Wind and solar have been proven to work now. Entire cities and even states in some countries are being run on renewable technologies.
You'd have to have a pretty small city or state to have all of its energy produces by wind or solar.
Here is a picture of only a small part of a the San Gorgonio wind farm, over 3,500 turbines 1,500 acres that can't even match a single nuclear reactor in terms of its peak energy, much less its base capability.
Take a closer look on Google Maps of this wind farm.
We would need hundreds and hundreds of these kinds of farms to provide all the electric power for the US.
People don't seem to recognize that depressed people just kill themselves. There is no "good reason", they just can't take being depressed any more - just living with the depression is "reason".
Depression can be well hid. A friend of mine in college killed himself. No one of his friends knew he was depressed or suicidal. His housemates had no clue until they found the body (they even slept through the shotgun blast). It was quite a shock to find out from his parents that he had attempted suicide several times before.
32,000 suicides occur in the US every year, nearly 90 a day. This is compared with 18,000 homicides per year.
800 years ago, Moses Maimonides enumerated the forms of charity, from best to least:
Unfortunately, it is the year 2008, and the best charity you can give is helping poor people understand that their government is involved in economically ignorant regulations that are keeping them poor, and that they should either put a stop to them in the ballot box or bullet box depending on the form of government.
Giving will likely just be appropriated by corrupt government officials.
Biofuels may be a factor, but the main reason for the recent dramatic increases in food prices is market speculation
Actually the problem is that the market is too regulated.
It is difficult for speculators to drive up prices in open, competitive markets. Rice is neither, plenty of countries have import quotas, huge import tariffs, export quotas, and export taxes.
The vast bulk of poor people do not produce a surplus of food, they are either subsistence farmers, or urbanized poor.
To some extent this is true. Many poor people in developing countries could be growing more food than they consumer and selling the excess into the global marketplace. But they are stopped because of government corruption in the food supply chain, poorly conceived irrigation systems, terrible or even nonexistent roads, insecure property rights, ill-considered land reforms, and agriculture trade and price controls. (See Zimbabwe for all of these).
Most of these limitations are due to poor local governance.
20m acres = ~81B/m2 * 6kWh/day/m2 = 486billion kWh per day or 486,000 GWh/day = 177,390,000 GWh/year
Let me say that again: 177,390,000 GWh. In 2005 Total U.S. electricity generation was 4,054,688 GWh
A modern nuclear reactor needs about 200 acres.
20m acres = 100,000 nuclear reactors = 100 TWe. They tend to operate at full power 80% of the time, so 365*24*100TWe = 700 PWh per year versus your 177 PWh.
Alternatively, we could simply build 500 nuclear reactors (taking up ~100,000 acres) to take care of US electrical needs.
To bad Argentina couldn't wait for DVB-T2, but on the other hand there should be a ton of reasonably good & reasonably priced ASTC 8VSB receivers on the market next year after the US analog shutoff.
SymbioticA, a cross-disciplinary life sciences and art research lab at the University of Western Australia has been taking "baby steps" in this process. You can read about their "disembodied cuisine" project where they grew frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer and ate it.
It turns out the biggest problem with doing these kinds of experiments are regulations. Research labs may lose their licenses if they produce food for eating, actual food production has tremendous amount of regulation, and the transport of "biological samples" are highly regulated (although transport of a flank steak is much less regulated).
Also real "meat" is not just muscle cells, but a rich microstructure of muscle, connective tissue, and fat. So it will push the limits of tissue engineering to come up with something that actually tastes good.
If you're a guy going into a technical field, realize that once you graduate and find a job, your oppotunities for meeting people of the other gender will drop off tremendously
We live in the world of Match.Com and OKCupid etc., not to mention Meetup.com and web-enabled interest groups. Post-college hookups are far easier than ever. Jeepers, I even met a woman on USENET back in the day.
I went to a large state grad school, where I met my wife who was smart (but in a different field). The big schools have the highest diversity. If you read Slashdot, you may be challenged to find a match in a small school just by the numbers.
I am hiring entry-level engineers right now - here are my suggestions
1) If you are a social person and can make friends and can afford it and can get into it, shoot for a top ivy school because the friend network you make their is a major part of the benefits of college.
2) If you don't qualify for #1, go to a good yet affordable CS school (like a state university). Don't bother with a school that doesn't have a upper-mid level quality CS program, you won't get much extra for the extra money. Let your parents party a bit more in retirement.
3) Make sure you have personal, school, or preferably work (intern/co-op) technical projects that you can coherently discus with your potential after-graduation employers. Nothing shows you are ready better than existing deployed code.
4) ACM or IEEE student chapter involvement is great, Tau Beta Pi is good as well if you qualify.
