Creationists always try to use the second law, to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw. The second law is quite precise about where it applies, only in a closed system must the entropy count rise. The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun, so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
You mean like Saturn, Mercury, Atlas, and Titan? I agree we need more awesome names like that.
I personally really like the names of the Falcon rockets with the Kestrel and Merlin engines -- two types of falcon, you see.
How does Draco not fit in?
And when you make something that's like the thing with the cool name, but way above it, "Super" is often applied.
When Boeing made a new long-range bomber to follow on the B-17 Flying Fortress, they called it the Superfortress. Super actually seems a pretty popular adjective to apply to aircraft.
Lovely post, thank you for the info, but just gotta correct the name because "Canadarm" is an awesome name for an awesome piece of equipment.
Side note to anyone from DARPA listening: When you build your first orbital weapon, please call it the "Americannon". You don't have to give me anything for the name! It's yours! A Distinguished Service award or somesuch would be nice though...
Wizards of the Coast has a long standing list of reserved cards which will not be reprinted.
As I told the AC who said the same thing: if that list existed at the time the Chronicles expansion came out and dropped the bottom out of the market for a huge number of old cards (and subsequent expansions that did the same thing to a lesser degree), then nobody in my community was aware of it. "Oh it's on their website" would have brought mostly blank stares. Frankly I doubt they had a web presence at the time. This was in the early 90s, you see. I'm an old-timer as such things go,.:)
And this list never appeared in Scrye magazine or I'm sure one of the nerds arguing over whether they'd ever reprint Black Lotus would have chimed in with it.
So yeah, maybe now you can limit your purchases to cards on that list and be relatively safe. But at one time nobody knew what the safe cards were, many cards had high value, and then their value tanked when the artificial scarcity vanished. True story.
Especially when you say "power", that refers to a very small pool of cards (nine)Especially when you say "power", that refers to a very small pool of cards (nine)
Oh! Yeah, I fucked that up, I'd used that term because it sounded right while totally forgetting it referred specifically to the Moxes, Black Lotus, and whatever the fuck the other ones were. It's been a long time.
They may not be the best form of money investment out there, but the anecdote you use to support your claim is spun out of whole cloth.
Now that's just not fair. If you're that in tune with the history of Magic then you know that something very much like what I said did happen, ergo not "whole cloth". Chronicles I think was the name of the first expansion that really did it and dropped the bottom out of the price for tons of cards from the early named expansions (Legends, Antiquities, Arabian Knights, can't remember if there were others). I personally knew people who had "invested" large amounts of money in these cards and found the values of their collections slashed overnight.
By the way this was in the first half of the 90s. If you'd said "Wizards of the Coast has a list on their website" most people would have just stared at you. Frankly I'm guessing that this list was something they created later, after having already shown that they will reprint old cards and thus making people scared. Certainly no one at the comic store gaming sessions were aware of such a list as there were plenty of arguments over whether WotC would ever reprint the Moxes. If this list had been printed in Scrye at any point one of them would have seen it and brought it up.
In any event, to the extent that you restrict your purchases to cards on the list and believe WotC really will never violate their promise, then those cards are a much better investment than any other Magic card or comic books or anything else where there is no reason to expect artificial scarcity to continue.
Absolutely. As commercial ventures start to make the trip to LEO cheaper, what NASA should be doing is working on basic technology to enhance what we can do once we get there. Like use LEO (halfway to Mars in terms of delta-v) as a staging point for a mission beyond.
This is the kind of thing that makes me feel good about NASA's future.
No, they're thinking shorter. They're thinking "I don't have to do anything, because in the future (when I don't have to experience it) if problems occur I just assume humanity will be okay."
Sounds like his survival instinct does exist, just at a higher level: that of the species.
Someone concerned about the fate of the species wouldn't be cavalier about our chances after passing through a 99% population bottleneck. They would be incredibly concerned that we not put all our eggs (literally in this case) in such a tiny basket (the basket is metaphorical).
