Well, maybe we are having a higher than average year. After more reading, they are saying that even Oklahoma, where I live has had more tornadoes than usual in the first five months. I guess it just seems lower because we have so far only had one tornado warning anywhere near the Oklahoma City area and I am used to having at least two a week in a normal year.
Death toll is a hard figure to use. On the one hand, forecasting and forewarning improves every year. On the other hand, we keep building larger and larger cities, and the houses we build in them are not designed to withstand the force of a tornado, so it becomes more and more likely that a tornado is going to cause more and more damage and probably kill people.
Part of the issue with the two tornadoes everyone is familiar with from this year is that they occurred in places that don't traditionally get really big tornado outbreaks, and don't have the weather facilities and coverage to be prepared for it. I live near Oklahoma City and believe me, nothing compares to the weather coverage here. If you get killed by a tornado here, you can't say you didn't know what was coming. Every channel has surface and air vehicles surrounding each cell. All of the local channels break into continuous coverage with sophisticated Doppler radio that shows the wind shear and from which they are able to tell right where a funnel will form if it does form.
Just last week, we had some really bad stuff come through the metro with tornadoes as large or larger than the Joplin tornadoes (one EF-4 and the other being investigated for consideration as an EF-5, plus numerous Ef-3s), and only 10 people were killed. The May 3rd 1999 tornado, the tornado with the highest wind speed ever recorded on planet Earth claimed only 36 lives despite tearing through suburbs of Oklahoma City.
Another point of interest. After the May 3rd 1999 tornado, the U.S. experienced the longest period without an F-5 or EF-5 tornado since records were kept. 8 years without an F-5 or EF-5.
By what definition of 'life' is a planet 'alive'?? None that I've heard.
The one that speaks of consuming external resources in order to continue its own existence. Of course, a planet does not meet the requirements we have placed on life as having to have improvement through natural selection because a planet already exists so long that reproduction is not a requirement. Undoubtedly, some of the first life on Earth also did not meet this requirement. There is no way that the first life forms somehow had the ability to reproduce themselves. There were probably billions of single celled organisms that came into being, lived for awhile, and then died, and then billions more came into being. This probably still happens today. The successful ones came into being with the facility to reproduce themselves, and multiple generations became a possibility.
Is ability to regenerate a requirement for life? If so, then the first several billion single celled creatures were not alive. And neither is a planet.
The more time passes, the more it's hard not to look at Drake's equation and figure that he might have been onto something... if there's bazillions of planets, and a good chunk of those have moons, and a couple of those are in a habitable section... well, maybe it's possible that there is far more life in the universe than we've previously thought.
Well, according to the definition of life, planets are already life anyway, just not self-replicating life, and probably not intelligent.
Me, I think the SETI guys are closed minded. They are always on about "habitable planets". What they are really getting at is habitable by US. An extraterrestrial life form may have developed without the need for water, oxygen, and our temperature range. An extraterrestrial life form could also be massively out of scale with us. It could be so large that our planet is an electron in it's body, or so small that an electron in a blade of grass is one of their planets. Their could be extraterrestrial life all around us and we just can't recognize it because we think it ought to be 6 feet tall, have 10 fingers and 10 toes, and likes it's beer slightly chilled.
Oil will be gone in ~50 years. Coal will be gone in about ~100 years.
So invest in Natural Gas, which claims to have a 100 year supply and growing with technology.
I think it is the lottery syndrome. People play the lottery knowing full well that they probably won't win, but if they overcome the odds and do win, the payout is huge. Same thing with energy. There is a very very small chance that something could happen at a nuclear plant, but that something would be very, very bad. On the average, nuclear is far better for your health than coal, but on the average, your expected return from playing the lottery is 25 cents on the dollar. The standard deviation is more important to people than the average.
the only silver lining in the current rash of tornadoes in the country's midsection is that the country's midsection is also home to more conservatives, who are more likely to doubt climate change gloom and doom
What rash of tornadoes? Despite the high profile that the news media has given to the Alabama and Joplin tornadoes, the number and severity of tornadoes this year has actually been somewhat below average.
Now, burning down forests on purpose to make more farmland does increase atmospheric CO2.
That all seems like a line drawing game. How come burn a tree, plant a tree is carbon neutral, but burn a tree, plant some corn is not? Doesn't corn also absorb CO2 from the air?
From some research on the web, I found that an acre of corn can sequester anywhere from 3000 to 7000 kg per acre and an acre of trees will sequester from 1300 to 9000 kg per acre.