But the real joke is the fact that people think our gasoline consumption has some huge effect on our oil usage. Actually our automobile fuel usage only accounts for 10% of our overall oil consumption.
Beowulf was in Dolby 3d in many places, which uses fairly expensive dichoic filters to separate light from 3 primaries into one eye, and light from 3 slightly different primaries into the other eye. Since these are more expensive than the RealD circularly polarized glasses, the theaters ask for them back.
I'm hoping this comes out at home. For those of us with two projectors, appropriate polarizing filters, a special screen, and a few sets of glasses I have to say there isn't enough content.
3D displays are moving forward very rapidly, for example 3D DLPs for LCD shutter glasses and 3D LCD displays that use cross-polarized glasses or shutter glasses.
The entire point of theaters going to 3D is to entice people away from their HDTVs with something that is unique and compelling can can't be as easily experienced at home.
That is probably true to some extent, but the business model of making movies includes threatrical release, DVDs, cable/sat VOD, now Blu-rays, electronic sell through (iTunes, Amazon, etc.), and television. Sometimes the last few of those make as much money as the theatrical release.
I think it is safe to expect all of these content distribution channels to go 3D capable over time, using 3D as a revenue multiplier at every step.
3D Cinema is moving away from active LCD "shutter glasses" and moving towards RealD circularly polarized glasses or Dolby 3D Digital Cinema which illuminates each eyes' image with light created from three slightly different primary colors and uses glasses that pass those different primary colors through fairly narrow band filters.
I predict that Blu-ray will have enough bits on it to be able to handle stereoscopic (xpol or shutter glasses) 3D. Obviously it can handle anaglyphic today (I suspect the Hannah Montana disc is going to use this). I also suspect the actual solution for true stereo 3D may involve an external decoder box (at least for legacy players). Note this is all wild speculation on my part.
Pixar movies would look especially good at higher frame rates. I wish Pixar would render them at 720p60 to show on ABC or on their DVD's.
But dude, 24p is the "film look", and thus must be 10000% better than 60p which is just "television". And you better spend 30 minutes per frame doing "color correction" as well!
Of course, all this "television" stuff sucks compared to good old film, even 16mm, because it doesn't have the grain you need for the "film look"
Gack. You can tell I've been in Hollywood too long (about 6 months)....
That silly stuff about the Chinese being incapable of running a free and democratic country, now that is nasty racist stuff, and would that be anything like the Germans (Ex-Nazis) being unable to have a democratic country or the Russians (ex-soviets) to have a democratic country or the rest of Europe (ex-monarchists), or dare I say it, the Taiwanese and the Tibetans from being able to run their own free and democratic societies.
On the other hand, regardlesss of "race", one has to wonder whether some "cultures" are really ready for "western style democracy". Think about all the people in the US who thought that Iraqis would be able to peacefully come together (including Iraqi ex-pats who had been outside the country for many years). Or the people who thought that Gaza would be able to peacefully self-govern itself.
Tribally-oriented cultures can't handle "western style democracy" because there is a desire to use government power to rent-seek for specific tribal/cultural/racial groups. Even in the US before the 1960's, most European Americans were not ready to allow African Americans to co-exist equally on a civil level.
Hitler's Germany shows how a fairly cosmopolitan society can revert to extreme tribalism, but they seem to have mainly recovered. On the other hand, it remains unclear if post-Soviet Russia can fully move beyond the tribal splits between Russians and the conquered peoples still in the boundaries of Russia.
That's great! I found Scheme to be the most useless language I've ever learned (and this includes FORTRAN, which was far more useful to me!) On the other hand, I use Python every day to solve real problems. Even if I don't use Python for months, I can generally get back into it in about 1 day.
Private-sector planning for the storm began days ahead of landfall. On the Friday prior to the Monday landfall, Home Depot activated the "war room" at its Atlanta headquarters, negotiating with various vendors to get needed supplies staged to move into the hurricane zone. Wal-Mart's response began slightly earlier. As part of its regular operations, the company maintains an emergency command center...
...Between August 29 and September 16, Wal-Mart shipped almost 2,500 truckloads of merchandise to the affected areas and had drivers and trucks in place to ship relief supplies to community members and organizations wishing to help. Home Depot provided more than 800 truckloads worth of supplies to the hard-hit areas and also used buses to transport 1,000 employees from other areas into the region. Wal-Mart also provided a large amount of free merchandise, including prescription drugs, to those in the worst-hit areas of the Gulf Coast.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we please call it the proper name, the "redistribution contol descriptor" in PSIP EIT, as defined by ATSC A/65C!
Wind and solar have been proven to work now. Entire cities and even states in some countries are being run on renewable technologies.
You'd have to have a pretty small city or state to have all of its energy produces by wind or solar.
