First of all, forget about shingle materials being "black" or "white" or whatever. The human eye is sampling such a tiny band of the black-body thermal spectrum.
A good A/C saving shingle is more than just white to the eye -- it has to have both good reflectivity as well as good emissivity, otherwise the roof will heat up like a tin roof. Odds are that a black shingle (again, it would need to be tested broad-band) has poor reflectivity but good emissivity. Hence a black shingle will radiate no more than a white shingle, but it will certainly absorb more. On balance, if you live in a cold climate, you may want to weigh the thermal gain of the black shingle over the cool roof effect of the white shingle.
The other thing is that according to Stefan-Boltzmann, the radiation effect goes as temperature to the 4th power, hence the emissivity of a shingle exposed to full summer sun on a hot day is important, the emissivity as a loss mechanism for the solar gain at winter surface temps, even when solar heated, less so.
One, the advantage of "painting your roof white" may depend on where you live. Even with this sweltering heat wave, those of us living far north of the Mason Dixon line spend far less on A/C than we do on heat. The reflective coating may not be best in every situation.
Secondly, it is not simply a matter of painting something white. An optimal coating has to have a high emissivity as well as high reflectivity. For example, a tin (galvanized metal) roof can get very hot because it is reflective, yes, but it doesn't emit heat very well either, and such a roof may not save on A/C usage.
Thirdly, there may be "lower tech" solutions to the same thing. I had a new shingle roof put up on my dad's place. We looked into the extra-cost Energy Star shingles that would have also qualified for the tax credit, but the roofer suggested going with a conventional shingle on account of cost, availability, and going with a known quantity in terms of lifetime, but the roofer installed ridge vents.
Those ridge vents keep the upstairs a good 10 deg-F cooler on sunny summer days. Of course ridge events are not "Democracy-whiskey-sexy" and do not qualify for Federal tax credits, but I would recommend them any day. Yes, by keeping the attic cooler, you get less solar gain in cold seasons, but by increasing ventilation, they should help dry out the insulation and make it work more effectively, both summer and winter.
The concept of doing charity without publicity or outward reward has a basis in Jewish faith practice.
In other words, if Jesus was calling out the Pharisees for being overt in their charitable deeds, he was not challenging them with anything they would not have already known.
Mafia, meh. This goes farther back in history. Perhaps to Cosimo Landfilli, who became wealth on the waste disposal contracts for Firenze and then became a great patron of the arts.
Or perhaps even earlier to Maximus Recyclimus, who engineered the waste management system in the 2nd century B.C.E. Roman Republic.
Paraphrasing the Apollo 13 ground controller Gene Kranz, what was still good on that aircraft?
They lost airspeed indications, but did they have altitude readouts? Attitude indications from a gyro? Angle of attack (not quite the same thing as attitude)? If they had a "partial panel", would they have had reliable indications of what was "good" what readouts were wrong?
Yeah, everyone and his brother wants to "segment the market", to charge widely different prices for the same thing based on the variable amount of utility (Econ 101 jargon for "yeah, what's it worth to you, Bud") for the different customers.
The phone company had that time-of-day pricing (good that is gone -- Hi Mom, sorry it is 2 AM by you but it is 11 PM for me here in college, and um, I need some money). GM would slap a Buick badge on a Chevy, Ford a Lincoln badge on a Ford and charge money for the status consciousness, that is until Bimmers and Audis came in fashion, although an Audi is a Volkswagen with a different badge on it. Airlines, don't get me started, have this patchwork of fares. Some of this is to fill plane seats and recoup costs at off-peak times, other of this is to offer teasers of bargain fares and then stick it to you when you have to get some place on short notice.
Yes sir, to charge different customers different amounts on willingness to pay for pretty much the same thing has long been the Holy Grail of marketing, but besides the seeming unfairness of it, and to all of you Libertarians, part of success in business is your reputation, and from a utilitarian standpoint, it imposes all manner of inconvenience.
Yes, we have cheap air fares, but on balance I have a low opinion of airlines. Yes, you can negotiate a good deal on a car, but the thought that car dealers "size you up" and someone else is getting a lower price on the car gives me a low opinion of car dealers and the auto industry in general. Yes, you can stay on this side of the law when it comes to swindling customers and I suppose there is a Randian Objectivist rationale to do that, but as a society we are the poorer for it.
