What is the subtext here, "Lord Kelvin was arrogant and foolish, but we are not and there's no way we'll make the same mistake?"
Jebus, do geeks not understand humility and self-deprecation? By quoting Lord Kelvin he is saying - even great minds sometimes forget that by definition today's science will be 'wrong' tomorrow, what follows is the best answer we have right now.
Something we can't see is generating a gravitational field, something we can't see is expanding space itself. These are very well documented observations that have been given the names dark matter and dark energy. General relativity predicted dark energy, nobody believed the prediction. At the time people believed the the Sun was powered by coal, they were wrong but the observation "the sun is hot" was and still is undeniable. Similarly we can dream up all sorts of things to explain the expanding universe but the fact it is expanding is a robust and repeatable observation.
It was certainly on university courses 20 years ago
Mine too (circa 1990), but the summary is correct. 20yrs is a long time, the detail you have forgotten is that mathematical knots do not have loose ends and are typically useless in the real world. TFA is talking about the mechanical properties of open knots, these are knots with loose ends, the useful kind found on shoelaces, climbing ropes, fishing hooks, sailing ships, flat-bed trucks, etc. Of course I haven't RTFA but I'm tempted because at first glance it appears they have used the same branch of math that studies closed knots (topology) to describe the mechanical properties of open knots
The vast majority of kids who go to collage have no fucking idea what they want to do with their working lives, in fact many people never find their 'passion' or have a 'passion' that will never pay the bills. But seriously, your post implies you think that the Bard was not a creative genius?
At the end of the day, any job from sweeping the floor to CEO is both an art and a science, if you don't recognise that you will never be good at anything.
I graduated my CS degree in 1991, after 15yrs of blue collar work. Many of the people I worked with in the heydey of the mid-90's were musicians who had found their way to computers via 'midi' (a 'language' for electronic instruments). I once had a project manager who was a biologist, he was a nice guy and may have been a good biologist but he had neither technical or managerial skills, since I was the lead dev, we did not get along.
This is exactly how traditional Japanese beef farmers make a living from tiny herds, emphasize "quality", emphasize "tradition", emphasise "scarcity", emphasise "natural", charge 10X as much.
Humans have always behaved this way, during stone age britain a prehistoric miner could make a greenstone axe head in an hour or two. The axe head was then taken back to the village and polished by others for up to 1000hrs, greenstone was prefered because it is hard dense rock that doesn't shatter like quartz, and it looks good when polished. The polishing was purely ornamental, a stone axe polished for 1000hrs does not perform any better than the non-polished one that took 2hrs to shape. Polished axes were not even used as axes, they were a kind of primitive currency, unlike gold trinkets of more modern cultures, the value was not the scarcity of the shinny rock, but the effort that went into making it shinny.
All white cockatoos look exactly the same, but even a bird brain has enough space for a unique personality that their owner can identify. An identical dog that behaves like a dog won't have the same personality and the (dog loving) owner will pick that up in a heartbeat.
Nobody is claiming he didn't have a role in Apple 2's success, just that he didn't do any of the engineering. Like many others, I thought that fact was already well known.
Dirty energy is 'cheap' because the environmental and social costs are all but ignored by traditional economists. The environment is the source of all our material wealth, degrading the free and fundamental services it provides to human economic activity to save 3c/kwh simply does not make sense, let alone economic sense.
The war in Syria is a contemporary example of those (admittedly difficult to quantify) costs. The unprecedented "once in 10,000 years" drought in the fertile crescent prior to the "arab spring" was "the straw that broke the camel's back", facebook was simply the most convenient communications method at hand. Climate change didn't 'cause' the drought, but it almost certainly had a hand in its record breaking ferocity. In Syria alone, two million farmers (10% of Syria's population) simply walked away from almost certain starvation in the rural dust bowl and headed for the cities and joined the food riots that swept the major cities of the ME and N Africa just prior to the uprisings. The dire "bread line" style situation was made worse by similar record breaking droughts in Russia and Australia that were simultaneously pushing international grain prices thru the roof
At 3c/hr, how long will it take to pay for dirty energy's role in all that? - Trick question because nobody expects them to pay, and that's the problem with "cheap and dirty" in a nutshell.
