just smells like Germanic (and to some extent English-speaking) cultural imperialism - they want to declare their own set of prejudices the universal standard for bigotry! Can you get any more bigoted than that?
And yet, in all those countries in Europe, isn't it against the law to print that you don't think the Nazis killed a ton of Jewish people?
No, most European countries it is not against the law to print that.
Seriously, how stupid can you be? There are some overzealous anti-Nazi laws in a few countries that were formerly fascist and somehow this means that everything is banned in all of Europe?
But hey, why am I even trying? Americans must be so irredeemable. I mean, don't you have death squads hunting down and killing poor street orphans in the USA? I heard that this happens in the Americas.
The world will be in big trouble if Russian nukes are controlled by the greatest chess genius ever while American nukes are controlled by George Bush.
There's only one solution: the Americans should get the most advanced artificial intelligence system ever built and let it take complete control over their nuclear arsenal.
Some co-workers and I were discussing the other day how greatful we all are that blogging didn't exist when we were teenagers-[snip]I have a feeling that in about 10 years there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth among people in their twenties and early thirties about what is availble via the Wayback Machine...
But Usenet, which you also talked about, did. I'm turning 25 pretty soon; my parents bought me a modem when I was 12 and Usenet was the thing then. I can find stuff from Google that I wrote when I wasn't even a teenager! So, the indelible teenage has already been well-pioneered.:-p
What's worst is that I was a really snooty teenager with all sorts of political opinions, utterly convinced that the world would be a paradise if everyone were to just hear some words of my divine wisdom, so I filled the ether with LOTS of garbage. The few times I've dared Google up my early teenage posts, I've gotten pretty close to dying of embarassment. Thankfully I mostly wrote in BBSes, often used aliases and have since drowned the real name teenage posts in early twenties posts (which, though, are already starting to embarass me). Google Groups finds 16400 hits on my real name, which is pretty much unique on this planet (I'm the only person on earth with my surname that has ever posted on Usenet, short of one post by my brother).
But then, almost all of it is in Finnish, which always leaves me the option of emigrating to China if the shame gets too intolerable...
*Today*. We're currently a lot closer to vernal equinox than winter solstice, that is, we're near the point when day length is the same *everywhere*. If you compare the difference at winter solstice (we'll need power then, too), the difference is evident. At winter solstice, my location has somewhat more than 5 and a half hours from sunrise to sunset. This is extremely long by our standards: at this height the amount of daylight drops rapidly when you go further to the north (and we have non-trivial population centers needing power not in the south, even if the far north is very lightly populated). The number one reason cited by every Finn I've known that has moved to Canada has been... finding a place with a familiar climate but no dark winters.
For another thing, the difference in the number of daylight hours understates the difference. What's relevant is the angle at which the sun shines - during the winter it stays *very* low here. That means that the power per square meter of land is lower and that the radiation has to travel through much more air before it hits land, losing energy to absorption. Pretty soon we'll hit the point where there's exactly the same amount of daylight hours in Miami, Halifax and Helsinki and at that moment there will obviously be more solar power per square meter theoretically available in Miami and Halifax (and obviously more in Miami than Halifax).
It's really no wonder that we're the first Western country to resume building nuclear power...
If I was king for a day I'd change the building code to require better insulation/windows/etc. I'd force new houses to have big windows/skylights facing south, instead of whatever random direction the street is running.
That would be troublesome here. One of the fun aspects of these latitudes is that we also get *lots* of solar radiation during the summer (even though it rarely gets really hot, reverse of the situation of southern Canada getting more solar energy during winter but most of it not usually being a lot warmer). I used to live in a big old house with huuuuge windows and many of the rooms facing south became unlivable during the worst summer months, sometimes even when temperatures were mild during the day. Some sort of a cooling device would've helped, but there's no point in making houses more energy-efficient for the winter if it makes them use more energy during the summer.
During the darkest months it made no difference, as the sun is just so weak that there is no noticeable warming (the big windows were just big heat-losers). This would be even more totally useless in cities and suburbs: it doesn't matter how you arrange the buildings, if there isn't a massive wide open space to the south, they'll just never see the winter sun, as it's just barely above the horizon and will be blocked by pretty much anything of any height.
Hmm, I'm Canadian and I can't think of any large-scale wind or tidal energy projects here. The idea of large-scale solar power at this latitude is pretty funny, though.
It isn't. This is a common mistake, to take climate for latitude: most of the Canadian population (and hence energy usage) is, from my point of view, rather southern. The southernmost parts of Canada actually reach down to Mediterranean/northern Californian latitudes! Remember, latitude is all that matters for the amount of light you get, the climate is irrelevant (unless it's really cloudy...).
From my (eg. Finnish - I'm writing from the extreme south, but the same latitude in Canada would still put me in Nunavut) point of view Canada's position looks rather enviable: you've got similar climates 15 degrees to the south of us. You must have lots of daylight even during the winter (and winter is when the energy use is at its highest; solar is completely useless to us, since there's little or no daylight for a good part of the cold period).
#1 Finland #2 Sweden #3 Hungary #4 Denmark #5 Norway . . .
the US comes in at place 28 of 116. And as for gold medals, well, there are no total statistics on the site, but for Sydney, gold medals per capita put the US at place 31 of 48. And so on. It's pretty standard knowledge that the US does very badly in the Olympics for a country of that size. It only does well in the absolute number of medals because of its, well, absolute size, which gives it a massive pool of talented people and a lot will succeed regardless of how inferior their training/financial environment is to rich world standards.
(BTW, part of the reason why Finland is leading the all time per capita stats is that in the early 20th century Finns *were* often written off in Western Europe/America as racially inferior and there was a huge national push to succeed in sports to defeat that image...)