That you base your software program on mutating objects is a programming style. You could just as easily base your program on immutable objects, creating such objects as needed and then discarding them.
The style of mutating objects comes about when you don't have good garbage collection. You want to avoid creating immutable objects that you have to discard as this stresses the garbage collector.
But they tell me there has been considerable progress in garbage collection, both in theory as to how it could be done and in practice in later versions of Java. The Java people are now encouraging the use of immutable objects because they claim their garbage collector is efficient enough to handle this style of programming, even thrives on creating objects with short lifetimes.
Maybe the anti-parallism is not in OOP as such but in programming style such as this Law of Demeter business.
Demeter, they tell me, was some manner of software project and the Law of Demeter is a style of OOP programming that is supposed to have come out of the experience on that project. In the strict sense, you are supposed to never invoke methods on objects embedded inside other object. Instead, the containing object is supposed to have a method that in turn invokes the method on the embedded object.
This manner of strict enforcement of encapsulation has the effect that most of your methods are mainly invocations of other methods. This may have the effect that any typical method invocation results in a long chain of method invocations.
This is kind of like I ask Phil for the monthly report and Phil tells me "you gotta get that from Sally." So I shoot Sally an e-mail and she gives me the monthly report? No, that is bad in some sense because if my contact is Phil I am not supposed to know about Sally. So I e-mail Phil with the request, who e-mails Sue, who e-mails Tom, who in turn e-mails Jason, who finally e-mails Sally. And when Sally generates the monthly report, she passes it back through that chain. So am I correct in thinking that OOP leads to such high levels of indirection, and programming styles such as Law of Demeter make this worse?
This style of programming probably helps coarse-grained parallelism of breaking programs up into elements that can run on separate threads or even processes. It helps by the rigorous enforcement of encapsulation. But this high level of indirection may break fine-grained parallelism -- every memory access chases long sequences of references.
The same thing happened with Project Mohole, the Journey Partway to the Center of the Earth Project funded by NSF in the '60's.
The Moho is short for Mohorovicic -- a Hrv (Croatian) scientist who discovered some seismic-wave boundary between crust and upper mantle. The Mohole was the effort do drill "partway to China" as it were, doing this in the ocean where the crust is to be thinner. You had to do seaborne drilling, which is hard, but you had to drill through less crust.
It seems that Texas drilling contractor Brown and Root blew through the budget and they never got there.
I guess people are talking C? I program C++ with the classes in the.h files, using the.cpp files only to determine which root classes get created. Criticize me for not following good practices, but I do this to simplify translation of programs between C++ and Java, where everything is done in terms of classes and there is only the one.java type source file.
So at least in C++, the header files could just specify interfaces or they could specify the entire program source code.
Yes, I am basing my opinions pre-official investigation on the PBS NOVA program. Their explanation at least gives a plausible context for the accident if perhaps not the final word on the cause.
For starters, even though the flight-recorder black boxes are not found, there was telemetry of the autopilot and autothrottle disengaging. There also were numerous incidents with the A-330 prior to the accident where the airspeed sensing pitot tubes iced up, resulting in the same syndrome in the autopilot and other controls.
As to the trained pilots in the simulator, these were a pair of instructor pilots -- sort of like the squadron leaders rather than the line troops. And yes, there is a procedure to follow -- the stream of messages regarding the autopilot and autothrottle disengaging is to be recognized as the syndrome for the pitot tubes being plugged, and you are supposed to fly the airplane by pitching the nose up and by adding power in prescribed amounts. This wastes fuel, but the airplane is stable that way without having to know your air speed.
So in a perfect, crash-free world, the A-330 would have pitot tubes that don't ice up. Or when the pitot tubes ice up and the computer program senses that airspeed is gone, that program would automatically apply the procedure of nose high and add throttle. Or instead of bombarding the pilots with alarms, a soft male voice would announce, "I believe we have lost the airspeed indication, Dave. I am sorry Dave, but I am disconnecting the autopilot. Please pitch up 5 degrees and set power at 85%."
