But that's exactly the point I'm making. Emission standards for cars aren't based on the 'sulfur emissions in Montana impacting a farmer in Wyoming' basis, they're set on 'sulfur emissions in New York impacting someone in New York.' By the time particulates from a ship in the middle of the pacific have diffused their way to population centers, they're insignificant. Otherwise LA's infamous smog clouds would cover the entire western seaboard.
Imposing the same standards on container ships doesn't make sense, since the standards are there to solve a problem that container ships don't have.
Sail is free and environmentally friendly... under a simplistic analysis.
Ever been to an old port? Seen the old warehouses (that have today been converted to other uses)? Heard old expressions like 'waiting for your ship to come in?' Steam, and eventually oil, replaced sail because even though it was 'more expensive' and even slower, at first, because by relying on engine power you gain reliability. Ships could stick to schedules, which means you don't need large - potentially refrigerated - warehouses to hold your goods. Goods don't spoil or go to waste, because a market opportunity has changed. You don't have to overproduce, you make exactly how much is needed.
Ultimately, every pound of bunker fuel is repayed ten times over, in money and environmental costs, by the efficiency improvements that regular shipping gives. We have another old expression for simplistic views of costs: penny wise, pound foolish.
Devil's advocate here: where do these ships pollute?
The environment can 'support' a certain rate of air pollution, but the diffusion rate of air pollution means that certain regions build up localized pollution far higher than the average pollution level (e.g. LA, New York, etc..). Car emissions and factory emissions need to be fairly strict to ensure that levels remain low, despite the concentration of pollution caused by urbanization. By its very nature, container ship owners want their vessels at sea as much as possible, and while they're crossing oceans, there's not exactly any urban concentration effect going on. So it makes sense that this kind of shipping be held to the lower standard of emissions (i.e., basic environmental sustainability).
Which is wrong. It's radiation. There's not some magical 'reflect off the skin' button which causes x-rays to suddenly stop following the laws of physics, and be absorbed only by the skin. The exposure is no different from the exposure to a normal x-ray, just at much lower intensities.
The "skin image" is a product of detection technology, not any fancy new radiation effect.
The media in the Palestinian Authority, as in the Arab world in general, are largely government-controlled, driving dissenting voices to the relative freedom of the Internet. The blogger's arrest showed a willingness on the part of the Palestinian government to clamp down on freedom of speech on the Web as well. He now faces a potential life prison sentence on heresy charges for "insulting the divine essence."
Many in this conservative Muslim town say that isn't enough, and suggested he should be killed for renouncing Islam. Even family members say he should remain behind bars for life.
"He should be burned to death," said Abdul-Latif Dahoud, a 35-year-old Qalqiliya resident. The execution should take place in public "to be an example to others," he added.
Few have come forward to defend him. One was Zainab Rashid, a liberal Palestinian commentator, who wrote in an online opinion piece that Husayin had made the important point that "criticizing religious texts for their (intellectual) weakness can only be combatted by... oppression, prison and execution."...
Gaza's Hamas rulers also stalk Facebook pages for suspected dissenters, said Palestinian rights activist Mustafa Ibrahim. He said Internet cafe owners are forced to monitor customers' online activity and alert intelligence officials if they see anything critical of the militant group or that violates Hamas' stern interpretation of Islam.
Freedom. I do not think this word means what you think it means.
Huh? Canadians in the US are almost always on TN-1 visas. The more expensive and complex H-1B permit is usually reserved for employees who don't qualify for TN visas.
If the ISS (and Mir) were capable of operating without regular resupply (and spare parts) we wouldn't need to learn how to operate indefinitely in space. In other words, that's the whole point.
Scientific research is just gravy. The biggest benefit of the ISS is it teaches us how to operate indefinitely in space. All the little unexpected things that went wrong and had to be solved, was an important lesson learned. They all might seem trivial, but if we ever want to do more than hang around in low-earth orbit, these are all important lessons to learn. And they can only be learned through experience.
When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.
Solar powered cars that exist today are impractical concept cars. You assume it is just engineering that stands between them and full-scale implementation. But it is not engineering that is the problem, it is fundamental physics: at the distance the Earth is from the sun, there is not enough power per unit area to drive a modern car. I have shown you the numbers, the stark reality. If you chose to reject them, then you are a fool.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki
When thermodynamics comes a knocking, the problem is often not where you thought it was. The problem with fuel is not the burning part, the problem is 'where did it come from?'
