Last year, I spent a couple of hours googling to be able to calculate the average amount of mercury (the mercury content of coal varies a lot) emitted by electric power plants. I came up with CFLs containing a third of the mercury that would be released to generate the extra power needed for incandescent lights. And mercury that escapes out a smokestack seems to me to be more immediately dangerous than mercury in a modern landfill.
Sorry, 300,000 hour MTBF is certainly an estimate. 300,000 / 24 *365 = 34+ years. So the only way this is a measured MTBF is if someone lit off a batch of them in 1973, and they all failed within a few months of each other late last year.
MTBFs get estimated all the time. MTBFs of this size are almost always estimates.
The Earth has been through many warming and cooling cycles in the past. The current cycle is not outside this norm.
I guess that depends on what you call the norm. We are heating up the planet faster (by 3 orders of magnitude) than happened in the Permian extinction when 96% of marine species went extinct and 70% of land vertebrate species went extinct. Adaptation is mostly dying off.
1 degree in 100 years, maybe Where did you get that number? The IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (page 23) says that the most optimistic scenario (which has peak CO2 emissions by 2015, and CO2 emission cut at least in half by 2050) gives us 2.0-2.4 degrees C warming. That's a big deal. James Hansen has a very good, if long explanation of the science and the consequences. Compare that very rosy scenario 2-2.4 degree C temperture rise over the next century with the fact that the depth of the last ice age was only 5 degrees C cooler. Buckle your seat belts and hold on, its gonna be a wild ride. Oh, and the claims that the IPCC says that sea level is only going to rise by 40 cm by 2100 contains a caveat. They don't have a good model for how Greenland and West Antartica are going to melt, so they included _no_ contributions from them. A collapse of either one of them (admitedly not likely by 2100, but possible) gives us something like a 7 meter rise in sea level.
Try looking for links.
On the other hand, the thing I published is a peer-reviewed document which has been internationally published, and is created by dozens of individuals at the Global Change Institute at the University of Michigan
I just went through all the post you have made on this topic up to the point you posted this. You have linked to a video on Google, and a link from UMich. Check the UMich link again, its title is "The Global Carbon Cycle" and the page header identifies it as lecture notes. It does not include volcanic contributions to the carbon cycle, apparently they are not even second tier in importance. You are claiming to have posted peer reviewed papers. Unfortunately for your credibility in this discussion, that claim is easily falsifiable. I just went through that exercise, just to make sure. From here, it looks like you are just making stuff up. And accusing others of doing the very thing.
Last year was only a "dead" hurricane season in the Atlantic. If you look at it globally, last year was above average for hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones.
First solar flux increases the direct amount of watervapor in the air. Currently, the models only account for this in the stratosphere and not the troposphere. I am fascinated by folks who state as fact that professional climate modelers can't put in something as simple as relative humidity in their models. None of the dozens of modeling teams in the world can quite figure it out. And then to crown their display of ignorance, they offer up the old canard of "the sun did it." We have been accurately measuring the output of the sun for about 50 years, and there is not trend in its output. This is a graph of the last 30 or so years. If the output of the sun is not changing, it can't account for our current warming.
People essentially just sit down and tweak the models until they get the results they expect, then use them to generate best case and worst case analysis. That folks, is hardly science.
Odd, but that is almost exactly how physics works. You left out the part about building the models in the first place, using textbook physics and chemistry equations, making sure that they match measured phenomena. Then using the models to make predictions, and adjusting or discarding the models depending on how well they predict things. You don't seem to realize that even Newton's venerable (and simple) "law" of gravity is a mathematical model. And physists have been tweaking it -- adjusting the gravitational constant -- for centuries. Do you think gravity isn't science?
If you are wondering what predictions the climate models are making, I'll offer up two. First is that CO2-driven warming (as opposed to, say solar-driven warming) will heat the troposphere and cool the stratosphere. Second is that the poles will warm faster than the tropics. The solar hypothesis should cause the opposite effect for both predictions. Solar loses; the model predictions corespond with what is being observed over time.
Climate does not have, and never will have, a "robust equation." Demanding one is either a disingenuous rhetorical trick, or a mark of your ignorance. There isn't a "robust equation" for the interaction of the earth, moon, and sun under gravitational attraction. Determining the future state of a three (or more) body problem requires simulation. If something we have all understood since 4th grade science doesn't have an analytical solution, how can you honestly require one before you'll take climate research seriously?
How can you be sure that your great-grandkids won't curse you for a silly, greedy bastard who didn't take care of the world God gave you?
How exactly would you have the US encourage folks to study CS? For better or worse, the US is capitalist, free market. So to encourage people to become computer scientists, we should increase CS salaries.