An irrelevant observation since the original poster's argument is not dependent on people never dying from starvation, but rather that the species is not so vulnerable. It's also worth noting that famine now is due to societal and infrastructure problems in a few countries rather than some flaw of humanity to adapt to changing circumstances.
It's irrelevant to point out that when a human population is denied its primary food source, it doesn't just instantly adapt to a new food source and carry on but rather suffers and dies in large numbers? When refuting the idea that if humanity's primary food sources go away we can just switch to another one no problem? Yeah, I think it's very relevant.
Aren't societal and infrastructure problems in countries that used to be able to feed themselves just changes that they should be able to adapt to? Why are these changes beyond human adaptability, but anything climate-related is assumed not to be?
Because surely, climate change won't result in any social or infrastructure problems. Nope. If coastal cities flood and a significant percentage of the world's population has to move inland that's going to be easy-breezy. It's not like there's any important infrastructure on the coasts. If the location of arable land shifts from a nice convenient place like the Midwest to the Middle East, no problems. No wars, no upheaval, nothing to deal with but some minor climate problems.
Don't get me wrong -- humans are very adaptable. That's for sure. Our adaptability isn't "flawed". But it also isn't perfect. Being able to survive in a wider range of environments than most other species does not mean we can survive anywhere close to anything.
In particular in our modern world, most of us depend on the rest of civilization for our survival. In many ways, we are less adaptable today than in the past. Which is fine -- specialization and the pyramid of technology we depend on makes our lives better and supports a larger population of humans than in the days when our entire technology stack could be created in a day with access to rocks and sticks.
Doesn't sound to me like you do either. What's the "easy" event that kicks over modern civilization and drives humanity to extinction?
Ha! Please. Your city is about one to four weeks from the last delivery of food, fuel, electricity, or water from anarchy.
Think about everything it takes for you to get a sandwich on your table. Crops grown in the midwest are brought to your city by a truck where they're kept fresh in the grocery store with refrigeration. Oh but the crops need artificial fertilizers, made in a factory. That factory needs a huge swath of input chemicals, including petroleum. Which the truck also needs. One hurricane hitting one region where drilling platforms and refineries are located caused skyrocketing fuel prices and even shortages. If a bigger hurricane, or more than one, knocked out those same pieces of infrastructure for longer, then the shortage would have become severe. The truck might not show up. The factory might not be able to make the fertilizer for the next season's crops. Your grocery store is empty.
And that's just one of the more obvious branches in the system. If you really trace out what goes into everything you take for granted that enables your survival, you'll find there are a great many things where any one of them taken out for a significant period of time can bring the whole thing down. Is that, or any one thing, irrecoverable? No. But when we're talking about Global Climate Change, we will never be talking about any one thing. There will be many changes, many things that go wrong, many upheavals.
Believing we don't need to worry because humanity is just so awesome (I mean look at our technology!) is naive and foolish.
If another animal loses its primary food source, it goes extinct. If we lose a primary food source, we eat something else. We synthesize, design, control, analyze, adapt, repurpose, refine... everything. We are not dinosaurs with nut-sized brains that can't even control their body temperature.
So I guess everyone who has died or will die from famine is just a dinosaur with a nut-sized brain?
That's a pretty bold statement of human adaptability coming from someone who would probably be unable to feed themselves the week after the grocery trucks stop showing up (or in the unlikely event you can, then from someone who hasn't thought about all their hungry neighbors who can't).
You really don't seem to appreciate all the things that go into making modern civilization work, the long legs that support the technology you appreciate and assume would allow us to survive anything, but in reality could have the legs knocked out from underneath it rather easily.
All we know is what did actually happen, and that is that all mass extinctions have had net positive effects in the long term
Thanks for pointing to evidence that this isn't actually true -- even if I accepted the notion that increased diversity is in and of itself "positive", and even if I accepted that the extinctions have a causal effect .
The graphs on the page you courteously linked to clearly shows several mass-extinctions where diversity recovered to an approximately equal value, but did not regain the same slope and instead leveled off. In at least one case it didn't even recover to the same level. The K-T event shows diversity recovering both the value and the steep slope of the Cretaceous. Which is not bad, but not evidence that the result post-KT was an "improvement".