Or the pilots would have had more intensive training on responding to this type of failure. The training syllabus spends lots of time on engine failure, and a pilot who cannot respond to engine failure gets flunked out of a license and a job. Do line pilots get any simulator practice on this kind of instrument failure or is it "look these fault codes up in the manual when they happen"?
Finally, this scenario is just NOVA's interpretation. Maybe right after the autopilot disengaged, the pilots were blinded by a lightning flash and could not see the flight instruments. We just don't know.
But just like the Wisconsin Governor and allies ragging on public employees, it is so easy to make judgements about other people and how they are supposed to do their jobs. There is a vocabulary for this: union members "feel entitled", Airbus pilots are "spoiled." Opinions are expressed on what others ought to do. Slashdot posts ought to use standard punctuation. I, for one, say this name calling ought to stop . . .
There was a British astronomer by the name of Sir Robert Ball, who published his Treatise on Screws in the early 1900's.
There has been a revival of screw theory in the study of robots and other machines. The basic idea is that any two rigid body postures can be connected by a helical (screw) motion along a single axis line -- this is attributed to Chasles (as in Chasles' Theorem).
Recently, a keyword search on this topic turned up a paper titled "Jerk Influence Coefficients, via Screw Theory, of Closed Chains." All of those words have an innocent meaning. Jerk is the derivative of acceleration as acceleration is in turn the derivative of velocity. Screw theory refers to Ball's Treatise on the parameterization of rigid body motions, and yes, a rigid body has a strict theoretical definition as well. A chain is a connection of links, such as in a robot or an automobile suspension mechanism, and a closed chain refers to where both ends are connected to the same reference body.
Yes, the people who publish in this field are not innocents and are fully aware of the cant meaning of all of these words and perhaps it is an inside joke in the community. But what was unexpected was that Google thought I was a leather-cruiser-culture gay person for turning up that paper (jerk, screw, chains), offering ads for "Find an HIV specialist near you", "HIV Treatment Basics", and the like.
Along those lines, I have gotten surprisingly little grief for my Slashdot handle, which derives from my geek interest in phase change as mediating heat transfer in heating, cooling and renewable energy systems. "Latent" is a somewhat archaic term for what people nowadays call "closeted", and "heat" has always meant "desire", and that double meaning is not what I had intended. But not that there is anything wrong with that!
So some suit is claiming Android is less secure because it is open in some sense. A suit makes some claim and the sun also rises in the east.
"This comes a week after Trend Micro released a mobility security app for Android."
Oooooooohhh. Trend Micro wants us to worry about security and then sell us a security app.
Slashdot is News for Nerds: the OP's are supposed to be news whereas the editorializing is supposed to take place in the comments sections. There is a trend around here that the OP's render their opinions now.
I say to the OP's, cut out the snark and leave the snark to those of us in the Peanut Gallery. If you want to color the news with your opinions, get in line with the rest of us and subject your comments to the moderation system.
Extradinary claims required extraordinary evidence and all of that. For really "cool" phenomena such as UFOs and hauntings, the temptation to perpetrate a hoax is tremendous.
James Randi is a stage magician where the stock-in-trade is creating illusions. In stage magic, it is all for fun, but Randi got upset that various ghost hunters and psychics and so on were doing the same thing while claiming it was real instead of a magic trick.
His basic knock on scientists conducting investigations into Uri Geller and the like is that scientists take things at face value -- that the people in question are playing fair. I believe Randi spoke well of Johnny Carson as providing a public forum for Geller and others to attempt to prove whatever it is that they are supposed to do -- Carson as an entertainer had technical knowledge about stage magic performance and knew what tricks to look for.
To investigate ghost claims, not only do you have to be thorough with your data gathering, you have to be on guard with respect to deception. Remember, before he hooked up with his geek friend who had gear that worked on ghosts for real, the Bill Murray character was a lacadaisical scientist and a charlatan ESP researcher.
I think that if you read the Gospels closely, Jesus doesn't call himself Son of God -- that is something he is called by others: John the Baptist, Peter/Cephas, the Roman Centurion.