Which of the following Early Nazi actions would you compare to Bush:
A) Krystalnacht
Bzzt - stop right there. That's not an *early* Nazi action, it's a *late* Nazi action; it happened in late 1938, actually slightly less than a year before the war. (And it's spelled Kristallnacht.) Hitler came to power in the first month of 1933 and there were many worrying years before that. *The point is, there is a long time gap between the time when things started looking bad (they certainly looked bad even before the Nazis came to power) and the notorious Nazi atrocities, and Germany started losing its best minds long before those atrocities started, before anyone even guessed how far the Nazis would go* (remember, at first they were mostly talking about expelling or interning the Jews and everyone else they hated, in just the way many American so-called "conservatives" I know today speak of Muslims) (it's *exactly* the same - which doesn't mean that it'll eventually get to the same atrocities, but it's evidence of something far, far too scary beneath the surface for me to even consider moving to that country).
Consider, for an example, the greatest symbol of the German handing over of scientific pre-eminence to the Americans, Albert Einstein, the greatest mind of the century. He left Germany the instant Hitler came to power, in 1933, before the Nazis had actually *done* anything in power. The filthy thugs do not need to prove their filthiness with massive atrocities for the really smart people to vote with their feet. The point is, to screw yourself over, *you don't need any atrocities, you just need the filthy foaming-mouth thugs in power to destroy your image*.
Which, still, doesn't mean that "Bush is as bad as Hitler" or anything silly like that - but you can be a filthy thug even if you're not quite as bad as Hitler and Bush isn't even from the scariest end of non-ostracized Americans. Why doesn't the American press simply tear apart the outright fascists and known terrorist apologists like Ann Coulter (who I know because she's apparently famous enough to reach even my TV and doesn't seem to be ostracized)?
I could just have easily picked Spain, Italy, Belgium or Sweden.
And within the "previous 10 years" that you picked Spain and Sweden have grown clearly faster than the US, Belgium about the same and Italy clearly slower. (BTW France has grown only slightly slower than the US over the 10 years. Germany has been very troubled, not France.) Coincidentally, Italy happens to be ruled by one of the European leaders that are really happy with the US, the total nutcase Berlusconi who makes Bush look sane and competent; if you look at the debt and the level of commitment to fiscal responsibility that Berlusconi's Italy has, you'll have no trouble believing it's one of the other Western countries setting itself up for a complete economical meltdown.
Again, growth as measured in *per capita GDP*. The US total has grown faster, but that's because the US grows faster in population; it does mean more power for the country, but translates to no benefit for individuals and isn't sustainable (at 1 % growth per year, you'd have about 800 million people by the end of the century). The US supposedly consistently growing much faster than sclerotic socialist Europe is yet another silly American "patriotic" myth - and one reason why I'm pretty sure the US is in decline: it is way too easy to delude Americans into believing these "we're #1!" myths that don't encourage them to actually strive for better.
Without looking up the data, what would you bet the gap, over the last 10 years, in the Europe-wide and US-wide unemployment is?
Near zero or up to 10 to either direction, depending on who you ask. When quoting statistics, remember that different countries count unemployment differently. The US has invented this brilliant concept of people being "outside the labour force" if they happen to be, for example, so unable to find work that they've given up (
I looked up and counted German nobel laurietes. There have been 8 since the end of the war. The US is 3.5 times the size of Germany, and we have *way* more than 28.
...which is precisely the fucking point! The Germans handed over their dominance to the US on a silver platter, by driving away their best minds. This is the same favour that your so-called "right" (which is so nuts that I'm putting the "'s around it, considering that I consider myself a right-winger and recognize absolutely nothing in common with these people) will hand us, if they can get ahold of power and keep there for any significant time. (And no, this *doesn't* violate Godwin's law. The Germans started losing their science might back when the Nazis hadn't done anything worse than Bush and most people still thought they were all talk and little action. The same is happening to the US. Even if it may be unlikely that it would ever get to the point of being comparable to Nazi atrocities, the smart people will not tolerate this level of sinister nuttiness for long. Think of how much of the US dominance has been resting on foreign talent, a very mobile group of people, a group that by being in the US *has already voted with their feet*.)
What can the US *offer* to a potential foreign student? What is it that attracts smart people? A liberal atmosphere, safety, funding for their type of research, prominent minds of their field to hang around with, low taxes... the US currently does better in financial incentives (or the lack of disincentives, to be more accurate) and it still has a lot of smart people to attract other smart people. But the latter is not sustainable, if the other conditions don't stay right (and would be destroyed by government policy, if the nuttiest of the "right-wingers" would get their say over "liberal academia") and the former won't be relevant, if you keep setting up the country for that economical meltdown.
Are you talking about the 10 years with your economic "powerhouses" (.fr and.de)
Again, you're cherry-picking. I can point out such countries as Ireland and Finland which have been the fastest-growing economies of the Western world (as measured by per capita GDP) for the past 10 years, mainly thanks to the tech boom. So, isn't Europe much better? If you only take the best or the worst into the comparison, you will reach these silly conclusions. The French have their own system utterly incomprehensible to everyone else and Germany will still have reunification problems for a long time (ever been to an ex-communist country? outside the big cities, which now tend to look better? it's fucking *terrible*), so they are very bad examples of what Europe is like.
I very much doubt that; at least you're most definitely not involved in any field that requires use of numbers. Most people here wouldn't believe how common it is for Americans to come up with dumb claims like "ha ha, we have so many more X's than country Y!" when country Y actually has 5 % of the US population and, when measured as *contribution per person* often have been much better in that field. Choosing the comparison measure to favour large countries naturally makes the US look greater than a place like Europe split into many smaller countries.
