You presume I am doing anything illegal in the first place. And if using ssh raises red flags for the gov't then they are going to be very very busy as it's really the de facto remote login protocol for all Unix machines.
My example is a case where if the AUP of the colo company explicitly states that they do not monitor traffic, and your ISP for the last mile does, you can avoid your ISP's deep packet sniffing.
I pay for a dedicated server (essentially colo but they provide the hardware) from a company with a decent AUP. I put linux on the server and run squid on a non-standard port, allowing connections from localhost only. Then from the machine I'm surfing from I tunnel into the squid server. Say squid is running on port 1234 and sshd is running on 4567:
Configure firefox to use a proxy to localhost:1234 and all traffic is encrypted to the squid server.
Of course, I could just use Tor, which is great, but can be slow. In fact, you could run a tor server on your colo machine and have all tor traffic bounce off of the server, which would be pretty fast if you leave tor running as a daemon and dedicate a decent amount of bandwidth to the tor network.
Finding another solar system with Jupiter-like planets in circular orbits at decent distances from the parent star is big news. There has been speculation (and I would imagine it will continue) that our solar system with its roughly circular orbiting planets was rather anomalous, especially with most of the extrasolar planets discovered having mostly whacked out orbits (of course the method of detection favors this type of discovery to some extent). Highly elliptical orbits would lead to horrible seasonal variations, as well as potentially unstable orbits for multiple planets. Jupiter helps protect Earth and the inner planets from comets and asteroids. I would imagine that the likelihood that life exists in the universe has just gone up (specifically, n_e in the Drake equation).
It excites me greatly to know that before I die, rocky inner planets similar to ours will most likely be discovered!
Generally DX propagation improves near the peak, especially from 20m to 10m, and then there's the magic of 6m... but I've only been licensed since 2002, so have really not had a lot of personal experience having only caught the tail of the last peak. I did make contacts to Iceland and Poland the second day I had my license, with 100W and a short random wire antenna bout 10 feet above the ground. That's whats neat about the peak of the sunspot cycle.
It looks like a really nice player, does it mount like a flash drive under linux? If it does, are you free from having to mess around with a database on the player. What I'm getting at here is are you able to just copy the song files onto the player/unplug/listen.
Yes, it does. You connect it via USB and it automounts as/mnt/music under Fedora (assuming you have automount running) and you can just copy/drag files to/from the top-level folder. You can put folders in folders to organize things. It reads flac/idv3/etc tags and rebuilds its own internal database after you move stuff and unmount it. Piece of cake.
I spent a couple solid days researching the options, because I also refused to get a player that did not do non-proprietary lossless and lossy audio, and found this to be a decent solution. I thought about doing the RockBox route but wanted something I didn't have to hack right away to get to work. I've had one for a year and have had no problems. Only downside is disk space is lower than similar players - but 12 GB isn't too shabby and moving music to it is a snap.
While your demographic might be a bit different than the General TV Watching Demographic, this is an obvious, free, and valuable way to determine popularity, probably as good as the Nielsons, and mabye slightly less useful than Tivo data (since they can, as I understand, know whether you actually played, and ostensibly watched, the show using Tivo data).
If it weren't for the advertiser-driven model that we currently have, the bittorrent "content delivery system" would be nothing but positive for the industry. What they need to do is make high definition, high quality video files available for download for a reasonable fee, and remove all ads (or at least make that an option). I'd say the removal of commercials is the second most valuable aspect of getting shows off the Internet compared to the tuning in at 8PM (the first being able to watch it when I feel like it, something about as novel as the VCR).
File sharing can't be stopped. Well it could, but it would involve stopping the Internet, and rather large economies would collapse if that happened. The writer's strike is all about writers getting revenue from "new media" and I have to say, I think they have a point since it's pretty clear that before long the boundary what is TV (coming over cable) and what is being delivered by the Internet (which, in my house, comes over cable already) will be less and less distinct.