I also found claims that said burning down forest reduces our ability to sequester CO2 by 2600 to 11000 kg per acre, while planting forest only increases our ability to sequester by the aforementioned 1300 to 9000 kg per acre. Must be something to do with entropy. Or number fudging to prove a point.
Well, thank goodness we are finally solving our global warming problem, since the deaths per year from Tornadoes continues to drop.
Although this years tornado outbreaks have drawn more news exposure, mostly because they happened to hit large cities, this years tornado season has actually been less severe than usual.
People have died of cancer from the earliest of times -- they just called it something else, and quite often "a curse."
Not to mention that people are living long enough now to actually die of cancer instead of being eaten, dying of infection after scraping their knee or whatever. I forget who said it originally, but if we live long enough we will ALL die of cancer.
There is another site out there that I heard about (I don't use Twitter, Facebook, or any of those social sites, unless you count slashdot, which doesn't seem very social to me) that limits you to 50. I'm sure they also have some scientific reasoning for the limitation.
It seems to me like it would make more sense to just have facebook or twitter give you the option to limit yourself to a number of your choosing. Then there would be no need for a whole other site with that limit that you now have to convince all your friends to sign up for in addition to whatever other sites for which they are already signed up.
Did you know in the 60s people used to buy cars every two years on average? Mostly because the cars sucked
Well, also, there was the fact that new cars were affordable back then compared to median income. In 1960 the price of a new car was half the median income. In 2011, the price a new car is almost equal to the median income.
Are you of the opinion that people only buy new cars? I have owned 13 cars in my life and only three of them have been new cars. I never really expected to EVER buy a new car, two of them were for my wife. Most americans go through far more than 4 cars in a liftime and many americans never own a new car. The cost of a new car has risen to nearly the median annual income and as prices continue to rise, chances are that fewer and fewer americans will be able to afford to buy new.
Regarding leasing, I have never leased and I expect to never lease a car. I guess leasing gives you the ability to make payments forever and be able to have a relatively newer car your whole life, but I would rather just pay less than half the new cost of a car for a two year old car and then own it for another 5 or 6 years.
your approach is wrong. for any travel that is bigger than an american state
Which american state? Alaska? Because for anything less than 1,000 miles it is less expensive and time consuming to drive than to take the airplane. For my family, a plane ride would be about $2,000 to pretty much anywhere. That's the cost of an entire vacation including driving costs. Airplane travel is beyond the means of the middle class american.
The purpose of College is not to learn how to do coding, although most people in CS or Engineering will undoubtedly pick some up along the way. College is not about how to do stuff, but learning how stuff works, learning how to learn, and learning a little bit of a wide variety of fields (thus the need for the electives and first couple of years of prerequisites).
If you really just want a code monkey, you should get someone from a trade school. Someone with a college degree in Engineering doing coding is being underutilized. They should be creating specs, engineering a solution, perhaps building a working model and then handing it down to the junior techs to develop.
insist on teaching me what I already know, like the "Computer Basics" class that everyone must take. How to turn on the computer, use a mouse, etc
Sounds like they have seriously dumbed down college since I went. When I went, the intro to computers class talked about how RAM, disks, Bus, Interrupts, cache and stuff like that worked. Then there was about 3 weeks at the end where they actually taught C (which I already knew, otherwise that would have been very rushed). I would think teaching how to turn on a computer or use a mouse would be something offered by a Trade School, or these days, an Elementary school.
Can you cite some specific software packages that want to install a browser (chrome) specifically? BR.
It would have to have been something I was installing from a download, like a new version of AdAware or AVG.
So does the average Joe get to website by typing words in the search bar and letting the search tell him which site he thinks he is looking for? I am just asking because I don't know anybody that does that. That is incredibly bad for the longevity of your computer. What if they misspell "microsoft windows critical update" and get routed to some site that uses commonly misspelled keywords and masks itself as an official download site?
I mean, sure I use Google (plus some common sense) from time to time to try to find a site, but at least 80% of the time, I am either typing a URL or clicking a bookmark.
I accidentally installed it because I either missed unchecking an "install chrome" box on some piece of software I was installing, or it just ignored me. That sort of clandestine installing makes Chrome lose several million points in my book, so it will probably never get evaluated by me. I did run it once just to look at it before uninstalling. It didn't look remotely worth switching browsers. But now that Firefox 4.0 is out and is much more sucky than 3.5, maybe I need to re-evaluate.
What is it with Americans that they think they need to police the world.