Jesus does call himself "Son of Man", a term that was a little baffling to people, contemporary with Jesus and even today. I had seen one Bible translation render that as "the one who is human" -- what little I understand about Semitic languages is that their grammer lacks an objective case. An example of this is where Jesus calls Zebedee's sons, James and John, "Sons of thunder" -- it probably was an Aramaic grammatical rendering of "Thundering one's" or "those guys who thunder."
The closest Jesus comes to identifying with the Father is in the Gospel of John (please excuse the paraphrase) where Jesus uses language to the effect of "The Father and I are one" or "To know me is to know the Father." Yeah, there is an actor who gives a performance of the memorized recitation of the Gospel of John, and no offense intended to you and others dealing with major mental illness, but the interpretation given to those lines is a little bit of the crazy you are alluding to.
The other thing you have to know about the Gospel of John is that it is not one of the "synoptic Gospels" but rather it is explaining to the Greek churches about who Jesus is -- "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God" -- the whole rest of John is a series of variations on that opening profession of belief.
But I am not following your remark about "no mental illness in Jesus time." Not to get into a theological discussion about such things, but the accounts of persons from whom Jesus cast out demons sounds a whole lot like the symptomology of major mental illness. And a lot of Jesus' reputation was on healing physical illness -- leprosy, paralysis, hemorrhage -- so to the extent that he was healing people based on their faith, and that gets into the question of mental influence on physical health, perhaps Jesus was healing the mentally ill, only they called it something else.
Again, if you read the Gospels carefully, Jesus is measured in his words regarding what he calls himself, so to assign to Jesus a diagnosis of a delusional mental illness state is a stretch. On the other hand, Jesus does not disabuse people who believe him to what people of faith believe Jesus to be -- Pilate asks Jesus "are you King of the Jews" and the reply is something to the effect, "if that is what you say that I am." Back in the day as in our day, who Jesus is is who we say Jesus is -- it is a matter of personal belief in response to the signs and the prophetic narrative.
I have perhaps a tiny window into what you have experienced in the form of the altered state of consciousness brought on by the high fever I had with the mumps. Whoever a person says that Jesus is becomes a matter of personal belief, but I don't think there is a basis to diagnose mental illness based on the Gospel accounts.
Actually there is a serious concern that persons concerned about the environment may have.
Any time you run a steam power plant, you have to figure out how to cool the condenser. Usually that means using a lake or a river as a source of cooling water; the next best is to use a "wet" cooling tower; what you don't want to have to use is a "dry" cooling tower.
A source of water for a lot of these things could be a problem in the desert, although I suppose you could use brackish water or other water not suitable for drinking. Then, if you are pumping such water from a well, where do you discharge it?
Not saying solar-thermal power is without merit or that the anti-progress faction is right about everything, but this plan does have the problem of cooling water in the desert.
What you want is Java's BufferedImage class. Nearest thing to a frame buffer where you can set individual pixels. You can map it to a graphics context and draw lines and characters on it. Best thing since the days of raw VGA.
Slashdot Mirror
A bait car with cameras, remote control, and remote locking? Where can I get me one?
A good A/C saving shingle is more than just white to the eye -- it has to have both good reflectivity as well as good emissivity, otherwise the roof will heat up like a tin roof. Odds are that a black shingle (again, it would need to be tested broad-band) has poor reflectivity but good emissivity. Hence a black shingle will radiate no more than a white shingle, but it will certainly absorb more. On balance, if you live in a cold climate, you may want to weigh the thermal gain of the black shingle over the cool roof effect of the white shingle.
The other thing is that according to Stefan-Boltzmann, the radiation effect goes as temperature to the 4th power, hence the emissivity of a shingle exposed to full summer sun on a hot day is important, the emissivity as a loss mechanism for the solar gain at winter surface temps, even when solar heated, less so.
One, the advantage of "painting your roof white" may depend on where you live. Even with this sweltering heat wave, those of us living far north of the Mason Dixon line spend far less on A/C than we do on heat. The reflective coating may not be best in every situation.
Secondly, it is not simply a matter of painting something white. An optimal coating has to have a high emissivity as well as high reflectivity. For example, a tin (galvanized metal) roof can get very hot because it is reflective, yes, but it doesn't emit heat very well either, and such a roof may not save on A/C usage.