If you dig your fuel out of the ground, you're injecting new carbon into the earth's carbon cycle. That's a problem. If you suck your carbon out of the atmosphere (either directly, or via a plant or algae or other organism), then that's no problem at all, and you've just made yourself renewable gasoline.
America's biggest foreign source of oil is Canada, but I digress.
There's nothing wrong with gasoline, diesel and other hydrocarbons. They're great ways of storing energy. Far better than batteries, which are nasty, things, full of toxic chemicals and very expensive to produce and safely dispose of. They have a lot of problems that aren't going to go away any time soon.
On the other hand, gasoline has one problem: we dig it out of the ground. And hey, that's actually a fairly easy problem to solve: there's lots of ways of producing gasoline and other hydrocarbons, without having to dig them out of the ground. And the best part is, we don't have to replace trillions of dollars of infrastructure to do it. And by the way, you can't ignore that infrastructure shift, because some of those trillions of dollars will have to be go towards buying trillions of kilowatt hours of electricity.
If the choice is between betting on alkali and metal chemistry (batteries) or organic chemistry (fuels), I'll take the organic bet. You only have to look at the Earth from space to see which one works better in the long run.
Your attitude is incredibly destructive, and frankly, idiotic.
Why do we like hydrocarbons? One reason is because they're comparatively easy to get at. But they have a lot of other advantages too: they're stable, they're safe, they have a high energy density and you can easily get a lot of power out of them too. And since they're fuel, not batteries, you don't have to hang around for them to recharge. There's nothing else quite like hydrocarbons when it comes to portable energy.
Hydrocarbons are fantastic. Why are you so obsessed with making them go away? Because you are are not using your brain, and conflating hydrocarbons with something else.
The problem with hydrocarbons, as used today is they break the carbon cycle, which may lead to catastrophic environmental change in the future. But this is not a problem with hydrocarbons, it's a problem with how they're produced. And there are plenty of ways of making hydrocarbons that are carbon neutral, from natural and engineered biological processes (e.g., algae), to chemical processes using organic feedstock (e.g., thermal depolymerization). We have plenty of "renewable" technologies that are within spitting distance of practicality, based on hydrocarbons. And since they're based on hydrocarbons, they don't require replacement of trillions of dollars of infrastructure that is already in place.
But no, I suppose they're not cool enough. Not cool like a solar powered car. Which is an absolutely stupid idea, by the way. Compare power requirements for operating a vehicle to solar insolation and vehicle surface area. Hell, I'll do the calculation for you:
The average solar insolation in the UK, during daylight hours, a G8 country, is about 0.25kW/m^2. A modern small car needs about 75kW of power. A lane is about 3m wide, so doing the calculations suggests your small car has to be about 100m long. Parking might be a problem.
Small and light enough. And inexpensive. And not extraordinarily toxic, or highly explosive... sure, it could happen. I'm not going to discount the ingenuity of a lot of people working in the field.
On the other hand, I'd rather put my hopes into synthetic hydrocarbons. Organic energy storage is better in almost all ways: better energy density, better power density, safer, and since it's fuel-based, easy to "recharge." Plus, all the infrastructure we need already exists.
Learning does need to be justified. There are orders of magnitudes more things to learn and to teach, than one can reasonably learn in a lifetime, let alone in school and university. If you cannot justify why a subject should be taught at all, then you cannot give a reason why it should be taught instead of something else. So I disagree with your argument entirely... but it just so happens that math is very easy to justify.
Congratulations, you got the right answer but by random chance. Perhaps you should take some more math classes, they'll help your reasoning ability:).
Everything Plato ever wrote has been translated into English. On the other hand, there's lots of interesting stuff in German that is not, and may never be translated into English.
The reason most people hate and fear math is because their teachers and parents hated and feared math. It is then badly taught, and the hatred and loathing is passed on, like an infection.
Instead of learning the elegance of the underlying concepts, they're forced to sit through painful classes where they are expected to memorize strange expressions full of alien symbols, and byzantine procedures. You might as well force them to sit through and memorize a class on nuclear power plant operation.
I agree that a government sponsored ad campaign and things of that nature are not going to solve the problem. The solution is to hire some proper math teachers.
Slashdot Mirror
But that's exactly the point I'm making. Emission standards for cars aren't based on the 'sulfur emissions in Montana impacting a farmer in Wyoming' basis, they're set on 'sulfur emissions in New York impacting someone in New York.' By the time particulates from a ship in the middle of the pacific have diffused their way to population centers, they're insignificant. Otherwise LA's infamous smog clouds would cover the entire western seaboard.