Even mass extinctions were not causal or catalytic, it is undeniable that they were not preclusive of those positive outcomes
I'd say that the only thing that is undeniable is that over the extremely long-by-geological-standards term, diversity increased regardless of mass extinctions. Looking at periods of a mere 50-100 million years, I think it becomes much harder to argue that most mass extinctions didn't preclude the positive outcome.
Of course that still assumes that more diversity -- when diversity is not already extremely low -- is "positive". That sounds like the same kind of arbitrary application of human value systems to morally-neutral nature that you accuse the "One Sacred Biosphere" people of. Just a different flavor of Hippie.
What's really strange is that this is the second time in under a week that I've heard this same new, and highly bizarre, argument for why Climate Change isn't a big deal.
I suppose you think the ocean has been the same pH forever too. Life adapts, and ocean life itself has shown an ability to spring back from as much as 90% species extinction.
Yeah, and maybe ocean life will adapt in such a way to create a new equivalent to the Oxygen Catastrophe only this time with a gas that is toxic to us. I mean it's not like there would be any other repercussions to a a drastically more acidic ocean, and the resulting collapse of existing ocean ecosystems, am I right?
I'm not worried, especially as humans have the technology to build closed systems for environmental control and resource production/management.
No we don't. There is no such system. Everything that is pretending to be such a system is in reality dependent on an extremely long and broad pyramid of precursors that at many points could easily be disrupted by such mundane things as war or weather. A dramatic change in the nature of the biosphere would practically be a shoe-in for the collapse of broad swaths of civilization. The idea that it can all just be weathered with closed systems is a pipe dream. You might as well say you're not worried because we could just move to Mars.
(Humanity too has sprung back from an immensely small population, as low as thousands at one point. We could lose 99.99999+% of our population and still have precedent for survival.)
Yes it's possible, but if you don't think we got lucky to survive such a population bottleneck, then you're just wrong. Counting on us doing it again is just foolish. And what about yourself? Surely you don't believe you're sure to be one of the lucky 0.0000001% do you?
You aren't worried about the vast majority, even the entirety, of humanity dying.
You aren't worried about the collapse of our current civilizations.
You aren't even worried about your own life.
Uh... that's nice, but maybe we should talk to someone who has a functioning survival instinct.
Population growth is leveling off, but that doesn't sell newspapers
The real irony is that people concerned with population growth are most concerned with those parts of the world where population growth has not leveled off. The parts of the world that are responsible for the rest of the world still having positive population growth due to immigration.
The problem with people today is that they are taught that we are living in The One True Sacred and Immutable Biosphere, and that if that biosphere changes, well, that's just the end of everything.
You think the problem is that people believe climate change will result in the end of all life on earth, when in reality is that the biosphere will just keep on chugging. So if we solved this "problem", there'd be no reason to worry about climate change. That's what you're saying?
You don't think the problem is, maybe, what might happen to us? That the one thing that is sacred about our current biosphere is that it's amenable to human habitation and survival?
What I think is funny is that you missed the whole point of that story-- we are the anaerobic organisms. Go ahead and tell them that in the long term the biosphere will recover, and even thrive. You think they will feel better? Why does this make you feel better? Are you one of those hippies who thinks Gaia would be better off if humanity was extinct? Or do you just think our civilizations are so robust that they can weather any storm, even widespread ecosystem collapse, and you'll be fine?
The fossil record shows that time and time again biosphere changes are not only recovered from, but that the net effect is dramatically positive in terms of long term diversity.
Interesting assertion. I think the fossil record simply shows increasing diversity over time, with each mass extinction representing a huge backward slide in those terms, from which the biosphere eventually recovers. I'd like to see some evidence that, say, there was less diversity in the late Cretaceous, and more importantly that there'd be less diversity today if the KT event had not occurred.
More to the point, though, why would this matter either way from the perspective of Tyrannosaurus Rex?