Thirdly, there may be "lower tech" solutions to the same thing. I had a new shingle roof put up on my dad's place. We looked into the extra-cost Energy Star shingles that would have also qualified for the tax credit, but the roofer suggested going with a conventional shingle on account of cost, availability, and going with a known quantity in terms of lifetime, but the roofer installed ridge vents.
Those ridge vents keep the upstairs a good 10 deg-F cooler on sunny summer days. Of course ridge events are not "Democracy-whiskey-sexy" and do not qualify for Federal tax credits, but I would recommend them any day. Yes, by keeping the attic cooler, you get less solar gain in cold seasons, but by increasing ventilation, they should help dry out the insulation and make it work more effectively, both summer and winter.
In other words, if Jesus was calling out the Pharisees for being overt in their charitable deeds, he was not challenging them with anything they would not have already known.
Or perhaps even earlier to Maximus Recyclimus, who engineered the waste management system in the 2nd century B.C.E. Roman Republic.
OK, OK, we take it "in" a little!
No, no, red!
(customer ejected from ATM) Beeeeewwwwwhhhh!
Maybe it was a month in the calendar invented for the GUI Revolution but the old calendar was put back in effect when Bill Gates took over.
They lost airspeed indications, but did they have altitude readouts? Attitude indications from a gyro? Angle of attack (not quite the same thing as attitude)? If they had a "partial panel", would they have had reliable indications of what was "good" what readouts were wrong?
The phone company had that time-of-day pricing (good that is gone -- Hi Mom, sorry it is 2 AM by you but it is 11 PM for me here in college, and um, I need some money). GM would slap a Buick badge on a Chevy, Ford a Lincoln badge on a Ford and charge money for the status consciousness, that is until Bimmers and Audis came in fashion, although an Audi is a Volkswagen with a different badge on it. Airlines, don't get me started, have this patchwork of fares. Some of this is to fill plane seats and recoup costs at off-peak times, other of this is to offer teasers of bargain fares and then stick it to you when you have to get some place on short notice.
Yes sir, to charge different customers different amounts on willingness to pay for pretty much the same thing has long been the Holy Grail of marketing, but besides the seeming unfairness of it, and to all of you Libertarians, part of success in business is your reputation, and from a utilitarian standpoint, it imposes all manner of inconvenience.
Yes, we have cheap air fares, but on balance I have a low opinion of airlines. Yes, you can negotiate a good deal on a car, but the thought that car dealers "size you up" and someone else is getting a lower price on the car gives me a low opinion of car dealers and the auto industry in general. Yes, you can stay on this side of the law when it comes to swindling customers and I suppose there is a Randian Objectivist rationale to do that, but as a society we are the poorer for it.
The style of mutating objects comes about when you don't have good garbage collection. You want to avoid creating immutable objects that you have to discard as this stresses the garbage collector.
But they tell me there has been considerable progress in garbage collection, both in theory as to how it could be done and in practice in later versions of Java. The Java people are now encouraging the use of immutable objects because they claim their garbage collector is efficient enough to handle this style of programming, even thrives on creating objects with short lifetimes.
Demeter, they tell me, was some manner of software project and the Law of Demeter is a style of OOP programming that is supposed to have come out of the experience on that project. In the strict sense, you are supposed to never invoke methods on objects embedded inside other object. Instead, the containing object is supposed to have a method that in turn invokes the method on the embedded object.
This manner of strict enforcement of encapsulation has the effect that most of your methods are mainly invocations of other methods. This may have the effect that any typical method invocation results in a long chain of method invocations.
This is kind of like I ask Phil for the monthly report and Phil tells me "you gotta get that from Sally." So I shoot Sally an e-mail and she gives me the monthly report? No, that is bad in some sense because if my contact is Phil I am not supposed to know about Sally. So I e-mail Phil with the request, who e-mails Sue, who e-mails Tom, who in turn e-mails Jason, who finally e-mails Sally. And when Sally generates the monthly report, she passes it back through that chain. So am I correct in thinking that OOP leads to such high levels of indirection, and programming styles such as Law of Demeter make this worse?
This style of programming probably helps coarse-grained parallelism of breaking programs up into elements that can run on separate threads or even processes. It helps by the rigorous enforcement of encapsulation. But this high level of indirection may break fine-grained parallelism -- every memory access chases long sequences of references.