As an American I can tell you that I would much prefer that we didn't because I am sick of them sucking all of the money out of my pocket to fund all this crap. Unfortunately, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't because there were plenty of people asking why the U.S. wouldn't get involved back when we were isolationist.
I'm sure your right, but I still prefer the big old tower. Lot's of room inside for drives, more memory, change out the CPU, whatever you want to do. I will say that the move away from CRT is a good one, but as a side point to this whole article, I really hate the cheap flatscreen monitors and am holding out for an IPS display.
Even Firefox went to that stupid crap in 4.0. It now takes me an extra click to get to everything. and they don't save any screen space because now instead of a bunch of menus across the screen, you have a single menu that still takes up just as much space and you have to click it to get to see the other menus that you used to be able to click directly on.
Someone will now inform me that I can easily get those menus all back up on the top menu bar and make me look like an idiot.
Oh, yeah, and it doesn't default to my previous session any more, but I fixed that already.
You are almost certainly correct. Every person I know of seems to want a laptop even though it may never leave the desk it is sitting on, let alone the house. As a computer professional who travels occasionally and is practically required to take his laptop home every night, I expect to have to have a laptop, but my home computer is a huge tower beast. Consumer versus professional also probably drives my decisions when buying a laptop. I care nothing about the weight, want as big a screen as it will get, a powerful cpu, and I know this will sound strange, a moderately sized hard drive, and only as much memory as I will ever possibly use. Yes, I know, I am supposed to want a 2 TB laptop drive, but why? I had a 300 GB one in my previous model and it wasn't close to full when I upgraded? And is 8 GB of memory going to do anything other than eat battery when the most that all my apps put together ever use is 3 GB?
Now, the typical home laptop buyer seems to want a lighter laptop, which means smaller screen, smaller battery, etc, doesn't care much about the CPU but knows they want as much memory as they can get, even though they won't be running anything to use all that memory, and also a huge disk drive, which in their case is often because they want to watch movies on it. Most consumers don't seem to have an issue with watching high res movies on a small screen, but I guess that stems from the fact that they are happy to also watch them on small screens (and buffering like mad) on tiny little smartphone screens.
Wow, and I ran across both of them despite not getting much slashdot time. That's like both times you ever turn on Seinfeld several years apart and it is the same episode.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, maybe we are having a higher than average year. After more reading, they are saying that even Oklahoma, where I live has had more tornadoes than usual in the first five months. I guess it just seems lower because we have so far only had one tornado warning anywhere near the Oklahoma City area and I am used to having at least two a week in a normal year.
Death toll is a hard figure to use. On the one hand, forecasting and forewarning improves every year. On the other hand, we keep building larger and larger cities, and the houses we build in them are not designed to withstand the force of a tornado, so it becomes more and more likely that a tornado is going to cause more and more damage and probably kill people.
Part of the issue with the two tornadoes everyone is familiar with from this year is that they occurred in places that don't traditionally get really big tornado outbreaks, and don't have the weather facilities and coverage to be prepared for it. I live near Oklahoma City and believe me, nothing compares to the weather coverage here. If you get killed by a tornado here, you can't say you didn't know what was coming. Every channel has surface and air vehicles surrounding each cell. All of the local channels break into continuous coverage with sophisticated Doppler radio that shows the wind shear and from which they are able to tell right where a funnel will form if it does form.
Just last week, we had some really bad stuff come through the metro with tornadoes as large or larger than the Joplin tornadoes (one EF-4 and the other being investigated for consideration as an EF-5, plus numerous Ef-3s), and only 10 people were killed. The May 3rd 1999 tornado, the tornado with the highest wind speed ever recorded on planet Earth claimed only 36 lives despite tearing through suburbs of Oklahoma City.
Another point of interest. After the May 3rd 1999 tornado, the U.S. experienced the longest period without an F-5 or EF-5 tornado since records were kept. 8 years without an F-5 or EF-5.
By what definition of 'life' is a planet 'alive'?? None that I've heard.
The one that speaks of consuming external resources in order to continue its own existence. Of course, a planet does not meet the requirements we have placed on life as having to have improvement through natural selection because a planet already exists so long that reproduction is not a requirement. Undoubtedly, some of the first life on Earth also did not meet this requirement. There is no way that the first life forms somehow had the ability to reproduce themselves. There were probably billions of single celled organisms that came into being, lived for awhile, and then died, and then billions more came into being. This probably still happens today. The successful ones came into being with the facility to reproduce themselves, and multiple generations became a possibility.
Is ability to regenerate a requirement for life? If so, then the first several billion single celled creatures were not alive. And neither is a planet.