When any country in Europe has as many Nobel Lauriates as can be found at Stanford,
As was pointed out to you, your assumption that Stanford has more was profoundly stupid. But it's funny that you should mention Stanford. In my field, physics, its Nobel laureates are very much due to the particle accelerators (off-hand, I can think of three Nobels from just the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), massive devices that require enough funding that it often gets politicized. A little more than a decade ago, everyone thought the US would also score the next major batch of Nobels through the next-generation accelerators, but surprise, surprise, purely thanks to US politics, those Nobels are now going to Europe. The big American project, the Superconducting Super Collider, was simply canceled by the Congress. Now, the next generation accelerator expected to make at least one Nobel-worthy discovery is getting built in Switzerland, as a co-operative effort of most European countries. It's not going to be as good as the SSC would've been, but good enough for the next step.
So, for purely political reasons, in my field Europe has the Nobels coming. And it's not even because of that monkey president; the problems precede him. After billions of dollars spent, the Congress simply decided that since the Cold War is over, pure science isn't useful for propaganda anymore and the SSC was axed in favour of mostly pointless manned space flight projects that are still good PR - and the country is still full of "conservatives" and "libertarians" claiming that even that amount of spending on anything marginally useful to science is evil.
And this is coming from the country that first achieved nuclear bombs. That *never* would've happened if you would've let the "libertarians" and "conservatives" decide whether spending money on these fantastical little particles that scientists claim to exist would be a good thing; the other powers who would've had the capability, like the USSR, didn't develop them first precisely *because* these silly particle claims were ridiculed by the ones in power. It's not simply religion that's the problem, it's this alliance of the science-hostile "social conservatives" and the crackpot cult of "libertarianism" and "small-government conservativism" hostile to absolutely everything.
In the mean time, good luck with your English lessons and H1-B application.
Again, funny that you should mention it, I used to consider the US the main candidate for my time abroad (something every non-American seems to want to do, to see the world beyond your home country), but that's changed, and mainly for political reasons. I used to think all the hatred of America going around in Old Europe was just silly leftist FUD, but oh boy, have the last ten years proven it all accurate.
That's another point - for the smartest bunch of people, pure liberalism is a major attraction. It doesn't matter how many Nobel laureates you used to produce or how low the taxes would be in Liberto-Jesustan (if I cared about money, I sure the hell wouldn't be studying theoretical physics!) - I'll simply inherently favour freedom.
And yet somehow over the last 200 years America was at the fore front of science and technology.
No, IT WASN'T. For the first 100 years, America was mostly irrelevant; it maybe produced a few scientists, but claiming that it was on the "forefront of science and technology" is like claiming that the Arabs are now at the forefront of science and technology because there are a handful of prominent Arab scientists. You're just living in patriotic fantasies, if you think America has been a major science power for "200 years".
In my field, physics, America ended up as the major forefront a bit more than a half-century ago, after the previous superpower, Germany, elected a bunch of fanatically intolerant ultra-"patriotic" thugs and most of the talent fled. Remember, it didn't even take a Holocaust - few really believed that would happen in the early days of Nazi power; Germany lost its best minds long before that. All it took was a bunch of fanatics who started making laws against the corrupting influence of terrorists, "liberal intellectuals" (yes, the rhetoric on these is the same) and minorities on universities. The final piece securing American scientific superpower was, then, half of Europe ending up under *another* bunch of fanatics, the communists, who messed up very large parts of their science by declaring theories to be morally corrupted by bourgeois anti-materialists and by preventing talented people from choosing the right fields (I know of talented people who were told that they simply can't study physics, because their background was ideologically incorrect). More talent fled to the US. For a simple experiment to see the effect, look at the number of US Nobel winners. It looks very impressive, but if you delete the foreign-born ones, it doesn't look impressive at all.
Thus, this scientific dominance (which has been declining for decades) was handed over as a perverse gift; assuming that it has always been so or that it exists not because of the history but because of special quality of America is a sure recipe for an ever more rapid decline. But go ahead - believe in that fantasy. By all means, assume that your position (what position? in per capita terms, we - the Finns - have been ahead in most hi-tech areas for a decade!) is secure. It'll be good to us; Europe is where much of the talent will flee to. Some already has.
The Arab example is another beautiful one. They were on top once and it's not like they ever *regressed*; they simply didn't advance fast enough anymore and Europe speeded past them. I can imagine Arabic writers ridiculing these people who thought they should stop marginalizing philosophers who questioned religious interference in philosophical thought - "we've been on top for hundreds of years, with our religion, so why should we change?". To be on top, you constantly have to change to fit the times; to become conservative is to become obsolete.
It also just happens to be that America, with its relatively low population density
So, why is it that European countries with much lower population densities, like Finland (IIRC the highest per capita energy user in Europe), have no problem at all joining Kyoto?
And the enviromentalists won't let us build nuclear power plants to replace coal-fired ones
The environmental movement is *much* more influental in Finland and we're building a new nuclear plant right now. (The Green Party was actually in the government that made the decision, although to their discredit they did walk out because of it.)
Agh, I simply screwed up, I was only thinking of continental Western Europe and the US. Sorry.
Still, Finland is *far* more *rural* than the US. Compared to Finland, the US has the advantage that *much* more of its population is either urban or suburban. I'm betting that broadband coverage in the rural US is *much* worse, because we simply couldn't be even that high on the list without decent rural coverage. I'll be leaving today to visit my parents for the weekend and they live in the middle of nowhere (ie. people a mile away are "neighbours" and such miraculous city things as "cable TV" are utterly unimaginable; we got an indoor toilet and paved streets in the late 1980s) and they could still get decent high-speed ADSL there (although they've opted for the cheaper speeds, currently 512kbit/s, IIRC).
The most spread out and least densely populated Western country is Finland. Now guess who's doing better in this broadband survey, Finland or the US?