It is highly doubtful whether human meddling will have a discernible influence on the morphology of any given hurricane. Hurricanes are simply too big and the amount of energy involved is too large. Have you ever seen a kid kick dust into a dust devil? The sucker continues merrily on its path. Think of the scale of dust-devil-to-kid and then think of the scale of a bunch of puny airplanes spewing dust to a hurricane!
I am highly skeptical of any conclusions drawn from simulated data. As a cloud modeler running at very high resolutions (much higher than hurricane simulations since I am studying much smaller individual thunderstorms) I can tell you that even the most sophisticated cloud microphysics parameterizations are extremely crude. Clouds and rain are represented not by droplets, but mixing ratios, and gross assumptions are made about drop size distributions, transfer rates between species, etc. So, to say "we dropped some parameterized soot in the model and it made a difference" is not saying much.
Small perturbations in a highly unstable chaotic simulations such as a hurricane simulation will result in noticeable changes in the simulation days down the road. This is not a surprise. But even a small perturbation in a model would involve a huge amount of matter or energy in the real world, and whether these perturbations could be orchestrated to create a predictable change in course is very highly doubtful.
Another problem that plagues all forms of weather modifications is that you'll never know for sure if the modifications themselves caused a shift in storm evolution, or if an observed shift was something that would have happened anyway. Causality is the hardest thing to prove - even in a model where you know the state of your system to seven decimal points of precision.
I really hope federal money is not spent on this kind of research. Is there a limit to the hubris of mankind?
When I was younger I used to have fun with a variable transformer that originally was used for a model train set. It had a wiper-type slider that would go from 0 to 12(?) volts from left to right. I discovered by placing the contacts across the graphite in a pencil I could heat the graphite until it glowed cherry red and caused the wood of the pencil to start smoking. Good times.
Indeed. No specifics whatsoever. I mean, the scale of this is mind boggling. Consider the Earth's atmosphere is about 78% nitrogen, providing much of the mass that gives us comfortable pressures. What gas will fill this role on Mars? Also, where is all the water going to come from? There is a lot of evidence of lots of water having flowed on Mars in the past, but that was billions of years ago. And finally, where is the oxygen going to come from? How can you liberate all that breathable oxygen from the iron oxide soil, which I would imagine where it would come from? The amount of energy required to to these things is absolutely mind boggling.
Finally consider the fact that Mars' mass is considerably less than that of the Earth, and that being able to gravitationally bind a terrestrial atmosphere may not be feasible in the long run.
Without any specifics, I put this guy in the loony-bin category.
demise of cash?
on
ATM Turns 40
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
FTA:
"Money costs money to transport. I am therefore predicting the demise of cash within three to five years."
Haven't we heard that before? Like, 20 years ago? Seems that cash is just as prevalent as it always was. I just got back from a vacation to the UK and loved the fact that I could use my debit card to withdraw cash without getting socked with a 3% 'foreign transaction fee' that comes with credit card purchases (rather, there was a $1.50 flat fee from my bank for every withdrawal - so for 200 UKP, or about $400 with today's exchange rate, that's about 0.37%). Along with the fact that *everyone* accepts cash, including that remote pub in Nowhere, Scotland, I don't see cash going away any time soon. Yay cash.
Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol -- whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops -- requires more energy than can be derived from the product.
News Flash: Environmental groups argue for the second law of thermodynamics!
Really... the whole reason fossil fuels are so compelling is the energy that went into making them was used eons ago. Ethanol requires resources *now*. The big advantage of ethanol (from a climate change standpoint) is it's a zero-sum game with regards to carbon dioxide emissions. We're not taking concentrated carbon from millions of years ago and turning it into an atmospheric gas, we're using plant material that was created, in part, from recently utilized atmospheric CO2.
In my opinion, feeding people now trumps using a fuel source which consumes enormous resources. Let's also not forget irrigation - our aquifers are being depleted faster than then can get restored. I doubt California is going to embrace growing corn, which can require large amounts of irrigation, for ethanol when they are running out of drinking water.
White boys should not try to talk like they grew up in the hood, lesbians should not piss standing up, and corporations with US$50 thousand million in the bank should not try to act "scrappy".