Instead, our government, at the behest of companies like Microsoft, is doing its best to suppress engineering salaries. Gates says we need 100,000 developers a year. Gates says we bring in 65,000 H1-B's a year. My experience is that H1-B's make half what citizens and green card holders make. You do the math. Why should any rational person invest $100,000 to $250,000 for a degree that lets them compete with folks who think $25/hr is a great wage?
The great irony of reports like this is that jobs like lawyer, radiologist, marketing consultant, financial analyst, and likely SOX compliance analysts _are_ being shipped to India. Just not in the numbers that software is. Wait a while, the lawyers will start whining when their rates start to fall. Then we can expect legislation to protect professionals. Or at least lawyers.
You seem confused. Efforts to reduce pollution started in the '60s. But those were about things like smog, acid raim, mercury, and stuff that makes rivers catch on fire. The first attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was the Kyoto protocol, which is failing because the US refused to cooperate and because the Chinese and Indians got a pass. So it would be a real miracle if we were seeing any effects from limiting GHG emissions.
The requirement will be that all websites be renderable by a reader, if Target loses the suit (all that has happened so far is that a Target motion to dismiss the case was not granted). The judge also denied a preliminary injunction to require Target to make their website accessible immediately.
This is not trivial. There are programs that will read web pages and then pump them out through a voice synthesizer. The trouble is that the reader programs can't understand all HTML. I've forgotten the details of what fails, but I remember deciding I never wanted to work on a 508-compliant web site. 508 is a separate set of accessibility regulations for government websites. Information can't be just graphic, for example. On one hand, this is essentially adding another type of browser. But it is more complicated than ms vs. netscape, because you have to have a version of each page that doesn't use graphics.
Re:You look for broad-coverage employees?
on
The Living Dilbert?
·
· Score: 1
Most of the job listings I have encountered seem to call for specialists. They read like this.
HUH?? You think that is a specialist position? They ask for
4 years java, server side stuff
4 years javascript, web browser stuff
3 years working with EJBs more back-end stuff
3 years writing PL/SQL, Oracle-specific database
If you think this is a specialist, what do you think generalists do?
The real killer, though, is in the personal attributes section: Must be a self starter who his a high degree of initiative and is resourceful in finding answers to problems In other words, creative take-charge guy
Ability to meet tight deadlines in a heads down environment In other words, you won't have time to be creative or take charge
Ability to take direction from multiple people and juggle multiple competing priorities And we are goiing to pull you in 17 directions at once, until you have no time to put 2 thoughts together
the old farts (baby boomers) will be retiring in droves over the next five to ten years
You must be new to programming. There are not a lot of baby boomers programming. When I was in my 30s, I could get a job in 3 weeks. In my forties, it started taking months. In my fifties, it took nearly a year to get a job after getting caught in a large RIF.
The folks who are nearing retirement typically are in management, customer support, sales, or deadwood. Sorry to deflate your dreams of great jobs.
How many Japanese did you know in the 1930's? In the 30's, Japan was completely militarist. Run by generals, and determined to expand into an empire that rivaled any European empire. After the war the Japanese completely reinvented themselves into a mostly pacifist country.
I have always admired Japan and its people. I understand why they chose to go for an empire (as a hint, look at the state of China circa 1900, dominated by Europeans). But that does not change the fact that they would have defended the home islands with to-the-death ferocity. Nor does it change the fact that they were brutal to the people they conquered.
Why are you willing to overlook what Japan did in Korea, Manchuria, China, SE Asia, Indonesia, and the Philipines, and yet think that we are bad guys for not accepting terms other than unconditional surrender? WWII was about destroying militarism, and by the time Japan was the last opponent standing, why should the allies give up the goal? Why not blame the Japanese for not bowing to the obvious fact that the war was lost?
These are not easy questions. My father worked on the Manhatten project and I grew up thinking that dropping the bomb was the right thing to do. Now I don't know. What I do know is that it is stupid to try to judge people who had to make horrible decisions in the middle of a desperate struggle.
Have you ever taken a hard look at Ricardo's model? Especially at the assumptions? He assumes that there is no cost to switching from growing grapes to growing apples. He assumes that there is no cost in retraining grape growers to be apple growers.
That may have been a valid simplification in the early 1800s, but it isn't today. A semiconductor fab plant can cost in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. A degree in computer science from a name school can easily run $200,000 (tuition, room, board, books, etc, plus 4 years lost wages).
Ricardo build a model of comparative advantage; don't assume it is a law.
As a thought experiment, consider the quote "the United States should instead focus on India as a vital new market for American goods..." and estimate how many of those American goods are actually going to be manufactured in China.