Of course, it *does* matter somewhat and you can see it in this (ie. Finland, which traditionally declares national emergency when it's not number 1 in IT and telecom charts, does not do very well on the list - but still, the embarassement of being behind in very high speed connections is getting a lot of discussion here), but the US is still behind, even when accounting for that effect. (It hurts Finland more than the US and we're still ahead!)
Besides, RTFA! "...controlling for both income and population density, we find eight nations performing better than the United States. They are Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Finland, Norway and Sweden."
The "Windows" key (which is really called the Super or Compose key)
Uh, no, it's not. I'm not sure where you'd get that impression, but I'm guessing that some Linux distribution has decided to bind the Windows key to Compose by default. It means that *the Windows key* has been turned into "Compose" in some situations, not that it's "really" a Compose key.
If it were really called "Compose", it would say so on the keyboard. It does on those keyboards that really have a Compose key.
For example, Shift+Super+[release Shift]+E+' forms an e with an acute accent (é)
You know, I did mention that I was talking about Finnish keyboards. I'm guessing that you can still buy non-Windows-keyed keyboards with an English key layout, so I couldn't miss those, but here, the market is simply too small for such nerdy specialties. (Most people in other small language areas will have the same lack of choice.) On my keyboard, I always can type é and ñ with standard keystrokes regardless of the software or the operating system (even though Finnish doesn't even use those characters...) - and the Windows keys are a nuisance for that, since for ñ I have to push Alt Gr ("Right Alt") which has been made *much* smaller on most keyboards thanks to the Windows keys.
If I had to choose between having bigget Alt and Ctrl keys, and being able to type these characters using my keyboard (instead of with a utility like KCharSelect), I'd choose the latter.
And the funny thing is, one reason I'm annoyed by the smaller Alts and Ctrls is that they make typing those characters slower and more annoying. You may think it's not a big deal, but the point here is that a) in smaller language areas we have no choice and b) in smaller language areas the need for foreign languages is much greater (Finnish isn't exactly widely spoken outside Finland) and we tend to need those signs much more often, so it's a much bigger deal for me than for someone who needs to type ñ twice a year. (Also, we tend to know how annoying it is when speakers of foreign languages think they can just drop those funny things above letters if they don't know how to type them, so we're more likely to want to type foreign words properly...)
The most annoying thing in this is that the keys function mainly only as a marketing thing: the average non-techie buyer will think there's something missing if they don't have them, even though they won't generally ever use them. Essentially, my Alt and Ctrl keys have gotten worse just because some marketing drone decided that they want to make keyboards "more advanced". That makes it just feel much, much worse.
Yes and in some places land is appearing for other reasons. Around here (Finland) the land is still "depressed" from the weight of the ice shelf of the last Ice Age and is rising from the sea. In some regions, it's quite dramatic, enough to easily produce new beach house plots in a human lifetime. (Of course, it'll also turn some beach houses into non-beach houses.)
But then, land is also getting destroyed in many places. Personally, if I could figure out how much the sea would rise by the time I'll turn sixty, I know how I'd invest for my retirement...
There's one thing I miss about the old keyboards: having no Windows keys. I liked those bigger alts and ctrls.
I used to think they were just one of those stupid fads that would disappear once people realize how useless those are, but now it's impossible to find a keyboard with a Finnish key layout and no Windows keys. And I still don't know anyone who actually uses those keys, at least not anyone who uses them *in Windows*. Dumb.:-/
If these guys can drill a hole this deep in a mere three weeks and nearly hit the Earth's mantle, doesn't it seem that it should be possible to directly harness the abundant heat energy in these holes?
So, you drill a hole, put some pipes to bring water there and up. Bringing the heat up will obviously cool the rock that touches your pipe, but as the rock cools, your power production drops. You can only produce energy sustainably if you limit the rate to such that the heat transfer from the rest of the crust is fast enough to balance the cooling. And even if it is really hot down there, the stuff isn't necessarily a good conductor of heat, so this can be a severe limitation to power production.
Remember all the nature films where you've seen underwater lava flows: once the stuff starts pouring into water, the surface will solidify quickly, but the inside will be hot for a long time. It's because the water cools the surface fast and the heat doesn't transfer equally quickly to the surface of the rock.
As a fellow NZer, I say just take it in stride. We're also near the top (if not the top) for average literacy rates.
THE top? Bah! No, you're not. Finland is number one! Overall number one, too.
Well, at least on the study quoted. Consistently. It kind of has everyone baffled, as for the last umpteen zillion years everyone talking about the politics of education has been drilling to our heads that the education system is in a terrible state, students are doing horribly and the nation is going to get ruined because of it...
Slashdot Mirror
butt I couldn't find the option "-1 Anal".
What?! No, there is no such law. We turn over Finnish criminals to foreign states all the time.
(The reason behind this "no turning over finnish citizens" law is, surprise surprise, those few hundred jews and communists and such that were turned over to Nazi Germany. Bit of an embarrassment to say the least.)
What?! No Jews who were Finnish citizens were turned over to Nazi Germany. For the story on Finnish Jews during WWII:
http://www.jewishquarterly.org/article.asp?articleid=194
The embarrasment is about the authorities turning back some refugees and exchanging Soviet prisoners of war, including some Jews who then perished in the camps. That's embarrassing, but hardly as ludicrous as deporting our own Jewish citizens into Nazi Germany would've been!
Where did you come up with this stuff?
Besides, the most embarrassing deportations of Finnish history are the Soviet defectors who were turned back after jumping the border - demanded both by those communists (and the moderate left - can't have people walking around telling the truth about the socialist wonderland).