There's a simple lesson here: Never treat something as an "investment" when the value is based entirely on artificial scarcity when the organization controlling the scarcity has no financial incentive to maintain the scarcity!
Money or stocks can be good investments because even though governments or corporations can issue new money/stock, it is detrimental to their own finances to do so without limit because they use that money and stock. So they have to balance reducing the scarcity with the resulting loss of value.
Marvel doesn't buy things with copies of Amazing Spiderman #1, the value of that comic has no direct effect on the company, so why would anyone assume they'd never do anything to tank its value?
Because publishers love secondary markets where they themselves don't see any of the profit, am I right?
I saw the same thing in Magic: The Gathering. Someone would pay hundreds of dollars for a rare first-print power card, and would rationalize it as an investment. Ha! Then -- to the surprise of only a few morons -- WotC reprinted most of these cards and made the originals next to worthless.
So, yeah, thinking of them as a long-term investment was kinda silly to begin with. And as the ACs pointed out, this has nothing to do with "artistic integrity" (it's about their money-grubbing vs yours), and is in fact better for the community at large because they get to enjoy the thing that before only a few did.
So yeah, thanks comic companies for spreading enjoyment and teaching people valuable economic lessons!
Huh? I remember the movie and comic endings being nearly identical, especially in that regard -- everyone but Rorschach plays along, because only Rorschach was completely sure he was doing the right thing in the first place. Everyone else is like "Oh, hey, maybe this was worth avoiding nuclear war."
The point of engineering is to have "just enough cake." Not too much (overdesign), not too little (underdesign).
But now imagine your equipment is going somewhere that you know very little about (this being the whole point of why you're sending it), and there is no possibility for repair, upgrade (outside of software), or second chances.
Now are you going to aim for "just enough", or are you going to err on the side of over-design? How are you going to determine what "just enough" is, when you don't know what the environment will be like?
The correct way to engineer something like the Mars rover was not to try to make it "just enough". The correct way to engineer them is to make them as robust as can possibly be made, within the mass budget.
And this isn't the only situation where optimizing for the exact amount required is bad engineering, and optimizing the amount that can fit within other constraints is good engineering.
Sorry but the natural assumption that power consumption decreases with decreasing transistor sizes went out the window pretty much right around the 90nm node. That was the inflection point where leakage went from being a minor nuisance to a major contributor comparable to switching power. Leakage goes up with decreasing transistor size, and so now it's a struggle to make sure that the new generation of part uses merely the same amount of power as the previous generation.
Lowering the power of devices today is more about driving your design with reducing power in mind, rather than counting on process technology to do it for you.
You forgot leakage current, which in modern designs is comparable to the switching power.
Yeah, chip makers really wish power was only consumed on the transitions.
But, to answer the original question about a theoretical limit, yes there is. turning disorder into order takes energy, so you can approach it from a thermodynamics standpoint.
If your computer solely makes use of reversible calculations, you can reduce the power consumed to arbitrarily low levels using adiabatic circuits. Unfortunately "arbitrarily low power" comes commensurate with "arbitrary long computation time" so not necessarily a way to get TFlops/Watt.
This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.
Hell, they originally thought the wind would be completely negligible, and the dust build-up that would result had in that case was the whole reason for the 90 day mission plan. So, yeah, they kinda anticipated the whole dust thing.
Isn't it nice when being wrong is a pleasant surprise? And hey, learning that kind of thing about the planet is part of why we're sending robots there. It all fits together nicely.
Slashdot Mirror
Creationists always try to use the second law,
to disprove evolution, but their theory has a flaw.
The second law is quite precise about where it applies,
only in a closed system must the entropy count rise.
The earth's not a closed system' it's powered by the sun,
so fuck the damn creationists, Doomsday get my gun!
-- M.C. Hawking, "Entropy"
So what is the mass equivalent of 222,504,000 TeraWatthours if one gram of matter is equivalent to 10E+13 J of energy?
8912 metric tonnes.
Can we go back to decent rocket names?
You mean like Saturn, Mercury, Atlas, and Titan? I agree we need more awesome names like that.