The Moho is short for Mohorovicic -- a Hrv (Croatian) scientist who discovered some seismic-wave boundary between crust and upper mantle. The Mohole was the effort do drill "partway to China" as it were, doing this in the ocean where the crust is to be thinner. You had to do seaborne drilling, which is hard, but you had to drill through less crust.
It seems that Texas drilling contractor Brown and Root blew through the budget and they never got there.
He has to say that every now and then that we know we are in the presence of greatness.
So at least in C++, the header files could just specify interfaces or they could specify the entire program source code.
For starters, even though the flight-recorder black boxes are not found, there was telemetry of the autopilot and autothrottle disengaging. There also were numerous incidents with the A-330 prior to the accident where the airspeed sensing pitot tubes iced up, resulting in the same syndrome in the autopilot and other controls.
As to the trained pilots in the simulator, these were a pair of instructor pilots -- sort of like the squadron leaders rather than the line troops. And yes, there is a procedure to follow -- the stream of messages regarding the autopilot and autothrottle disengaging is to be recognized as the syndrome for the pitot tubes being plugged, and you are supposed to fly the airplane by pitching the nose up and by adding power in prescribed amounts. This wastes fuel, but the airplane is stable that way without having to know your air speed.
So in a perfect, crash-free world, the A-330 would have pitot tubes that don't ice up. Or when the pitot tubes ice up and the computer program senses that airspeed is gone, that program would automatically apply the procedure of nose high and add throttle. Or instead of bombarding the pilots with alarms, a soft male voice would announce, "I believe we have lost the airspeed indication, Dave. I am sorry Dave, but I am disconnecting the autopilot. Please pitch up 5 degrees and set power at 85%."
Or the pilots would have had more intensive training on responding to this type of failure. The training syllabus spends lots of time on engine failure, and a pilot who cannot respond to engine failure gets flunked out of a license and a job. Do line pilots get any simulator practice on this kind of instrument failure or is it "look these fault codes up in the manual when they happen"?
Finally, this scenario is just NOVA's interpretation. Maybe right after the autopilot disengaged, the pilots were blinded by a lightning flash and could not see the flight instruments. We just don't know.
But just like the Wisconsin Governor and allies ragging on public employees, it is so easy to make judgements about other people and how they are supposed to do their jobs. There is a vocabulary for this: union members "feel entitled", Airbus pilots are "spoiled." Opinions are expressed on what others ought to do. Slashdot posts ought to use standard punctuation. I, for one, say this name calling ought to stop . . .
There has been a revival of screw theory in the study of robots and other machines. The basic idea is that any two rigid body postures can be connected by a helical (screw) motion along a single axis line -- this is attributed to Chasles (as in Chasles' Theorem).
Recently, a keyword search on this topic turned up a paper titled "Jerk Influence Coefficients, via Screw Theory, of Closed Chains." All of those words have an innocent meaning. Jerk is the derivative of acceleration as acceleration is in turn the derivative of velocity. Screw theory refers to Ball's Treatise on the parameterization of rigid body motions, and yes, a rigid body has a strict theoretical definition as well. A chain is a connection of links, such as in a robot or an automobile suspension mechanism, and a closed chain refers to where both ends are connected to the same reference body.
Yes, the people who publish in this field are not innocents and are fully aware of the cant meaning of all of these words and perhaps it is an inside joke in the community. But what was unexpected was that Google thought I was a leather-cruiser-culture gay person for turning up that paper (jerk, screw, chains), offering ads for "Find an HIV specialist near you", "HIV Treatment Basics", and the like.
Along those lines, I have gotten surprisingly little grief for my Slashdot handle, which derives from my geek interest in phase change as mediating heat transfer in heating, cooling and renewable energy systems. "Latent" is a somewhat archaic term for what people nowadays call "closeted", and "heat" has always meant "desire", and that double meaning is not what I had intended. But not that there is anything wrong with that!
I will commence my project to extract ENERGY from the CENTER OF THE EARTH unless the governments of the world pay me . . . ONE MILLYUN DOHLLARRS!
"This comes a week after Trend Micro released a mobility security app for Android."
Oooooooohhh. Trend Micro wants us to worry about security and then sell us a security app.