Sorry, but so far 9/11 goes to the same class for *the world* as, say, the death of princess Diana: a big news story. It's a definite "where were you when..?" thing for a generation, but it's just too early to tell whether it'll even be known to non-history-geeks outside America in 60 years. (This jihad thing turns out to be a big fizzle? It'll be a footnote. Otherwise, perhaps not.)
Americans are extraordinarily fortunate with geography and have been shielded from even the threat of nasty stuff happening on your own soil, so the attack seems more significant, but most of us in the rest of the world look at this stuff with a background of having our cities terror-bombed the second someone invented terror-bombing, occasionally razed to the ground, taken and cleansed of our people, occupied with the usual terror that goes with conventional occupations and so on. This stuff just happens a couple of times per century and it'll probably happen a couple of times this century, unless this time we manage to do it to someone else. Something that only takes out 1/10000th of the population isn't a serious blow; it's a tragedy, yes, but even greatest tragedies come and get forgotten if they didn't lead to anything else.
The two wars it sparked are rather minor - again, certainly major events for those involved, but globally, they don't rise above the background noise. They're not much for the United States, even: you don't even need conscription to fight them! And so far it looks like those wars changed very little over there.
During the quarter-century that I've existed, the only historical world moment has been the collapse of communism, really. My grandfather, who lived to be over 90, could remember dozens of things of equal significance (he could remember the communists coming to power, actually...).
Reports on the Tunguska event I have seen report glowing clouds in the sky afterward, not before.
It is not banned in almost all of the countries on the list.
Heck, if it's banned in one, how is that a good thing?
It isn't - but why would you insist that every country on the same continent is guilty by association? Similarily, I "assumed" that the United States is just as dysfunctional as the worst hellholes down south just because it's connected to them by land. Trust me, if we could cut out the country and move it to the middle of the ocean where we wouldn't have to deal so closely with the Germans or the even more hated closer neighbours, every sane Finn would immediately vote for the move. But, no. "We cannot change geography" is the proverbial foundation of Finnish foreign policy.
(If you think the EU exists because Europeans would like each other, you're very seriously mistaken. The EU exists because we hate each other.)
Doesn't the EU have treaties that try to "normalize" the speech laws amongst its members?
No. There's a supposed commitment to freedom of expression, but that's not as strong as the wording in the US constitution (obviously Germany and France wouldn't have agreed on that) and the EU doesn't have any actual power to do much against any member state in such issues. The EU enforces a common market, other treaties are mostly meaningless word candy.
To believe that the EU might normalize something like anti-Nazi laws is ridiculously misinformed. Nazism is a real cultural issue only for France, a few Germanic countries and the Anglosphere. In Finland, Nazism is just ridiculous. Those guys who dress up like Nazis are taken as seriously as those who like dressing up as Darth Vader and imagining that they're scary. This is not to say that far-right ethnic bigotry wouldn't be a problem in Finland, it's just that most local bigots are so different from Nazis - they like Russia-hating Slavs, they despise those Germanic peoples that were considered the ideal by Nazis and they usually either don't care about Jews either way or believe them to be on the same side (ie. against Muslims). Nazism is just too alien to be taken seriously. Similarily, eg. a Polish "Nazi" would be even more confused - they'd get killed if they showed up at a real Polish far right meeting.
An attempt to make Nazism such a big deal just smells like Germanic (and to some extent English-speaking) cultural imperialism - they want to declare their own set of prejudices the universal standard for bigotry! Can you get any more bigoted than that?
And yet, in all those countries in Europe, isn't it against the law to print that you don't think the Nazis killed a ton of Jewish people?
No, most European countries it is not against the law to print that.
Seriously, how stupid can you be? There are some overzealous anti-Nazi laws in a few countries that were formerly fascist and somehow this means that everything is banned in all of Europe?
But hey, why am I even trying? Americans must be so irredeemable. I mean, don't you have death squads hunting down and killing poor street orphans in the USA? I heard that this happens in the Americas.
The world will be in big trouble if Russian nukes are controlled by the greatest chess genius ever while American nukes are controlled by George Bush.
There's only one solution: the Americans should get the most advanced artificial intelligence system ever built and let it take complete control over their nuclear arsenal.
But Usenet, which you also talked about, did. I'm turning 25 pretty soon; my parents bought me a modem when I was 12 and Usenet was the thing then. I can find stuff from Google that I wrote when I wasn't even a teenager! So, the indelible teenage has already been well-pioneered. :-p
What's worst is that I was a really snooty teenager with all sorts of political opinions, utterly convinced that the world would be a paradise if everyone were to just hear some words of my divine wisdom, so I filled the ether with LOTS of garbage. The few times I've dared Google up my early teenage posts, I've gotten pretty close to dying of embarassment. Thankfully I mostly wrote in BBSes, often used aliases and have since drowned the real name teenage posts in early twenties posts (which, though, are already starting to embarass me). Google Groups finds 16400 hits on my real name, which is pretty much unique on this planet (I'm the only person on earth with my surname that has ever posted on Usenet, short of one post by my brother).
But then, almost all of it is in Finnish, which always leaves me the option of emigrating to China if the shame gets too intolerable...
*Today*. We're currently a lot closer to vernal equinox than winter solstice, that is, we're near the point when day length is the same *everywhere*. If you compare the difference at winter solstice (we'll need power then, too), the difference is evident. At winter solstice, my location has somewhat more than 5 and a half hours from sunrise to sunset. This is extremely long by our standards: at this height the amount of daylight drops rapidly when you go further to the north (and we have non-trivial population centers needing power not in the south, even if the far north is very lightly populated). The number one reason cited by every Finn I've known that has moved to Canada has been... finding a place with a familiar climate but no dark winters.