I think a lot of good points have been raised about this type of approach towards getting kids interested in the subject.
But for those of you who think this is limited to grade school... at the college level I am familiar with a professor who uses a similar approach. Imagine looking at a Snickers bar and talking about conglomerate rocks, or talking about geological stratification with a peanut butter sandwich. And getting numerous teaching awards for it.
There are some of us who scratch our heads and wonder exactly what he is doing in college. He doesn't teach the upper level classes, but he is a hit with the intro classes. I have seen absolutely no assessment data indicating whether his approach is actually helping these students learn. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.
Over the years I have come to the realization that there is no one right way to teach, and that not everybody responds equally to a given teaching approach. I (a college professor) and my sister (an MD) both like the "soak up as much knowledge from the knowledgeable professor at the head of the class" approach. Chalk notes on the board, copied by hand to to the notebook, working on assignments outside of class, asking specific questions after getting stuck on something for hours, etc... that approach works for us. I really hate games and interactive working-with-other-students approaches in the classroom. I find it to be a copout by the professor; he or she is the one with the knowledge, not my fellow students (who are likely to be less knowledgeable than myself).
But some students do respond more to this approach. The "inquiry based learning" approach is catching on like wildfire in some schools, and some of this has bubbled up to the college level. There are many who sing its praises profess its superiority to "chalk and talk" but from what I can glean from conversations with those in the field of Education, this approach is not clearly better (as determined by test scores), but that it does work better for some (just like the traditional method works better for my sister and me).
As someone in the sciences, I have found that learning is really hard, and not always pleasant, and I do not hesitate to remind my students who are struggling with the material. I feel their pain. But no amount of entertainment will substitute sitting down with the text/notes/assignment and slogging through this stuff alone in the library for hours. I think the idea of individual hard, grueling work as an approach to learning has fallen out of favor. The majority of my students do not study outside of class until a day or two before the test. I can pretty much gage what the scores will be before I even collect the tests based upon the kinds of questions I am asking, and the depth of knowledge required to answer these questions correctly (think thermodynamics here).
In conclusion, I see some - not all - of these approaches as style vs. substance. I think we can all agree that engaging students with the material is always good, but that there is no single approach which will engage all students at the same level. Perhaps the best approach (one which I am gravitating towards) is a mixture of traditional and somewhat less traditional approaches.
Unfortunately, no. Hurricanes are way too big and generate way too much energy for us to have an effect.
This will answer all of your questions about trying to destroy hurricanes.
There was an article in Scientific American about a year or so ago that had a cover story about this. The authors posited that if we had accurate enough forecasts, we could modify the initial conditions (through some sort of perturbation) before the storm even started, and get it to, for instance, form over the open sea instead of over land.
But such forecasts are probably not possible for, say, 50 years at least, and that assumes we have much, much better observational data than we do today (and of course Moore's Law holds true, or something like it).
Nice find submitter. Unfortunately the article isn't in print yet, I'd like to look at what model they used (I presume it was WRF. We are able to simulate hurricanes at unprecedented resolution today, resolving convective features that just weren't there before in coarsers simulations. Coupling this numerical finding with observations makes a strong case.
This is big news, if it pans out, by the way. Certain aspects of hurricanes are still somewhat of a mystery. We are pretty good at tracking their path today but are still pretty bad at forecasting their intensity. This work will certainly help with understanding what determines the intensity. Very nifty stuff.
I was writing primarily to the AGW doubters that popped up like mushrooms on an old log, like they always do in any discussion involving global warming.
You have to start there before you can talk intelligently about implications. I'm still trying to convince people that it exists, and that humans are very likely primarily responsible.
Some of the results of GW may be positive from a human standpoint, but only if you look at the situation with a very narrow focus. Perhaps in 100 years you will be able to grow corn in northern Saskatchewan, but that may be grossly outbalanced by the global negatives to humans and the biosphere in general. It's just happening too fast for much of the biosphere to respond comfortably.
Disclaimer: I have a PhD in meteorology. While paleoclimatology and climate change are not my research areas, I am fascinated by climate change and try to keep up on the research.