I personally really like the names of the Falcon rockets with the Kestrel and Merlin engines -- two types of falcon, you see.
How does Draco not fit in?
And when you make something that's like the thing with the cool name, but way above it, "Super" is often applied.
When Boeing made a new long-range bomber to follow on the B-17 Flying Fortress, they called it the Superfortress. Super actually seems a pretty popular adjective to apply to aircraft.
Canadarm! Canadarm! One word!
Lovely post, thank you for the info, but just gotta correct the name because "Canadarm" is an awesome name for an awesome piece of equipment.
Side note to anyone from DARPA listening: When you build your first orbital weapon, please call it the "Americannon". You don't have to give me anything for the name! It's yours! A Distinguished Service award or somesuch would be nice though...
By filling the prequel with flash-forwards of course.
Wizards of the Coast has a long standing list of reserved cards which will not be reprinted.
As I told the AC who said the same thing: if that list existed at the time the Chronicles expansion came out and dropped the bottom out of the market for a huge number of old cards (and subsequent expansions that did the same thing to a lesser degree), then nobody in my community was aware of it. "Oh it's on their website" would have brought mostly blank stares. Frankly I doubt they had a web presence at the time. This was in the early 90s, you see. I'm an old-timer as such things go,. :)
And this list never appeared in Scrye magazine or I'm sure one of the nerds arguing over whether they'd ever reprint Black Lotus would have chimed in with it.
So yeah, maybe now you can limit your purchases to cards on that list and be relatively safe. But at one time nobody knew what the safe cards were, many cards had high value, and then their value tanked when the artificial scarcity vanished. True story.
Especially when you say "power", that refers to a very small pool of cards (nine)Especially when you say "power", that refers to a very small pool of cards (nine)
Oh! Yeah, I fucked that up, I'd used that term because it sounded right while totally forgetting it referred specifically to the Moxes, Black Lotus, and whatever the fuck the other ones were. It's been a long time.
They may not be the best form of money investment out there, but the anecdote you use to support your claim is spun out of whole cloth.
Now that's just not fair. If you're that in tune with the history of Magic then you know that something very much like what I said did happen, ergo not "whole cloth". Chronicles I think was the name of the first expansion that really did it and dropped the bottom out of the price for tons of cards from the early named expansions (Legends, Antiquities, Arabian Knights, can't remember if there were others). I personally knew people who had "invested" large amounts of money in these cards and found the values of their collections slashed overnight.
By the way this was in the first half of the 90s. If you'd said "Wizards of the Coast has a list on their website" most people would have just stared at you. Frankly I'm guessing that this list was something they created later, after having already shown that they will reprint old cards and thus making people scared. Certainly no one at the comic store gaming sessions were aware of such a list as there were plenty of arguments over whether WotC would ever reprint the Moxes. If this list had been printed in Scrye at any point one of them would have seen it and brought it up.
In any event, to the extent that you restrict your purchases to cards on the list and believe WotC really will never violate their promise, then those cards are a much better investment than any other Magic card or comic books or anything else where there is no reason to expect artificial scarcity to continue.
Absolutely. As commercial ventures start to make the trip to LEO cheaper, what NASA should be doing is working on basic technology to enhance what we can do once we get there. Like use LEO (halfway to Mars in terms of delta-v) as a staging point for a mission beyond.
This is the kind of thing that makes me feel good about NASA's future.
No, they're thinking shorter. They're thinking "I don't have to do anything, because in the future (when I don't have to experience it) if problems occur I just assume humanity will be okay."
Sounds like his survival instinct does exist, just at a higher level: that of the species.
Someone concerned about the fate of the species wouldn't be cavalier about our chances after passing through a 99% population bottleneck. They would be incredibly concerned that we not put all our eggs (literally in this case) in such a tiny basket (the basket is metaphorical).
An irrelevant observation since the original poster's argument is not dependent on people never dying from starvation, but rather that the species is not so vulnerable. It's also worth noting that famine now is due to societal and infrastructure problems in a few countries rather than some flaw of humanity to adapt to changing circumstances.