For another thing, the difference in the number of daylight hours understates the difference. What's relevant is the angle at which the sun shines - during the winter it stays *very* low here. That means that the power per square meter of land is lower and that the radiation has to travel through much more air before it hits land, losing energy to absorption. Pretty soon we'll hit the point where there's exactly the same amount of daylight hours in Miami, Halifax and Helsinki and at that moment there will obviously be more solar power per square meter theoretically available in Miami and Halifax (and obviously more in Miami than Halifax).
It's really no wonder that we're the first Western country to resume building nuclear power...
If I was king for a day I'd change the building code to require better insulation/windows/etc. I'd force new houses to have big windows/skylights facing south, instead of whatever random direction the street is running.
That would be troublesome here. One of the fun aspects of these latitudes is that we also get *lots* of solar radiation during the summer (even though it rarely gets really hot, reverse of the situation of southern Canada getting more solar energy during winter but most of it not usually being a lot warmer). I used to live in a big old house with huuuuge windows and many of the rooms facing south became unlivable during the worst summer months, sometimes even when temperatures were mild during the day. Some sort of a cooling device would've helped, but there's no point in making houses more energy-efficient for the winter if it makes them use more energy during the summer.
During the darkest months it made no difference, as the sun is just so weak that there is no noticeable warming (the big windows were just big heat-losers). This would be even more totally useless in cities and suburbs: it doesn't matter how you arrange the buildings, if there isn't a massive wide open space to the south, they'll just never see the winter sun, as it's just barely above the horizon and will be blocked by pretty much anything of any height.
Hmm, I'm Canadian and I can't think of any large-scale wind or tidal energy projects here. The idea of large-scale solar power at this latitude is pretty funny, though.
It isn't. This is a common mistake, to take climate for latitude: most of the Canadian population (and hence energy usage) is, from my point of view, rather southern. The southernmost parts of Canada actually reach down to Mediterranean/northern Californian latitudes! Remember, latitude is all that matters for the amount of light you get, the climate is irrelevant (unless it's really cloudy...).
From my (eg. Finnish - I'm writing from the extreme south, but the same latitude in Canada would still put me in Nunavut) point of view Canada's position looks rather enviable: you've got similar climates 15 degrees to the south of us. You must have lots of daylight even during the winter (and winter is when the energy use is at its highest; solar is completely useless to us, since there's little or no daylight for a good part of the cold period).
http://www.asianplayboy.com/tgp/images/asian/asian 511/51116.jpg
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph-T/spo_sum_oly_me d_all_tim_percap
Olympic medals per capita, all time:
#1 Finland
#2 Sweden
#3 Hungary
#4 Denmark
#5 Norway
.
.
.
the US comes in at place 28 of 116. And as for gold medals, well, there are no total statistics on the site, but for Sydney, gold medals per capita put the US at place 31 of 48. And so on. It's pretty standard knowledge that the US does very badly in the Olympics for a country of that size. It only does well in the absolute number of medals because of its, well, absolute size, which gives it a massive pool of talented people and a lot will succeed regardless of how inferior their training/financial environment is to rich world standards.
(BTW, part of the reason why Finland is leading the all time per capita stats is that in the early 20th century Finns *were* often written off in Western Europe/America as racially inferior and there was a huge national push to succeed in sports to defeat that image...)
A) Krystalnacht
Bzzt - stop right there. That's not an *early* Nazi action, it's a *late* Nazi action; it happened in late 1938, actually slightly less than a year before the war. (And it's spelled Kristallnacht.) Hitler came to power in the first month of 1933 and there were many worrying years before that. *The point is, there is a long time gap between the time when things started looking bad (they certainly looked bad even before the Nazis came to power) and the notorious Nazi atrocities, and Germany started losing its best minds long before those atrocities started, before anyone even guessed how far the Nazis would go* (remember, at first they were mostly talking about expelling or interning the Jews and everyone else they hated, in just the way many American so-called "conservatives" I know today speak of Muslims) (it's *exactly* the same - which doesn't mean that it'll eventually get to the same atrocities, but it's evidence of something far, far too scary beneath the surface for me to even consider moving to that country).
Consider, for an example, the greatest symbol of the German handing over of scientific pre-eminence to the Americans, Albert Einstein, the greatest mind of the century. He left Germany the instant Hitler came to power, in 1933, before the Nazis had actually *done* anything in power. The filthy thugs do not need to prove their filthiness with massive atrocities for the really smart people to vote with their feet. The point is, to screw yourself over, *you don't need any atrocities, you just need the filthy foaming-mouth thugs in power to destroy your image*.
Which, still, doesn't mean that "Bush is as bad as Hitler" or anything silly like that - but you can be a filthy thug even if you're not quite as bad as Hitler and Bush isn't even from the scariest end of non-ostracized Americans. Why doesn't the American press simply tear apart the outright fascists and known terrorist apologists like Ann Coulter (who I know because she's apparently famous enough to reach even my TV and doesn't seem to be ostracized)?
I could just have easily picked Spain, Italy, Belgium or Sweden.
And within the "previous 10 years" that you picked Spain and Sweden have grown clearly faster than the US, Belgium about the same and Italy clearly slower. (BTW France has grown only slightly slower than the US over the 10 years. Germany has been very troubled, not France.) Coincidentally, Italy happens to be ruled by one of the European leaders that are really happy with the US, the total nutcase Berlusconi who makes Bush look sane and competent; if you look at the debt and the level of commitment to fiscal responsibility that Berlusconi's Italy has, you'll have no trouble believing it's one of the other Western countries setting itself up for a complete economical meltdown.
Again, growth as measured in *per capita GDP*. The US total has grown faster, but that's because the US grows faster in population; it does mean more power for the country, but translates to no benefit for individuals and isn't sustainable (at 1 % growth per year, you'd have about 800 million people by the end of the century). The US supposedly consistently growing much faster than sclerotic socialist Europe is yet another silly American "patriotic" myth - and one reason why I'm pretty sure the US is in decline: it is way too easy to delude Americans into believing these "we're #1!" myths that don't encourage them to actually strive for better.