Slashdot Mirror
It is more useful in more fields, and would be good for the democracy.
Last year, I spent a couple of hours googling to be able to calculate the average amount of mercury (the mercury content of coal varies a lot) emitted by electric power plants. I came up with CFLs containing a third of the mercury that would be released to generate the extra power needed for incandescent lights. And mercury that escapes out a smokestack seems to me to be more immediately dangerous than mercury in a modern landfill.
Sorry, 300,000 hour MTBF is certainly an estimate. 300,000 / 24 *365 = 34+ years. So the only way this is a measured MTBF is if someone lit off a batch of them in 1973, and they all failed within a few months of each other late last year.
MTBFs get estimated all the time. MTBFs of this size are almost always estimates.
That's how you find out that while your staff was reading slashdot, a customer reported a major outage that nobody has handled.
I guess that depends on what you call the norm. We are heating up the planet faster (by 3 orders of magnitude) than happened in the Permian extinction when 96% of marine species went extinct and 70% of land vertebrate species went extinct.
Adaptation is mostly dying off.
Ford developped almost the same technology as the prius
Look a little closer and you will find that Ford licensed their hybrid technology from Toyota.
1 degree in 100 years, maybe
Where did you get that number? The IPCC Summary for Policy Makers (page 23) says that the most optimistic scenario (which has peak CO2 emissions by 2015, and CO2 emission cut at least in half by 2050) gives us 2.0-2.4 degrees C warming. That's a big deal. James Hansen has a very good, if long explanation of the science and the consequences. Compare that very rosy scenario 2-2.4 degree C temperture rise over the next century with the fact that the depth of the last ice age was only 5 degrees C cooler.
Buckle your seat belts and hold on, its gonna be a wild ride.
Oh, and the claims that the IPCC says that sea level is only going to rise by 40 cm by 2100 contains a caveat. They don't have a good model for how Greenland and West Antartica are going to melt, so they included _no_ contributions from them. A collapse of either one of them (admitedly not likely by 2100, but possible) gives us something like a 7 meter rise in sea level.
I just went through all the post you have made on this topic up to the point you posted this. You have linked to a video on Google, and a link from UMich. Check the UMich link again, its title is "The Global Carbon Cycle" and the page header identifies it as lecture notes. It does not include volcanic contributions to the carbon cycle, apparently they are not even second tier in importance.
You are claiming to have posted peer reviewed papers. Unfortunately for your credibility in this discussion, that claim is easily falsifiable. I just went through that exercise, just to make sure.
From here, it looks like you are just making stuff up. And accusing others of doing the very thing.
Neither of these sentences are even remotely close to true. You have been demanding data sources, so where are your sources for this?
Present-day carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from subaerial and submarine volcanoes are uncertain at the present time. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. This is a conservative estimate. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times.
After circling many more times, most of the ash settled to the Earth's surface, but some of the smallest fragments and aerosols remained suspended in the upper atmosphere for years.
Flunked statistics did you?
Last year was only a "dead" hurricane season in the Atlantic. If you look at it globally, last year was above average for hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones.
First solar flux increases the direct amount of watervapor in the air. Currently, the models only account for this in the stratosphere and not the troposphere.
I am fascinated by folks who state as fact that professional climate modelers can't put in something as simple as relative humidity in their models. None of the dozens of modeling teams in the world can quite figure it out. And then to crown their display of ignorance, they offer up the old canard of "the sun did it." We have been accurately measuring the output of the sun for about 50 years, and there is not trend in its output. This is a graph of the last 30 or so years. If the output of the sun is not changing, it can't account for our current warming.
Odd, but that is almost exactly how physics works. You left out the part about building the models in the first place, using textbook physics and chemistry equations, making sure that they match measured phenomena. Then using the models to make predictions, and adjusting or discarding the models depending on how well they predict things. You don't seem to realize that even Newton's venerable (and simple) "law" of gravity is a mathematical model. And physists have been tweaking it -- adjusting the gravitational constant -- for centuries. Do you think gravity isn't science?
If you are wondering what predictions the climate models are making, I'll offer up two. First is that CO2-driven warming (as opposed to, say solar-driven warming) will heat the troposphere and cool the stratosphere. Second is that the poles will warm faster than the tropics. The solar hypothesis should cause the opposite effect for both predictions. Solar loses; the model predictions corespond with what is being observed over time.
Climate does not have, and never will have, a "robust equation." Demanding one is either a disingenuous rhetorical trick, or a mark of your ignorance. There isn't a "robust equation" for the interaction of the earth, moon, and sun under gravitational attraction. Determining the future state of a three (or more) body problem requires simulation. If something we have all understood since 4th grade science doesn't have an analytical solution, how can you honestly require one before you'll take climate research seriously?