It's irrelevant to point out that when a human population is denied its primary food source, it doesn't just instantly adapt to a new food source and carry on but rather suffers and dies in large numbers? When refuting the idea that if humanity's primary food sources go away we can just switch to another one no problem? Yeah, I think it's very relevant.
Aren't societal and infrastructure problems in countries that used to be able to feed themselves just changes that they should be able to adapt to? Why are these changes beyond human adaptability, but anything climate-related is assumed not to be?
Because surely, climate change won't result in any social or infrastructure problems. Nope. If coastal cities flood and a significant percentage of the world's population has to move inland that's going to be easy-breezy. It's not like there's any important infrastructure on the coasts. If the location of arable land shifts from a nice convenient place like the Midwest to the Middle East, no problems. No wars, no upheaval, nothing to deal with but some minor climate problems.
Don't get me wrong -- humans are very adaptable. That's for sure. Our adaptability isn't "flawed". But it also isn't perfect. Being able to survive in a wider range of environments than most other species does not mean we can survive anywhere close to anything.
In particular in our modern world, most of us depend on the rest of civilization for our survival. In many ways, we are less adaptable today than in the past. Which is fine -- specialization and the pyramid of technology we depend on makes our lives better and supports a larger population of humans than in the days when our entire technology stack could be created in a day with access to rocks and sticks.
Doesn't sound to me like you do either. What's the "easy" event that kicks over modern civilization and drives humanity to extinction?
Ha! Please. Your city is about one to four weeks from the last delivery of food, fuel, electricity, or water from anarchy.
Think about everything it takes for you to get a sandwich on your table. Crops grown in the midwest are brought to your city by a truck where they're kept fresh in the grocery store with refrigeration. Oh but the crops need artificial fertilizers, made in a factory. That factory needs a huge swath of input chemicals, including petroleum. Which the truck also needs. One hurricane hitting one region where drilling platforms and refineries are located caused skyrocketing fuel prices and even shortages. If a bigger hurricane, or more than one, knocked out those same pieces of infrastructure for longer, then the shortage would have become severe. The truck might not show up. The factory might not be able to make the fertilizer for the next season's crops. Your grocery store is empty.
And that's just one of the more obvious branches in the system. If you really trace out what goes into everything you take for granted that enables your survival, you'll find there are a great many things where any one of them taken out for a significant period of time can bring the whole thing down. Is that, or any one thing, irrecoverable? No. But when we're talking about Global Climate Change, we will never be talking about any one thing. There will be many changes, many things that go wrong, many upheavals.
Believing we don't need to worry because humanity is just so awesome (I mean look at our technology!) is naive and foolish.
If another animal loses its primary food source, it goes extinct. If we lose a primary food source, we eat something else. We synthesize, design, control, analyze, adapt, repurpose, refine ... everything. We are not dinosaurs with nut-sized brains that can't even control their body temperature.
So I guess everyone who has died or will die from famine is just a dinosaur with a nut-sized brain?
That's a pretty bold statement of human adaptability coming from someone who would probably be unable to feed themselves the week after the grocery trucks stop showing up (or in the unlikely event you can, then from someone who hasn't thought about all their hungry neighbors who can't).
You really don't seem to appreciate all the things that go into making modern civilization work, the long legs that support the technology you appreciate and assume would allow us to survive anything, but in reality could have the legs knocked out from underneath it rather easily.
All we know is what did actually happen, and that is that all mass extinctions have had net positive effects in the long term
Thanks for pointing to evidence that this isn't actually true -- even if I accepted the notion that increased diversity is in and of itself "positive", and even if I accepted that the extinctions have a causal effect .
The graphs on the page you courteously linked to clearly shows several mass-extinctions where diversity recovered to an approximately equal value, but did not regain the same slope and instead leveled off. In at least one case it didn't even recover to the same level. The K-T event shows diversity recovering both the value and the steep slope of the Cretaceous. Which is not bad, but not evidence that the result post-KT was an "improvement".