You have been misled. Also it was Fourier who predicted CO2 GHG properties in 1824, Arrehnius was the first to suggest human CO2 emissions could be warming the Earth (1890's). The climate sensitivity number of 3degC for a doubling of CO2 commonly used today was determined during the 1970's and has changed very little since then,it was derived from geological evidence and has nothing to do with Arrehnius.
You can't scream anti-science at people
I for one don't think you are anti-science, but it obvious your sources are.
I taught C lab class to 2nd year CS and EE students for a couple of years. The first assignment of the semester the EE students invariably ignored the style sheet and stuffed the whole program into main() with the only comment being their name and student number. So I made 'style' worth 50% of the mark on the second and subsequent assignments, I have to hand it to the EE students, they're fast learners.:)
Nuclear power is so reliable, safe, and inexpensive that using wind and solar becomes nonsensical.
Reliable and safe yes, inexpensive no. Economics and a very long lead time to build are the major issues holding back the use of nukes. Numbers vary but solar and wind are now cheaper per kwh than importing brown coal to countries like India. Costs per kwh are still steadily dropping for wind and solar, whereas costs for nukes are stagnant or rising.
people will freeze to death because the sun didn't shine and the wind didn't blow when we needed it to..snip...people will die needlessly.
That's just silly fear mongering, every bit as ignorant an mis-informed as the anti-nuke people you are arguing against. Local weather variations are irrelevant to a national solar/wind grid, climate wobbles such as the el-nino phenomena mentioned in TFA have a minor impact on output because they change the average weather conditions over the entire planet. Note the impact of natural climate wobbles on output can also be positive, it just happens that the one on TFA is negative for the US (it's likely the same climate event had a positive impact on Australian renewable output).
I have no ideological problems with nukes, the appear to work very well in parts of Europe apart from the occasional political spat. However the costs and long lead times associated with building nukes means they will continue to be used in the future only where renewables are impractical. Worse still for the nuke industry, the economic niches for profitable nukes are shrinking as the renewables industry steadily continues improving their technology and ROI numbers. One thing is certain, king coal's crown is slipping, "book values" for coal assets are falling fast, the world bank, IMF, etc, have all recently stopped investing in coal and advised other to follow, nobody wants to be stuck with a "stranded asset", except the luddites running the fucking country down here in Oz, who are doing everything in their power to build the port/rail infrastructure to service "the world's largest coal mine", the mine itself is likely to fall into the "stranded asset" basket before it is even constructed.
There are lakes in the former USSR, abandoned tailings dams, it's said the radiation from them so intense it will kill a human standing on its shore within 2hrs.
The same explosion of wildlife was seen in Korea's DMZ, a strip of land that cuts the peninsula in half and is chock full of landmines. It appears that the mere presence of urbanised humans is more detrimental to wildlife than a nuclear disaster. As a science based greenie I have to tentatively conclude that nuclear disasters are a very effective way to create large wilderness areas.
Disclaimer: I would welcome a properly managed nuke replacing the local coal plant (Hazelwood - said to be the dirtiest coal plant in the world), I say "well managed and modern" because even with the spectacular benefits nuclear disasters have to the natural environment, I'm still NOT ok with a nuclear disaster in MY backyard.;)
Plain old economics is what is holding back nukes, not "envirowackos", if "envirowackos" had that sort of political power then why are we still building new coal plants? The fact that changing to renewables for electricity generation is both good for the environment and good for the economy has been recognised by sane capitalists since the "Stern Report" (2005 IIRC). The insane ones still believe AGW is a UN plot to strip mine their wallet and their "freedoms".
Slashdot Mirror
What is the subtext here, "Lord Kelvin was arrogant and foolish, but we are not and there's no way we'll make the same mistake?"
Jebus, do geeks not understand humility and self-deprecation? By quoting Lord Kelvin he is saying - even great minds sometimes forget that by definition today's science will be 'wrong' tomorrow, what follows is the best answer we have right now.
'wrong' - Maybe it will be clear if I link to a popular sci-fi writer.