Without looking up the data, what would you bet the gap, over the last 10 years, in the Europe-wide and US-wide unemployment is?
Near zero or up to 10 to either direction, depending on who you ask. When quoting statistics, remember that different countries count unemployment differently. The US has invented this brilliant concept of people being "outside the labour force" if they happen to be, for example, so unable to find work that they've given up (
What can the US *offer* to a potential foreign student? What is it that attracts smart people? A liberal atmosphere, safety, funding for their type of research, prominent minds of their field to hang around with, low taxes... the US currently does better in financial incentives (or the lack of disincentives, to be more accurate) and it still has a lot of smart people to attract other smart people. But the latter is not sustainable, if the other conditions don't stay right (and would be destroyed by government policy, if the nuttiest of the "right-wingers" would get their say over "liberal academia") and the former won't be relevant, if you keep setting up the country for that economical meltdown.
Are you talking about the 10 years with your economic "powerhouses" (.fr and .de)
Again, you're cherry-picking. I can point out such countries as Ireland and Finland which have been the fastest-growing economies of the Western world (as measured by per capita GDP) for the past 10 years, mainly thanks to the tech boom. So, isn't Europe much better? If you only take the best or the worst into the comparison, you will reach these silly conclusions. The French have their own system utterly incomprehensible to everyone else and Germany will still have reunification problems for a long time (ever been to an ex-communist country? outside the big cities, which now tend to look better? it's fucking *terrible*), so they are very bad examples of what Europe is like.
I very much doubt that; at least you're most definitely not involved in any field that requires use of numbers. Most people here wouldn't believe how common it is for Americans to come up with dumb claims like "ha ha, we have so many more X's than country Y!" when country Y actually has 5 % of the US population and, when measured as *contribution per person* often have been much better in that field. Choosing the comparison measure to favour large countries naturally makes the US look greater than a place like Europe split into many smaller countries.
When any country in Europe has as many Nobel Lauriates as can be found at Stanford,
As was pointed out to you, your assumption that Stanford has more was profoundly stupid. But it's funny that you should mention Stanford. In my field, physics, its Nobel laureates are very much due to the particle accelerators (off-hand, I can think of three Nobels from just the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center), massive devices that require enough funding that it often gets politicized. A little more than a decade ago, everyone thought the US would also score the next major batch of Nobels through the next-generation accelerators, but surprise, surprise, purely thanks to US politics, those Nobels are now going to Europe. The big American project, the Superconducting Super Collider, was simply canceled by the Congress. Now, the next generation accelerator expected to make at least one Nobel-worthy discovery is getting built in Switzerland, as a co-operative effort of most European countries. It's not going to be as good as the SSC would've been, but good enough for the next step.
So, for purely political reasons, in my field Europe has the Nobels coming. And it's not even because of that monkey president; the problems precede him. After billions of dollars spent, the Congress simply decided that since the Cold War is over, pure science isn't useful for propaganda anymore and the SSC was axed in favour of mostly pointless manned space flight projects that are still good PR - and the country is still full of "conservatives" and "libertarians" claiming that even that amount of spending on anything marginally useful to science is evil.
And this is coming from the country that first achieved nuclear bombs. That *never* would've happened if you would've let the "libertarians" and "conservatives" decide whether spending money on these fantastical little particles that scientists claim to exist would be a good thing; the other powers who would've had the capability, like the USSR, didn't develop them first precisely *because* these silly particle claims were ridiculed by the ones in power. It's not simply religion that's the problem, it's this alliance of the science-hostile "social conservatives" and the crackpot cult of "libertarianism" and "small-government conservativism" hostile to absolutely everything.
In the mean time, good luck with your English lessons and H1-B application.
Again, funny that you should mention it, I used to consider the US the main candidate for my time abroad (something every non-American seems to want to do, to see the world beyond your home country), but that's changed, and mainly for political reasons. I used to think all the hatred of America going around in Old Europe was just silly leftist FUD, but oh boy, have the last ten years proven it all accurate.
That's another point - for the smartest bunch of people, pure liberalism is a major attraction. It doesn't matter how many Nobel laureates you used to produce or how low the taxes would be in Liberto-Jesustan (if I cared about money, I sure the hell wouldn't be studying theoretical physics!) - I'll simply inherently favour freedom.
No, IT WASN'T. For the first 100 years, America was mostly irrelevant; it maybe produced a few scientists, but claiming that it was on the "forefront of science and technology" is like claiming that the Arabs are now at the forefront of science and technology because there are a handful of prominent Arab scientists. You're just living in patriotic fantasies, if you think America has been a major science power for "200 years".
In my field, physics, America ended up as the major forefront a bit more than a half-century ago, after the previous superpower, Germany, elected a bunch of fanatically intolerant ultra-"patriotic" thugs and most of the talent fled. Remember, it didn't even take a Holocaust - few really believed that would happen in the early days of Nazi power; Germany lost its best minds long before that. All it took was a bunch of fanatics who started making laws against the corrupting influence of terrorists, "liberal intellectuals" (yes, the rhetoric on these is the same) and minorities on universities. The final piece securing American scientific superpower was, then, half of Europe ending up under *another* bunch of fanatics, the communists, who messed up very large parts of their science by declaring theories to be morally corrupted by bourgeois anti-materialists and by preventing talented people from choosing the right fields (I know of talented people who were told that they simply can't study physics, because their background was ideologically incorrect). More talent fled to the US. For a simple experiment to see the effect, look at the number of US Nobel winners. It looks very impressive, but if you delete the foreign-born ones, it doesn't look impressive at all.