I naively thought once the IPCC report came out these types of "debates" about climate change would end. I was wrong. If anything, the naysayers are louder than ever.
I have read the Summary for Policymakers (and actually used it as a teaching tool in my numerical weather prediction undergraduate class). Have you? It's written at a relatively non-scientific level (hey, it's for politicians after all) but is very, very clear.
The results of this international (intergovernmental) exhaustive literature review? Humans are very likely (90%) responsible for the bulk of observed global warming.
That's it. Plain and simple.
Yet, no other topic in the world brings out the armchair scientists more than global warming. It's a frustrating phenomenon for me as a scientist. It's sort of like being an oncologist dealing with a chronic smoker who blames his lung cancer on some genetic anomaly, or living 50 miles away from a nuclear power plant, rather than the bloody obvious fact that smoking two packs of cigarettes for 40 years just might have something to do with the cancer.
This is science, not faith. Just about every climate change doubter starts his sentence with "I don't believe humans cause global warming because..." or "I don't believe in global warming." This clearly demonstrates a huge misunderstanding of the scientific process. Belief has nothing to do with it. It's about physics, meteorology, climatology, astronomy, biology, oceanography, chemistry etc., all of which rely on the peer-reviewed scientific process to further our understanding of the physical world.
I challenge any of the naysayers to do a little research of their own, not simply rely on cherry picking viewpoints which align with their own. It's sort of like a game, holding up their "most credible scientist" as a shield, challenging me to do the same. Never mind the fact that my "army" of scientists is about three orders of magnitude greater than their own... but I digress...
The very least anyone should do before arguing against... or for... anthropogenic climate change is to pick up an undergraduate meteorology textbook and opening up to (usually) chapter 3, the chapter on heat transfer. The section on radiation is the most crucial one. Read about blackbody radiation. The solar spectrum and the terrestrial spectrum are a function of their temperatures. Because the Earth is much colder than than the sun, it emits in the infrared (longer wavelength than visible light etc. from the sun).
Then read about greenhouse gases, those by-and-large trace gases which exist in our atmosphere. Understand how they respond to longwave and shortwave radiation. A little light bulb should eventually go on over your head when you realize "oh, so *that's* why the Earth is habitable." You see, without these trace gases (CO2, H20, CH4) the earth would be in a deep freeze - estimated at about 50 degrees F colder global average temperature.
Once you make it that far, you're almost there. Realize that humans are responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 levels from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm to a modern day value of 380 ppm, an increase of over 30%. It takes very little stretch to realize that this would lead to a shift in the radiative equilibrium temperature of the earth (related to the global average temperature).
You see, this is really easy science. There is NO REASON TO ASSUME that CO2 values increasing the way they have would NOT lead to an increase in global average temperature!! This is exactly what we'd expect! And this doesn't even involve the scary discussion of feedbacks (water vapor feedback, snow/ice albedo feedback) which may accelerate the warming.
And that's just the back of the envelope part. Yes, there are still unknowns. Not, it's not the sun (we've checked into that if you can believe it). No, it's n
...if she had a research position, the story should have ended there (there are many professors with no undergrad or even grad degrees)
Uh, I disagree.
I am also an academic. If I had lied about my degrees, it means I hadn't done the work required to get the degree. It means that I not qualified to be a college professor at any university (that I am familiar with).
Note that I do not mean to say that all college professors with degrees are doing good work / are good teachers, nor am I saying that you *have* to have a degree to be an effective teacher, or maybe even researcher, at the undergraduate level (I would say graduate level: no way). The most tremendous failures I have personally seen in the classroom are people with lots of "life experience" but who are not lifelong academics.
I also disagree about "general education" being treated differently. It's a sore spot for me, because I put a *lot* into my gen-ed classes (e.g., "weather for poets") and believe my research and breadth/depth of knowledge makes me a much better teacher than a temp. faculty member with, say, a Geography degree who is looking for a better job while "teaching on the side."
You say there are many "college professors" with no degrees. Can you provide examples? I've never heard of such a thing. Even our temporary faculty for intro-level courses have to have at least a Master's Degree.