The more time passes, the more it's hard not to look at Drake's equation and figure that he might have been onto something ... if there's bazillions of planets, and a good chunk of those have moons, and a couple of those are in a habitable section ... well, maybe it's possible that there is far more life in the universe than we've previously thought.
Well, according to the definition of life, planets are already life anyway, just not self-replicating life, and probably not intelligent.
Me, I think the SETI guys are closed minded. They are always on about "habitable planets". What they are really getting at is habitable by US. An extraterrestrial life form may have developed without the need for water, oxygen, and our temperature range. An extraterrestrial life form could also be massively out of scale with us. It could be so large that our planet is an electron in it's body, or so small that an electron in a blade of grass is one of their planets. Their could be extraterrestrial life all around us and we just can't recognize it because we think it ought to be 6 feet tall, have 10 fingers and 10 toes, and likes it's beer slightly chilled.
Oil will be gone in ~50 years. Coal will be gone in about ~100 years.
So invest in Natural Gas, which claims to have a 100 year supply and growing with technology.
I think it is the lottery syndrome. People play the lottery knowing full well that they probably won't win, but if they overcome the odds and do win, the payout is huge. Same thing with energy. There is a very very small chance that something could happen at a nuclear plant, but that something would be very, very bad. On the average, nuclear is far better for your health than coal, but on the average, your expected return from playing the lottery is 25 cents on the dollar. The standard deviation is more important to people than the average.
the only silver lining in the current rash of tornadoes in the country's midsection is that the country's midsection is also home to more conservatives, who are more likely to doubt climate change gloom and doom
What rash of tornadoes? Despite the high profile that the news media has given to the Alabama and Joplin tornadoes, the number and severity of tornadoes this year has actually been somewhat below average.
Now, burning down forests on purpose to make more farmland does increase atmospheric CO2.
That all seems like a line drawing game. How come burn a tree, plant a tree is carbon neutral, but burn a tree, plant some corn is not? Doesn't corn also absorb CO2 from the air?
From some research on the web, I found that an acre of corn can sequester anywhere from 3000 to 7000 kg per acre and an acre of trees will sequester from 1300 to 9000 kg per acre.
I also found claims that said burning down forest reduces our ability to sequester CO2 by 2600 to 11000 kg per acre, while planting forest only increases our ability to sequester by the aforementioned 1300 to 9000 kg per acre. Must be something to do with entropy. Or number fudging to prove a point.
Well, thank goodness we are finally solving our global warming problem, since the deaths per year from Tornadoes continues to drop.
Although this years tornado outbreaks have drawn more news exposure, mostly because they happened to hit large cities, this years tornado season has actually been less severe than usual.
People have died of cancer from the earliest of times -- they just called it something else, and quite often "a curse."
Not to mention that people are living long enough now to actually die of cancer instead of being eaten, dying of infection after scraping their knee or whatever. I forget who said it originally, but if we live long enough we will ALL die of cancer.
There is another site out there that I heard about (I don't use Twitter, Facebook, or any of those social sites, unless you count slashdot, which doesn't seem very social to me) that limits you to 50. I'm sure they also have some scientific reasoning for the limitation.
It seems to me like it would make more sense to just have facebook or twitter give you the option to limit yourself to a number of your choosing. Then there would be no need for a whole other site with that limit that you now have to convince all your friends to sign up for in addition to whatever other sites for which they are already signed up.
Did you know in the 60s people used to buy cars every two years on average? Mostly because the cars sucked
Well, also, there was the fact that new cars were affordable back then compared to median income. In 1960 the price of a new car was half the median income. In 2011, the price a new car is almost equal to the median income.
Are you of the opinion that people only buy new cars? I have owned 13 cars in my life and only three of them have been new cars. I never really expected to EVER buy a new car, two of them were for my wife. Most americans go through far more than 4 cars in a liftime and many americans never own a new car. The cost of a new car has risen to nearly the median annual income and as prices continue to rise, chances are that fewer and fewer americans will be able to afford to buy new.
Regarding leasing, I have never leased and I expect to never lease a car. I guess leasing gives you the ability to make payments forever and be able to have a relatively newer car your whole life, but I would rather just pay less than half the new cost of a car for a two year old car and then own it for another 5 or 6 years.
More anecdotal evidence. I'm 41, currently own two cars, and have owned 13 cars so far.
your approach is wrong. for any travel that is bigger than an american state
Which american state? Alaska? Because for anything less than 1,000 miles it is less expensive and time consuming to drive than to take the airplane. For my family, a plane ride would be about $2,000 to pretty much anywhere. That's the cost of an entire vacation including driving costs. Airplane travel is beyond the means of the middle class american.