Thus, this scientific dominance (which has been declining for decades) was handed over as a perverse gift; assuming that it has always been so or that it exists not because of the history but because of special quality of America is a sure recipe for an ever more rapid decline. But go ahead - believe in that fantasy. By all means, assume that your position (what position? in per capita terms, we - the Finns - have been ahead in most hi-tech areas for a decade!) is secure. It'll be good to us; Europe is where much of the talent will flee to. Some already has.
The Arab example is another beautiful one. They were on top once and it's not like they ever *regressed*; they simply didn't advance fast enough anymore and Europe speeded past them. I can imagine Arabic writers ridiculing these people who thought they should stop marginalizing philosophers who questioned religious interference in philosophical thought - "we've been on top for hundreds of years, with our religion, so why should we change?". To be on top, you constantly have to change to fit the times; to become conservative is to become obsolete.
So, why is it that European countries with much lower population densities, like Finland (IIRC the highest per capita energy user in Europe), have no problem at all joining Kyoto?
And the enviromentalists won't let us build nuclear power plants to replace coal-fired ones
The environmental movement is *much* more influental in Finland and we're building a new nuclear plant right now. (The Green Party was actually in the government that made the decision, although to their discredit they did walk out because of it.)
Agh, I simply screwed up, I was only thinking of continental Western Europe and the US. Sorry. Still, Finland is *far* more *rural* than the US. Compared to Finland, the US has the advantage that *much* more of its population is either urban or suburban. I'm betting that broadband coverage in the rural US is *much* worse, because we simply couldn't be even that high on the list without decent rural coverage. I'll be leaving today to visit my parents for the weekend and they live in the middle of nowhere (ie. people a mile away are "neighbours" and such miraculous city things as "cable TV" are utterly unimaginable; we got an indoor toilet and paved streets in the late 1980s) and they could still get decent high-speed ADSL there (although they've opted for the cheaper speeds, currently 512kbit/s, IIRC).
The most spread out and least densely populated Western country is Finland. Now guess who's doing better in this broadband survey, Finland or the US? Of course, it *does* matter somewhat and you can see it in this (ie. Finland, which traditionally declares national emergency when it's not number 1 in IT and telecom charts, does not do very well on the list - but still, the embarassement of being behind in very high speed connections is getting a lot of discussion here), but the US is still behind, even when accounting for that effect. (It hurts Finland more than the US and we're still ahead!) Besides, RTFA! "...controlling for both income and population density, we find eight nations performing better than the United States. They are Korea, Netherlands, Denmark, Iceland, Canada, Finland, Norway and Sweden."
Uh, no, it's not. I'm not sure where you'd get that impression, but I'm guessing that some Linux distribution has decided to bind the Windows key to Compose by default. It means that *the Windows key* has been turned into "Compose" in some situations, not that it's "really" a Compose key.
If it were really called "Compose", it would say so on the keyboard. It does on those keyboards that really have a Compose key.
For example, Shift+Super+[release Shift]+E+' forms an e with an acute accent (é)
You know, I did mention that I was talking about Finnish keyboards. I'm guessing that you can still buy non-Windows-keyed keyboards with an English key layout, so I couldn't miss those, but here, the market is simply too small for such nerdy specialties. (Most people in other small language areas will have the same lack of choice.) On my keyboard, I always can type é and ñ with standard keystrokes regardless of the software or the operating system (even though Finnish doesn't even use those characters...) - and the Windows keys are a nuisance for that, since for ñ I have to push Alt Gr ("Right Alt") which has been made *much* smaller on most keyboards thanks to the Windows keys.
If I had to choose between having bigget Alt and Ctrl keys, and being able to type these characters using my keyboard (instead of with a utility like KCharSelect), I'd choose the latter.
And the funny thing is, one reason I'm annoyed by the smaller Alts and Ctrls is that they make typing those characters slower and more annoying. You may think it's not a big deal, but the point here is that a) in smaller language areas we have no choice and b) in smaller language areas the need for foreign languages is much greater (Finnish isn't exactly widely spoken outside Finland) and we tend to need those signs much more often, so it's a much bigger deal for me than for someone who needs to type ñ twice a year. (Also, we tend to know how annoying it is when speakers of foreign languages think they can just drop those funny things above letters if they don't know how to type them, so we're more likely to want to type foreign words properly...)
The most annoying thing in this is that the keys function mainly only as a marketing thing: the average non-techie buyer will think there's something missing if they don't have them, even though they won't generally ever use them. Essentially, my Alt and Ctrl keys have gotten worse just because some marketing drone decided that they want to make keyboards "more advanced". That makes it just feel much, much worse.
Yes and in some places land is appearing for other reasons. Around here (Finland) the land is still "depressed" from the weight of the ice shelf of the last Ice Age and is rising from the sea. In some regions, it's quite dramatic, enough to easily produce new beach house plots in a human lifetime. (Of course, it'll also turn some beach houses into non-beach houses.) But then, land is also getting destroyed in many places. Personally, if I could figure out how much the sea would rise by the time I'll turn sixty, I know how I'd invest for my retirement...
There's one thing I miss about the old keyboards: having no Windows keys. I liked those bigger alts and ctrls.
:-/
I used to think they were just one of those stupid fads that would disappear once people realize how useless those are, but now it's impossible to find a keyboard with a Finnish key layout and no Windows keys. And I still don't know anyone who actually uses those keys, at least not anyone who uses them *in Windows*. Dumb.
That would be hirvi.
I know, terribly important...
Well, at least on the study quoted. Consistently. It kind of has everyone baffled, as for the last umpteen zillion years everyone talking about the politics of education has been drilling to our heads that the education system is in a terrible state, students are doing horribly and the nation is going to get ruined because of it...