Imposing the same standards on container ships doesn't make sense, since the standards are there to solve a problem that container ships don't have.
Sail is free and environmentally friendly... under a simplistic analysis.
Ever been to an old port? Seen the old warehouses (that have today been converted to other uses)? Heard old expressions like 'waiting for your ship to come in?' Steam, and eventually oil, replaced sail because even though it was 'more expensive' and even slower, at first, because by relying on engine power you gain reliability. Ships could stick to schedules, which means you don't need large - potentially refrigerated - warehouses to hold your goods. Goods don't spoil or go to waste, because a market opportunity has changed. You don't have to overproduce, you make exactly how much is needed.
Ultimately, every pound of bunker fuel is repayed ten times over, in money and environmental costs, by the efficiency improvements that regular shipping gives. We have another old expression for simplistic views of costs: penny wise, pound foolish.
Devil's advocate here: where do these ships pollute?
The environment can 'support' a certain rate of air pollution, but the diffusion rate of air pollution means that certain regions build up localized pollution far higher than the average pollution level (e.g. LA, New York, etc..). Car emissions and factory emissions need to be fairly strict to ensure that levels remain low, despite the concentration of pollution caused by urbanization. By its very nature, container ship owners want their vessels at sea as much as possible, and while they're crossing oceans, there's not exactly any urban concentration effect going on. So it makes sense that this kind of shipping be held to the lower standard of emissions (i.e., basic environmental sustainability).
Which is wrong. It's radiation. There's not some magical 'reflect off the skin' button which causes x-rays to suddenly stop following the laws of physics, and be absorbed only by the skin. The exposure is no different from the exposure to a normal x-ray, just at much lower intensities.
The "skin image" is a product of detection technology, not any fancy new radiation effect.
From the article:
The media in the Palestinian Authority, as in the Arab world in general, are largely government-controlled, driving dissenting voices to the relative freedom of the Internet. The blogger's arrest showed a willingness on the part of the Palestinian government to clamp down on freedom of speech on the Web as well. He now faces a potential life prison sentence on heresy charges for "insulting the divine essence."
Many in this conservative Muslim town say that isn't enough, and suggested he should be killed for renouncing Islam. Even family members say he should remain behind bars for life.
"He should be burned to death," said Abdul-Latif Dahoud, a 35-year-old Qalqiliya resident. The execution should take place in public "to be an example to others," he added.
Few have come forward to defend him. One was Zainab Rashid, a liberal Palestinian commentator, who wrote in an online opinion piece that Husayin had made the important point that "criticizing religious texts for their (intellectual) weakness can only be combatted by ... oppression, prison and execution." ...
Gaza's Hamas rulers also stalk Facebook pages for suspected dissenters, said Palestinian rights activist Mustafa Ibrahim. He said Internet cafe owners are forced to monitor customers' online activity and alert intelligence officials if they see anything critical of the militant group or that violates Hamas' stern interpretation of Islam.
Freedom. I do not think this word means what you think it means.
Yes.
If you look at the other date, the NOTAM was created a couple hours before the launch. The timing is suspicious, but bizarre.
Huh? Canadians in the US are almost always on TN-1 visas. The more expensive and complex H-1B permit is usually reserved for employees who don't qualify for TN visas.
ActiveX has been deprecated since the release of .NET, almost a decade ago.
Can we move on, please?
What personal information have they been stealing from people's computers again?
It's not Microsoft's fault Google, Apple and Mozilla aren't writing and submitting test cases to the W3C.
If the ISS (and Mir) were capable of operating without regular resupply (and spare parts) we wouldn't need to learn how to operate indefinitely in space. In other words, that's the whole point.
Ugh, were important lessons learned.
Scientific research is just gravy. The biggest benefit of the ISS is it teaches us how to operate indefinitely in space. All the little unexpected things that went wrong and had to be solved, was an important lesson learned. They all might seem trivial, but if we ever want to do more than hang around in low-earth orbit, these are all important lessons to learn. And they can only be learned through experience.
When you're half way to mars, a malfunctioning toilet would be a shitty way to die.
Solar powered cars that exist today are impractical concept cars. You assume it is just engineering that stands between them and full-scale implementation. But it is not engineering that is the problem, it is fundamental physics: at the distance the Earth is from the sun, there is not enough power per unit area to drive a modern car. I have shown you the numbers, the stark reality. If you chose to reject them, then you are a fool.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, in the expert's mind there are few." - Shunryu Suzuki
There's a very easy way to solve the energy storage problem for an electric motor: series-hybrid.