How can you be sure that your great-grandkids won't curse you for a silly, greedy bastard who didn't take care of the world God gave you?
Instead, our government, at the behest of companies like Microsoft, is doing its best to suppress engineering salaries. Gates says we need 100,000 developers a year. Gates says we bring in 65,000 H1-B's a year. My experience is that H1-B's make half what citizens and green card holders make. You do the math. Why should any rational person invest $100,000 to $250,000 for a degree that lets them compete with folks who think $25/hr is a great wage?
The great irony of reports like this is that jobs like lawyer, radiologist, marketing consultant, financial analyst, and likely SOX compliance analysts _are_ being shipped to India. Just not in the numbers that software is. Wait a while, the lawyers will start whining when their rates start to fall.
Then we can expect legislation to protect professionals. Or at least lawyers.
An Aussie patent only applies in Aussieland, not in the US. Ergo, a ruling in US court means they have a US patent.
You seem confused. Efforts to reduce pollution started in the '60s. But those were about things like smog, acid raim, mercury, and stuff that makes rivers catch on fire. The first attempt to regulate greenhouse gases was the Kyoto protocol, which is failing because the US refused to cooperate and because the Chinese and Indians got a pass. So it would be a real miracle if we were seeing any effects from limiting GHG emissions.
The requirement will be that all websites be renderable by a reader, if Target loses the suit (all that has happened so far is that a Target motion to dismiss the case was not granted). The judge also denied a preliminary injunction to require Target to make their website accessible immediately.
This is not trivial. There are programs that will read web pages and then pump them out through a voice synthesizer. The trouble is that the reader programs can't understand all HTML. I've forgotten the details of what fails, but I remember deciding I never wanted to work on a 508-compliant web site. 508 is a separate set of accessibility regulations for government websites. Information can't be just graphic, for example. On one hand, this is essentially adding another type of browser. But it is more complicated than ms vs. netscape, because you have to have a version of each page that doesn't use graphics.
HUH?? You think that is a specialist position? They ask for
4 years java, server side stuff
4 years javascript, web browser stuff
3 years working with EJBs more back-end stuff
3 years writing PL/SQL, Oracle-specific database
If you think this is a specialist, what do you think generalists do?
The real killer, though, is in the personal attributes section:
Must be a self starter who his a high degree of initiative and is resourceful in finding answers to problems In other words, creative take-charge guy
Ability to meet tight deadlines in a heads down environment In other words, you won't have time to be creative or take charge
Ability to take direction from multiple people and juggle multiple competing priorities And we are goiing to pull you in 17 directions at once, until you have no time to put 2 thoughts together
You must be new to programming. There are not a lot of baby boomers programming. When I was in my 30s, I could get a job in 3 weeks. In my forties, it started taking months. In my fifties, it took nearly a year to get a job after getting caught in a large RIF.
The folks who are nearing retirement typically are in management, customer support, sales, or deadwood. Sorry to deflate your dreams of great jobs.
I would love to conceded that they have a valid point, and I will, just as soon as it happens.
I have always admired Japan and its people. I understand why they chose to go for an empire (as a hint, look at the state of China circa 1900, dominated by Europeans). But that does not change the fact that they would have defended the home islands with to-the-death ferocity. Nor does it change the fact that they were brutal to the people they conquered.
Why are you willing to overlook what Japan did in Korea, Manchuria, China, SE Asia, Indonesia, and the Philipines, and yet think that we are bad guys for not accepting terms other than unconditional surrender? WWII was about destroying militarism, and by the time Japan was the last opponent standing, why should the allies give up the goal? Why not blame the Japanese for not bowing to the obvious fact that the war was lost?
These are not easy questions. My father worked on the Manhatten project and I grew up thinking that dropping the bomb was the right thing to do. Now I don't know. What I do know is that it is stupid to try to judge people who had to make horrible decisions in the middle of a desperate struggle.
So you're what, 25, 26?
But you see, grasshopper, you will make one mod for Half-Life. Recurrance relations you will have to deal with over and over and over again.
That may have been a valid simplification in the early 1800s, but it isn't today. A semiconductor fab plant can cost in the neighborhood of a billion dollars. A degree in computer science from a name school can easily run $200,000 (tuition, room, board, books, etc, plus 4 years lost wages).
Ricardo build a model of comparative advantage; don't assume it is a law.
As a thought experiment, consider the quote "the United States should instead focus on India as a vital new market for American goods ..." and estimate how many of those American goods are actually going to be manufactured in China.