Something we can't see is generating a gravitational field, something we can't see is expanding space itself. These are very well documented observations that have been given the names dark matter and dark energy. General relativity predicted dark energy, nobody believed the prediction. At the time people believed the the Sun was powered by coal, they were wrong but the observation "the sun is hot" was and still is undeniable. Similarly we can dream up all sorts of things to explain the expanding universe but the fact it is expanding is a robust and repeatable observation.
It was certainly on university courses 20 years ago
Mine too (circa 1990), but the summary is correct. 20yrs is a long time, the detail you have forgotten is that mathematical knots do not have loose ends and are typically useless in the real world. TFA is talking about the mechanical properties of open knots, these are knots with loose ends, the useful kind found on shoelaces, climbing ropes, fishing hooks, sailing ships, flat-bed trucks, etc. Of course I haven't RTFA but I'm tempted because at first glance it appears they have used the same branch of math that studies closed knots (topology) to describe the mechanical properties of open knots
What is a Knot? - Numberphile
The vast majority of kids who go to collage have no fucking idea what they want to do with their working lives, in fact many people never find their 'passion' or have a 'passion' that will never pay the bills. But seriously, your post implies you think that the Bard was not a creative genius?
At the end of the day, any job from sweeping the floor to CEO is both an art and a science, if you don't recognise that you will never be good at anything.
I graduated my CS degree in 1991, after 15yrs of blue collar work. Many of the people I worked with in the heydey of the mid-90's were musicians who had found their way to computers via 'midi' (a 'language' for electronic instruments). I once had a project manager who was a biologist, he was a nice guy and may have been a good biologist but he had neither technical or managerial skills, since I was the lead dev, we did not get along.
In capitalist USA, fossils own National Geographic.
I agree that violent crime should be more severely punished than a comparable non-violent crime, but frauds like Bernie Madoff deserve jail time.
This is exactly how traditional Japanese beef farmers make a living from tiny herds, emphasize "quality", emphasize "tradition", emphasise "scarcity", emphasise "natural", charge 10X as much.
Humans have always behaved this way, during stone age britain a prehistoric miner could make a greenstone axe head in an hour or two. The axe head was then taken back to the village and polished by others for up to 1000hrs, greenstone was prefered because it is hard dense rock that doesn't shatter like quartz, and it looks good when polished. The polishing was purely ornamental, a stone axe polished for 1000hrs does not perform any better than the non-polished one that took 2hrs to shape. Polished axes were not even used as axes, they were a kind of primitive currency, unlike gold trinkets of more modern cultures, the value was not the scarcity of the shinny rock, but the effort that went into making it shinny.
All white cockatoos look exactly the same, but even a bird brain has enough space for a unique personality that their owner can identify. An identical dog that behaves like a dog won't have the same personality and the (dog loving) owner will pick that up in a heartbeat.
Worthles? He was probably the richest pimp who ever lived.
Is there an echo in here?
Nobody is claiming he didn't have a role in Apple 2's success, just that he didn't do any of the engineering. Like many others, I thought that fact was already well known.
This is why I admire James Hansen, a public servant with the balls to speak truth to power, we need more people like him in government institutions.
Dirty energy is 'cheap' because the environmental and social costs are all but ignored by traditional economists. The environment is the source of all our material wealth, degrading the free and fundamental services it provides to human economic activity to save 3c/kwh simply does not make sense, let alone economic sense.
The war in Syria is a contemporary example of those (admittedly difficult to quantify) costs. The unprecedented "once in 10,000 years" drought in the fertile crescent prior to the "arab spring" was "the straw that broke the camel's back", facebook was simply the most convenient communications method at hand. Climate change didn't 'cause' the drought, but it almost certainly had a hand in its record breaking ferocity. In Syria alone, two million farmers (10% of Syria's population) simply walked away from almost certain starvation in the rural dust bowl and headed for the cities and joined the food riots that swept the major cities of the ME and N Africa just prior to the uprisings. The dire "bread line" style situation was made worse by similar record breaking droughts in Russia and Australia that were simultaneously pushing international grain prices thru the roof
At 3c/hr, how long will it take to pay for dirty energy's role in all that? - Trick question because nobody expects them to pay, and that's the problem with "cheap and dirty" in a nutshell.
there is no statistical warming during that time
You have been misled. Also it was Fourier who predicted CO2 GHG properties in 1824, Arrehnius was the first to suggest human CO2 emissions could be warming the Earth (1890's). The climate sensitivity number of 3degC for a doubling of CO2 commonly used today was determined during the 1970's and has changed very little since then,it was derived from geological evidence and has nothing to do with Arrehnius.