When thermodynamics comes a knocking, the problem is often not where you thought it was. The problem with fuel is not the burning part, the problem is 'where did it come from?'
If you dig your fuel out of the ground, you're injecting new carbon into the earth's carbon cycle. That's a problem. If you suck your carbon out of the atmosphere (either directly, or via a plant or algae or other organism), then that's no problem at all, and you've just made yourself renewable gasoline.
America's biggest foreign source of oil is Canada, but I digress.
There's nothing wrong with gasoline, diesel and other hydrocarbons. They're great ways of storing energy. Far better than batteries, which are nasty, things, full of toxic chemicals and very expensive to produce and safely dispose of. They have a lot of problems that aren't going to go away any time soon.
On the other hand, gasoline has one problem: we dig it out of the ground. And hey, that's actually a fairly easy problem to solve: there's lots of ways of producing gasoline and other hydrocarbons, without having to dig them out of the ground. And the best part is, we don't have to replace trillions of dollars of infrastructure to do it. And by the way, you can't ignore that infrastructure shift, because some of those trillions of dollars will have to be go towards buying trillions of kilowatt hours of electricity.
If the choice is between betting on alkali and metal chemistry (batteries) or organic chemistry (fuels), I'll take the organic bet. You only have to look at the Earth from space to see which one works better in the long run.
Your attitude is incredibly destructive, and frankly, idiotic.
Why do we like hydrocarbons? One reason is because they're comparatively easy to get at. But they have a lot of other advantages too: they're stable, they're safe, they have a high energy density and you can easily get a lot of power out of them too. And since they're fuel, not batteries, you don't have to hang around for them to recharge. There's nothing else quite like hydrocarbons when it comes to portable energy.
Hydrocarbons are fantastic. Why are you so obsessed with making them go away? Because you are are not using your brain, and conflating hydrocarbons with something else.
The problem with hydrocarbons, as used today is they break the carbon cycle, which may lead to catastrophic environmental change in the future. But this is not a problem with hydrocarbons, it's a problem with how they're produced. And there are plenty of ways of making hydrocarbons that are carbon neutral, from natural and engineered biological processes (e.g., algae), to chemical processes using organic feedstock (e.g., thermal depolymerization). We have plenty of "renewable" technologies that are within spitting distance of practicality, based on hydrocarbons. And since they're based on hydrocarbons, they don't require replacement of trillions of dollars of infrastructure that is already in place.
But no, I suppose they're not cool enough. Not cool like a solar powered car. Which is an absolutely stupid idea, by the way. Compare power requirements for operating a vehicle to solar insolation and vehicle surface area. Hell, I'll do the calculation for you:
The average solar insolation in the UK, during daylight hours, a G8 country, is about 0.25kW/m^2. A modern small car needs about 75kW of power. A lane is about 3m wide, so doing the calculations suggests your small car has to be about 100m long. Parking might be a problem.
Small and light enough. And inexpensive. And not extraordinarily toxic, or highly explosive... sure, it could happen. I'm not going to discount the ingenuity of a lot of people working in the field.
On the other hand, I'd rather put my hopes into synthetic hydrocarbons. Organic energy storage is better in almost all ways: better energy density, better power density, safer, and since it's fuel-based, easy to "recharge." Plus, all the infrastructure we need already exists.
Learning does need to be justified. There are orders of magnitudes more things to learn and to teach, than one can reasonably learn in a lifetime, let alone in school and university. If you cannot justify why a subject should be taught at all, then you cannot give a reason why it should be taught instead of something else. So I disagree with your argument entirely... but it just so happens that math is very easy to justify.
Congratulations, you got the right answer but by random chance. Perhaps you should take some more math classes, they'll help your reasoning ability :).
Everything Plato ever wrote has been translated into English. On the other hand, there's lots of interesting stuff in German that is not, and may never be translated into English.
That doesn't mean he was wrong.
And given the context, I find that exchange extraordinarily amusing.
99% of the legal profession exists outside of jury trials.
The reason most people hate and fear math is because their teachers and parents hated and feared math. It is then badly taught, and the hatred and loathing is passed on, like an infection.
Instead of learning the elegance of the underlying concepts, they're forced to sit through painful classes where they are expected to memorize strange expressions full of alien symbols, and byzantine procedures. You might as well force them to sit through and memorize a class on nuclear power plant operation.
I agree that a government sponsored ad campaign and things of that nature are not going to solve the problem. The solution is to hire some proper math teachers.