Slashdot is News for Nerds: the OP's are supposed to be news whereas the editorializing is supposed to take place in the comments sections. There is a trend around here that the OP's render their opinions now.
I say to the OP's, cut out the snark and leave the snark to those of us in the Peanut Gallery. If you want to color the news with your opinions, get in line with the rest of us and subject your comments to the moderation system.
James Randi is a stage magician where the stock-in-trade is creating illusions. In stage magic, it is all for fun, but Randi got upset that various ghost hunters and psychics and so on were doing the same thing while claiming it was real instead of a magic trick.
His basic knock on scientists conducting investigations into Uri Geller and the like is that scientists take things at face value -- that the people in question are playing fair. I believe Randi spoke well of Johnny Carson as providing a public forum for Geller and others to attempt to prove whatever it is that they are supposed to do -- Carson as an entertainer had technical knowledge about stage magic performance and knew what tricks to look for.
To investigate ghost claims, not only do you have to be thorough with your data gathering, you have to be on guard with respect to deception. Remember, before he hooked up with his geek friend who had gear that worked on ghosts for real, the Bill Murray character was a lacadaisical scientist and a charlatan ESP researcher.
Joseph Conrad, you're next.
Jesus does call himself "Son of Man", a term that was a little baffling to people, contemporary with Jesus and even today. I had seen one Bible translation render that as "the one who is human" -- what little I understand about Semitic languages is that their grammer lacks an objective case. An example of this is where Jesus calls Zebedee's sons, James and John, "Sons of thunder" -- it probably was an Aramaic grammatical rendering of "Thundering one's" or "those guys who thunder."
The closest Jesus comes to identifying with the Father is in the Gospel of John (please excuse the paraphrase) where Jesus uses language to the effect of "The Father and I are one" or "To know me is to know the Father." Yeah, there is an actor who gives a performance of the memorized recitation of the Gospel of John, and no offense intended to you and others dealing with major mental illness, but the interpretation given to those lines is a little bit of the crazy you are alluding to.
The other thing you have to know about the Gospel of John is that it is not one of the "synoptic Gospels" but rather it is explaining to the Greek churches about who Jesus is -- "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God" -- the whole rest of John is a series of variations on that opening profession of belief.
But I am not following your remark about "no mental illness in Jesus time." Not to get into a theological discussion about such things, but the accounts of persons from whom Jesus cast out demons sounds a whole lot like the symptomology of major mental illness. And a lot of Jesus' reputation was on healing physical illness -- leprosy, paralysis, hemorrhage -- so to the extent that he was healing people based on their faith, and that gets into the question of mental influence on physical health, perhaps Jesus was healing the mentally ill, only they called it something else.
Again, if you read the Gospels carefully, Jesus is measured in his words regarding what he calls himself, so to assign to Jesus a diagnosis of a delusional mental illness state is a stretch. On the other hand, Jesus does not disabuse people who believe him to what people of faith believe Jesus to be -- Pilate asks Jesus "are you King of the Jews" and the reply is something to the effect, "if that is what you say that I am." Back in the day as in our day, who Jesus is is who we say Jesus is -- it is a matter of personal belief in response to the signs and the prophetic narrative.
I have perhaps a tiny window into what you have experienced in the form of the altered state of consciousness brought on by the high fever I had with the mumps. Whoever a person says that Jesus is becomes a matter of personal belief, but I don't think there is a basis to diagnose mental illness based on the Gospel accounts.
Any time you run a steam power plant, you have to figure out how to cool the condenser. Usually that means using a lake or a river as a source of cooling water; the next best is to use a "wet" cooling tower; what you don't want to have to use is a "dry" cooling tower.
A source of water for a lot of these things could be a problem in the desert, although I suppose you could use brackish water or other water not suitable for drinking. Then, if you are pumping such water from a well, where do you discharge it?
Not saying solar-thermal power is without merit or that the anti-progress faction is right about everything, but this plan does have the problem of cooling water in the desert.
. . . ATM defrauds you!
What you want is Java's BufferedImage class. Nearest thing to a frame buffer where you can set individual pixels. You can map it to a graphics context and draw lines and characters on it. Best thing since the days of raw VGA.