You can't scream anti-science at people
I for one don't think you are anti-science, but it obvious your sources are.
Pick one and you might get it, pick both and you get neither.
I taught C lab class to 2nd year CS and EE students for a couple of years. The first assignment of the semester the EE students invariably ignored the style sheet and stuffed the whole program into main() with the only comment being their name and student number. So I made 'style' worth 50% of the mark on the second and subsequent assignments, I have to hand it to the EE students, they're fast learners. :)
Slashdot?
Test it very carefully, we don't want to give them any good ideas.
And "intuition" is just another word for "abstraction":
Not according to my thesaurus.
Nuclear power is so reliable, safe, and inexpensive that using wind and solar becomes nonsensical.
Reliable and safe yes, inexpensive no. Economics and a very long lead time to build are the major issues holding back the use of nukes. Numbers vary but solar and wind are now cheaper per kwh than importing brown coal to countries like India. Costs per kwh are still steadily dropping for wind and solar, whereas costs for nukes are stagnant or rising.
people will freeze to death because the sun didn't shine and the wind didn't blow when we needed it to..snip...people will die needlessly.
That's just silly fear mongering, every bit as ignorant an mis-informed as the anti-nuke people you are arguing against. Local weather variations are irrelevant to a national solar/wind grid, climate wobbles such as the el-nino phenomena mentioned in TFA have a minor impact on output because they change the average weather conditions over the entire planet. Note the impact of natural climate wobbles on output can also be positive, it just happens that the one on TFA is negative for the US (it's likely the same climate event had a positive impact on Australian renewable output).
I have no ideological problems with nukes, the appear to work very well in parts of Europe apart from the occasional political spat. However the costs and long lead times associated with building nukes means they will continue to be used in the future only where renewables are impractical. Worse still for the nuke industry, the economic niches for profitable nukes are shrinking as the renewables industry steadily continues improving their technology and ROI numbers. One thing is certain, king coal's crown is slipping, "book values" for coal assets are falling fast, the world bank, IMF, etc, have all recently stopped investing in coal and advised other to follow, nobody wants to be stuck with a "stranded asset", except the luddites running the fucking country down here in Oz, who are doing everything in their power to build the port/rail infrastructure to service "the world's largest coal mine", the mine itself is likely to fall into the "stranded asset" basket before it is even constructed.
There are lakes in the former USSR, abandoned tailings dams, it's said the radiation from them so intense it will kill a human standing on its shore within 2hrs.
Way too many workers died during the construction of Hoover dam, the root cause of death was the same as chernobyl - hubris.
The same explosion of wildlife was seen in Korea's DMZ, a strip of land that cuts the peninsula in half and is chock full of landmines. It appears that the mere presence of urbanised humans is more detrimental to wildlife than a nuclear disaster. As a science based greenie I have to tentatively conclude that nuclear disasters are a very effective way to create large wilderness areas.
;)
Disclaimer: I would welcome a properly managed nuke replacing the local coal plant (Hazelwood - said to be the dirtiest coal plant in the world), I say "well managed and modern" because even with the spectacular benefits nuclear disasters have to the natural environment, I'm still NOT ok with a nuclear disaster in MY backyard.
Plain old economics is what is holding back nukes, not "envirowackos", if "envirowackos" had that sort of political power then why are we still building new coal plants? The fact that changing to renewables for electricity generation is both good for the environment and good for the economy has been recognised by sane capitalists since the "Stern Report" (2005 IIRC). The insane ones still believe AGW is a UN plot to strip mine their wallet and their "freedoms".