The purpose of College is not to learn how to do coding, although most people in CS or Engineering will undoubtedly pick some up along the way. College is not about how to do stuff, but learning how stuff works, learning how to learn, and learning a little bit of a wide variety of fields (thus the need for the electives and first couple of years of prerequisites).
If you really just want a code monkey, you should get someone from a trade school. Someone with a college degree in Engineering doing coding is being underutilized. They should be creating specs, engineering a solution, perhaps building a working model and then handing it down to the junior techs to develop.
insist on teaching me what I already know, like the "Computer Basics" class that everyone must take. How to turn on the computer, use a mouse, etc
Sounds like they have seriously dumbed down college since I went. When I went, the intro to computers class talked about how RAM, disks, Bus, Interrupts, cache and stuff like that worked. Then there was about 3 weeks at the end where they actually taught C (which I already knew, otherwise that would have been very rushed). I would think teaching how to turn on a computer or use a mouse would be something offered by a Trade School, or these days, an Elementary school.
Can you cite some specific software packages that want to install a browser (chrome) specifically? BR. It would have to have been something I was installing from a download, like a new version of AdAware or AVG.
So does the average Joe get to website by typing words in the search bar and letting the search tell him which site he thinks he is looking for? I am just asking because I don't know anybody that does that. That is incredibly bad for the longevity of your computer. What if they misspell "microsoft windows critical update" and get routed to some site that uses commonly misspelled keywords and masks itself as an official download site?
I mean, sure I use Google (plus some common sense) from time to time to try to find a site, but at least 80% of the time, I am either typing a URL or clicking a bookmark.
FTFY :)
Maybe they were really referring to boarders. ie, the people that already made it across.
I accidentally installed it because I either missed unchecking an "install chrome" box on some piece of software I was installing, or it just ignored me. That sort of clandestine installing makes Chrome lose several million points in my book, so it will probably never get evaluated by me. I did run it once just to look at it before uninstalling. It didn't look remotely worth switching browsers. But now that Firefox 4.0 is out and is much more sucky than 3.5, maybe I need to re-evaluate.
What is it with Americans that they think they need to police the world.
As an American I can tell you that I would much prefer that we didn't because I am sick of them sucking all of the money out of my pocket to fund all this crap. Unfortunately, it's damned if you do, damned if you don't because there were plenty of people asking why the U.S. wouldn't get involved back when we were isolationist.
I'm sure your right, but I still prefer the big old tower. Lot's of room inside for drives, more memory, change out the CPU, whatever you want to do. I will say that the move away from CRT is a good one, but as a side point to this whole article, I really hate the cheap flatscreen monitors and am holding out for an IPS display.
Even Firefox went to that stupid crap in 4.0. It now takes me an extra click to get to everything. and they don't save any screen space because now instead of a bunch of menus across the screen, you have a single menu that still takes up just as much space and you have to click it to get to see the other menus that you used to be able to click directly on.
Someone will now inform me that I can easily get those menus all back up on the top menu bar and make me look like an idiot.
Oh, yeah, and it doesn't default to my previous session any more, but I fixed that already.
You are almost certainly correct. Every person I know of seems to want a laptop even though it may never leave the desk it is sitting on, let alone the house. As a computer professional who travels occasionally and is practically required to take his laptop home every night, I expect to have to have a laptop, but my home computer is a huge tower beast. Consumer versus professional also probably drives my decisions when buying a laptop. I care nothing about the weight, want as big a screen as it will get, a powerful cpu, and I know this will sound strange, a moderately sized hard drive, and only as much memory as I will ever possibly use. Yes, I know, I am supposed to want a 2 TB laptop drive, but why? I had a 300 GB one in my previous model and it wasn't close to full when I upgraded? And is 8 GB of memory going to do anything other than eat battery when the most that all my apps put together ever use is 3 GB?
Now, the typical home laptop buyer seems to want a lighter laptop, which means smaller screen, smaller battery, etc, doesn't care much about the CPU but knows they want as much memory as they can get, even though they won't be running anything to use all that memory, and also a huge disk drive, which in their case is often because they want to watch movies on it. Most consumers don't seem to have an issue with watching high res movies on a small screen, but I guess that stems from the fact that they are happy to also watch them on small screens (and buffering like mad) on tiny little smartphone screens.
Wow, and I ran across both of them despite not getting much slashdot time. That's like both times you ever turn on Seinfeld several years apart and it is the same episode.