Here is a picture of only a small part of a the San Gorgonio wind farm, over 3,500 turbines 1,500 acres that can't even match a single nuclear reactor in terms of its peak energy, much less its base capability.
Take a closer look on Google Maps of this wind farm.
We would need hundreds and hundreds of these kinds of farms to provide all the electric power for the US.
People don't seem to recognize that depressed people just kill themselves. There is no "good reason", they just can't take being depressed any more - just living with the depression is "reason".
Depression can be well hid. A friend of mine in college killed himself. No one of his friends knew he was depressed or suicidal. His housemates had no clue until they found the body (they even slept through the shotgun blast). It was quite a shock to find out from his parents that he had attempted suicide several times before.
32,000 suicides occur in the US every year, nearly 90 a day. This is compared with 18,000 homicides per year.
800 years ago, Moses Maimonides enumerated the forms of charity, from best to least:
Unfortunately, it is the year 2008, and the best charity you can give is helping poor people understand that their government is involved in economically ignorant regulations that are keeping them poor, and that they should either put a stop to them in the ballot box or bullet box depending on the form of government.
Giving will likely just be appropriated by corrupt government officials.
Biofuels may be a factor, but the main reason for the recent dramatic increases in food prices is market speculation
Actually the problem is that the market is too regulated.
It is difficult for speculators to drive up prices in open, competitive markets. Rice is neither, plenty of countries have import quotas, huge import tariffs, export quotas, and export taxes.
The vast bulk of poor people do not produce a surplus of food, they are either subsistence farmers, or urbanized poor.
To some extent this is true. Many poor people in developing countries could be growing more food than they consumer and selling the excess into the global marketplace. But they are stopped because of government corruption in the food supply chain, poorly conceived irrigation systems, terrible or even nonexistent roads, insecure property rights, ill-considered land reforms, and agriculture trade and price controls. (See Zimbabwe for all of these).
Most of these limitations are due to poor local governance.
20m acres = ~81B/m2 * 6kWh/day/m2 = 486billion kWh per day or 486,000 GWh/day = 177,390,000 GWh/year
Let me say that again: 177,390,000 GWh. In 2005 Total U.S. electricity generation was 4,054,688 GWh
A modern nuclear reactor needs about 200 acres.
20m acres = 100,000 nuclear reactors = 100 TWe. They tend to operate at full power 80% of the time, so 365*24*100TWe = 700 PWh per year versus your 177 PWh.
Alternatively, we could simply build 500 nuclear reactors (taking up ~100,000 acres) to take care of US electrical needs.
We may get ATSC as standard next year
To bad Argentina couldn't wait for DVB-T2, but on the other hand there should be a ton of reasonably good & reasonably priced ASTC 8VSB receivers on the market next year after the US analog shutoff.
I was in grad school at UVa for 6 months before I learned the location of landmarks like "the corner".
Heh, the woman I met on USENET from a physics grad student from UVa - i had a fun night in Charlottesville - obviously you were working too hard!
SymbioticA, a cross-disciplinary life sciences and art research lab at the University of Western Australia has been taking "baby steps" in this process. You can read about their "disembodied cuisine" project where they grew frog skeletal muscle over biopolymer and ate it.
It turns out the biggest problem with doing these kinds of experiments are regulations. Research labs may lose their licenses if they produce food for eating, actual food production has tremendous amount of regulation, and the transport of "biological samples" are highly regulated (although transport of a flank steak is much less regulated).
Also real "meat" is not just muscle cells, but a rich microstructure of muscle, connective tissue, and fat. So it will push the limits of tissue engineering to come up with something that actually tastes good.
If you're a guy going into a technical field, realize that once you graduate and find a job, your oppotunities for meeting people of the other gender will drop off tremendously
We live in the world of Match.Com and OKCupid etc., not to mention Meetup.com and web-enabled interest groups. Post-college hookups are far easier than ever. Jeepers, I even met a woman on USENET back in the day.
I went to a large state grad school, where I met my wife who was smart (but in a different field). The big schools have the highest diversity. If you read Slashdot, you may be challenged to find a match in a small school just by the numbers.
I am hiring entry-level engineers right now - here are my suggestions
1) If you are a social person and can make friends and can afford it and can get into it, shoot for a top ivy school because the friend network you make their is a major part of the benefits of college.
2) If you don't qualify for #1, go to a good yet affordable CS school (like a state university). Don't bother with a school that doesn't have a upper-mid level quality CS program, you won't get much extra for the extra money. Let your parents party a bit more in retirement.
3) Make sure you have personal, school, or preferably work (intern/co-op) technical projects that you can coherently discus with your potential after-graduation employers. Nothing shows you are ready better than existing deployed code.
4) ACM or IEEE student chapter involvement is great, Tau Beta Pi is good as well if you qualify.