Even mass extinctions were not causal or catalytic, it is undeniable that they were not preclusive of those positive outcomes
I'd say that the only thing that is undeniable is that over the extremely long-by-geological-standards term, diversity increased regardless of mass extinctions. Looking at periods of a mere 50-100 million years, I think it becomes much harder to argue that most mass extinctions didn't preclude the positive outcome.
Of course that still assumes that more diversity -- when diversity is not already extremely low -- is "positive". That sounds like the same kind of arbitrary application of human value systems to morally-neutral nature that you accuse the "One Sacred Biosphere" people of. Just a different flavor of Hippie.
What's really strange is that this is the second time in under a week that I've heard this same new, and highly bizarre, argument for why Climate Change isn't a big deal.
I suppose you think the ocean has been the same pH forever too. Life adapts, and ocean life itself has shown an ability to spring back from as much as 90% species extinction.
Yeah, and maybe ocean life will adapt in such a way to create a new equivalent to the Oxygen Catastrophe only this time with a gas that is toxic to us. I mean it's not like there would be any other repercussions to a a drastically more acidic ocean, and the resulting collapse of existing ocean ecosystems, am I right?
I'm not worried, especially as humans have the technology to build closed systems for environmental control and resource production/management.
No we don't. There is no such system. Everything that is pretending to be such a system is in reality dependent on an extremely long and broad pyramid of precursors that at many points could easily be disrupted by such mundane things as war or weather. A dramatic change in the nature of the biosphere would practically be a shoe-in for the collapse of broad swaths of civilization. The idea that it can all just be weathered with closed systems is a pipe dream. You might as well say you're not worried because we could just move to Mars.
(Humanity too has sprung back from an immensely small population, as low as thousands at one point. We could lose 99.99999+% of our population and still have precedent for survival.)
Yes it's possible, but if you don't think we got lucky to survive such a population bottleneck, then you're just wrong. Counting on us doing it again is just foolish. And what about yourself? Surely you don't believe you're sure to be one of the lucky 0.0000001% do you?
You aren't worried about the vast majority, even the entirety, of humanity dying.
You aren't worried about the collapse of our current civilizations.
You aren't even worried about your own life.
Uh... that's nice, but maybe we should talk to someone who has a functioning survival instinct.
Population growth is leveling off, but that doesn't sell newspapers
The real irony is that people concerned with population growth are most concerned with those parts of the world where population growth has not leveled off. The parts of the world that are responsible for the rest of the world still having positive population growth due to immigration.
No, you're right, it wasn't that the act itself was justified. It was that them keeping quiet about it and going along was justified.
The problem with people today is that they are taught that we are living in The One True Sacred and Immutable Biosphere, and that if that biosphere changes, well, that's just the end of everything.
You think the problem is that people believe climate change will result in the end of all life on earth, when in reality is that the biosphere will just keep on chugging. So if we solved this "problem", there'd be no reason to worry about climate change. That's what you're saying?
You don't think the problem is, maybe, what might happen to us? That the one thing that is sacred about our current biosphere is that it's amenable to human habitation and survival?
What I think is funny is that you missed the whole point of that story-- we are the anaerobic organisms. Go ahead and tell them that in the long term the biosphere will recover, and even thrive. You think they will feel better? Why does this make you feel better? Are you one of those hippies who thinks Gaia would be better off if humanity was extinct? Or do you just think our civilizations are so robust that they can weather any storm, even widespread ecosystem collapse, and you'll be fine?
The fossil record shows that time and time again biosphere changes are not only recovered from, but that the net effect is dramatically positive in terms of long term diversity.
Interesting assertion. I think the fossil record simply shows increasing diversity over time, with each mass extinction representing a huge backward slide in those terms, from which the biosphere eventually recovers. I'd like to see some evidence that, say, there was less diversity in the late Cretaceous, and more importantly that there'd be less diversity today if the KT event had not occurred.
More to the point, though, why would this matter either way from the perspective of Tyrannosaurus Rex?