But the real joke is the fact that people think our gasoline consumption has some huge effect on our oil usage. Actually our automobile fuel usage only accounts for 10% of our overall oil consumption.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics begs to differ.
In 2003, US transportation used 13 million barrels per day, industry 5 million, buildings 1.27 million, and industry just 500 thousand per day.
Now it is true that outside the US, oil is used far more for electricity production, but plastics are "a drop in the bucket" of oil use.
I am tempted to mod you down just for MENTIONING the damn Unity thing! :b
Hah, I'd totally deserve it!
Beowulf was in Dolby 3d in many places, which uses fairly expensive dichoic filters to separate light from 3 primaries into one eye, and light from 3 slightly different primaries into the other eye. Since these are more expensive than the RealD circularly polarized glasses, the theaters ask for them back.
I'm hoping this comes out at home. For those of us with two projectors, appropriate polarizing filters, a special screen, and a few sets of glasses I have to say there isn't enough content.
3D displays are moving forward very rapidly, for example 3D DLPs for LCD shutter glasses and 3D LCD displays that use cross-polarized glasses or shutter glasses.
The entire point of theaters going to 3D is to entice people away from their HDTVs with something that is unique and compelling can can't be as easily experienced at home.
That is probably true to some extent, but the business model of making movies includes threatrical release, DVDs, cable/sat VOD, now Blu-rays, electronic sell through (iTunes, Amazon, etc.), and television. Sometimes the last few of those make as much money as the theatrical release.
I think it is safe to expect all of these content distribution channels to go 3D capable over time, using 3D as a revenue multiplier at every step.
3D Cinema is moving away from active LCD "shutter glasses" and moving towards RealD circularly polarized glasses or Dolby 3D Digital Cinema which illuminates each eyes' image with light created from three slightly different primary colors and uses glasses that pass those different primary colors through fairly narrow band filters.
I predict that Blu-ray will have enough bits on it to be able to handle stereoscopic (xpol or shutter glasses) 3D. Obviously it can handle anaglyphic today (I suspect the Hannah Montana disc is going to use this). I also suspect the actual solution for true stereo 3D may involve an external decoder box (at least for legacy players). Note this is all wild speculation on my part.
Pixar movies would look especially good at higher frame rates. I wish Pixar would render them at 720p60 to show on ABC or on their DVD's.
But dude, 24p is the "film look", and thus must be 10000% better than 60p which is just "television". And you better spend 30 minutes per frame doing "color correction" as well!
Of course, all this "television" stuff sucks compared to good old film, even 16mm, because it doesn't have the grain you need for the "film look"
Gack. You can tell I've been in Hollywood too long (about 6 months)....
In the broadcast engineering space, we see a lot of this kind of thing...
Avid Unity ISIS
Omneon MediaGrid
DataDirect S2A
That silly stuff about the Chinese being incapable of running a free and democratic country, now that is nasty racist stuff, and would that be anything like the Germans (Ex-Nazis) being unable to have a democratic country or the Russians (ex-soviets) to have a democratic country or the rest of Europe (ex-monarchists), or dare I say it, the Taiwanese and the Tibetans from being able to run their own free and democratic societies.
On the other hand, regardlesss of "race", one has to wonder whether some "cultures" are really ready for "western style democracy". Think about all the people in the US who thought that Iraqis would be able to peacefully come together (including Iraqi ex-pats who had been outside the country for many years). Or the people who thought that Gaza would be able to peacefully self-govern itself.
Tribally-oriented cultures can't handle "western style democracy" because there is a desire to use government power to rent-seek for specific tribal/cultural/racial groups. Even in the US before the 1960's, most European Americans were not ready to allow African Americans to co-exist equally on a civil level.
Hitler's Germany shows how a fairly cosmopolitan society can revert to extreme tribalism, but they seem to have mainly recovered. On the other hand, it remains unclear if post-Soviet Russia can fully move beyond the tribal splits between Russians and the conquered peoples still in the boundaries of Russia.
Actually, the MIT course has switched to Python.
That's great! I found Scheme to be the most useless language I've ever learned (and this includes FORTRAN, which was far more useful to me!) On the other hand, I use Python every day to solve real problems. Even if I don't use Python for months, I can generally get back into it in about 1 day.
Lessons from the Private Sector and the Coast Guard During Katrina
Private-sector planning for the storm began days ahead of landfall. On the Friday prior to the Monday landfall, Home Depot activated the "war room" at its Atlanta headquarters, negotiating with various vendors to get needed supplies staged to move into the hurricane zone. Wal-Mart's response began slightly earlier. As part of its regular operations, the company maintains an emergency command center...
Why do they have 1080p sets?
A: 1080p24, which is the preferred way to store movies on Blu-Ray, and you can get some players that natively output it.