There's a simple lesson here: Never treat something as an "investment" when the value is based entirely on artificial scarcity when the organization controlling the scarcity has no financial incentive to maintain the scarcity!
Money or stocks can be good investments because even though governments or corporations can issue new money/stock, it is detrimental to their own finances to do so without limit because they use that money and stock. So they have to balance reducing the scarcity with the resulting loss of value.
Marvel doesn't buy things with copies of Amazing Spiderman #1, the value of that comic has no direct effect on the company, so why would anyone assume they'd never do anything to tank its value?
Because publishers love secondary markets where they themselves don't see any of the profit, am I right?
I saw the same thing in Magic: The Gathering. Someone would pay hundreds of dollars for a rare first-print power card, and would rationalize it as an investment. Ha! Then -- to the surprise of only a few morons -- WotC reprinted most of these cards and made the originals next to worthless.
So, yeah, thinking of them as a long-term investment was kinda silly to begin with. And as the ACs pointed out, this has nothing to do with "artistic integrity" (it's about their money-grubbing vs yours), and is in fact better for the community at large because they get to enjoy the thing that before only a few did.
So yeah, thanks comic companies for spreading enjoyment and teaching people valuable economic lessons!
Huh? I remember the movie and comic endings being nearly identical, especially in that regard -- everyone but Rorschach plays along, because only Rorschach was completely sure he was doing the right thing in the first place. Everyone else is like "Oh, hey, maybe this was worth avoiding nuclear war."
I think I may be misunderstanding your point.
Hm... The name might give you some Silly credentials, but this sounds suspiciously Sensible.
I prefer to call them "Republican'ts and Democraps." But I am moderately childish...
You sound like a perfect match for the Slightly Silly party. Vote Kevin Phillips Bong in the general election!
The point of engineering is to have "just enough cake." Not too much (overdesign), not too little (underdesign).
But now imagine your equipment is going somewhere that you know very little about (this being the whole point of why you're sending it), and there is no possibility for repair, upgrade (outside of software), or second chances.
Now are you going to aim for "just enough", or are you going to err on the side of over-design? How are you going to determine what "just enough" is, when you don't know what the environment will be like?
The correct way to engineer something like the Mars rover was not to try to make it "just enough". The correct way to engineer them is to make them as robust as can possibly be made, within the mass budget.
And this isn't the only situation where optimizing for the exact amount required is bad engineering, and optimizing the amount that can fit within other constraints is good engineering.
"Just enough" engineering is only one kind.
With an exaflop computer, simulating the human brain is looking like it might be possible.
The main problem of simulating a brain isn't the computational power required.
Sorry but the natural assumption that power consumption decreases with decreasing transistor sizes went out the window pretty much right around the 90nm node. That was the inflection point where leakage went from being a minor nuisance to a major contributor comparable to switching power. Leakage goes up with decreasing transistor size, and so now it's a struggle to make sure that the new generation of part uses merely the same amount of power as the previous generation.
Lowering the power of devices today is more about driving your design with reducing power in mind, rather than counting on process technology to do it for you.
You forgot leakage current, which in modern designs is comparable to the switching power.
Yeah, chip makers really wish power was only consumed on the transitions.
But, to answer the original question about a theoretical limit, yes there is. turning disorder into order takes energy, so you can approach it from a thermodynamics standpoint.
If your computer solely makes use of reversible calculations, you can reduce the power consumed to arbitrarily low levels using adiabatic circuits. Unfortunately "arbitrarily low power" comes commensurate with "arbitrary long computation time" so not necessarily a way to get TFlops/Watt.
This wasn't an oversight, it was well understood that this would happen. They've gotten lucky that dust devils have cleaned the panels a few times.
Hell, they originally thought the wind would be completely negligible, and the dust build-up that would result had in that case was the whole reason for the 90 day mission plan. So, yeah, they kinda anticipated the whole dust thing.
Isn't it nice when being wrong is a pleasant surprise? And hey, learning that kind of thing about the planet is part of why we're sending robots there. It all fits together nicely.
Don't forget the turtle wax.