"The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."
Yeah, this stops me on the tracks alright - I'd rather the train run me over than read a book full of this lousy attempt at metaphor.
I keep blog (what I used to call an online journal before that stupid term came about) but I disable comments. I think this would solve a lot of the problem. If developers simply want to do a brain dump every once in a while and share it with the world they should not feel obliged to turn on comments and subsequently respond to them. As a journaller from way back (junior high school) I have found journalling to be a very valuable process for collecting my thoughts and forcing myself to take stock of where I am currently at. The process itself is rewarding. But I feel no obligation to share my journalling with others (although I do in one venue, but in a self-censored way) or enable responses. I certainly see how enabling feedback/comments adds a whole new dimension to the process, but it's certainly not a necessary quality of a blog.
Another good theory on it can be found here, where it is claimed that he observed warming actually reflects the Urban Heat Island effect...
Climatologists long realized this effect and have corrected for it. They are not stupid. This a not a "good theory" because even the most cursory research on the topic will debunk it.
And it's not about "slowing down glaciation" - it's about hitting the system way too hard way too fast.
If it is real, is it permanent and not just an earth/solar cycle?
It is real. Nothing is permanent. It is not due to solar forcing.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)
The primary forcing is greenhouse gas emissions, notably CO2 but also methane. Water vapor provides the strongest greenhouse forcing - and a warmer atmosphere will have more water vapor, which will lead to a warmer earth due to its greenhouse forcing, rinse, lather, repeat. This is known as a positive feedback. If it was the only game in town (it is not) we would probably end up like Venus.
Deforesteation and other messing with the carbon cycle may play a role which may go in either direction. One must look at the albedo effect as well.
Do not - ever - talk about ozone depletion and global warming in the same sentence. They are entirely unrelated. Thank you.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done? (Even if the cause is greenhouse gases, it may make more sense to grow the necessary number of forests to absorb the gas as our gas output increases or find some other way to solidify/trap greenhouse gases.)
"Business as usual" will lead to a much different world in 100-200 years.
You can't just "grow more forests" to take up the extra CO2. Does not work that way. Even if it did: trees decompose. Guess what a product of decomposition is?
Some people are beginning to seriously consider carbon sequestering. This is a horrible situation we have set up for ourselves. I wonder where the energy is going to come from to power this sequestering technology? Fossil fuels?
And just wait until a reservoir of CO2 that didn't manage to form other compounds when you sequestered it manages to burp itself into the lower troposphere and suffocate life in low-lying areas.
I repeat: business as usual will lead to extremely different conditions across the planet in a couple hundred years.
Earth's climate system is nonlinear. This means a focring of A does not necessarily lead to a response of some fraction of A. If you push the climate system far enough it may (and indeed has in the past) flip into another very different regime. Once you reach this so-called tipping point you cannot get back to the original state.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).
Transition out of fossil fuel dependence. Pure and simple. Even then we may reach the tipping point. But it is thought we can turn things around if we begin to act now.
Seriously folks - educate yourselves. Learn some physics, raditive transfer, etc. Get an introductory meteorology textbook at the very least. This is about science, pure and simple, and in order to be taken seriously in this discussion you need to understand the science beneath it. Armchair climatologists are a dime a dozen and are mostly making fools of themselves simply because they don't understand the basic fundamentals. Unfortunately most people are not educated enough to realize this and think there is some sort of big debate on the causes of recent climate change. There isn't. It's all about how much, and when.
Slashdot Mirror
You presume I am doing anything illegal in the first place. And if using ssh raises red flags for the gov't then they are going to be very very busy as it's really the de facto remote login protocol for all Unix machines.
My example is a case where if the AUP of the colo company explicitly states that they do not monitor traffic, and your ISP for the last mile does, you can avoid your ISP's deep packet sniffing.
I pay for a dedicated server (essentially colo but they provide the hardware) from a company with a decent AUP. I put linux on the server and run squid on a non-standard port, allowing connections from localhost only. Then from the machine I'm surfing from I tunnel into the squid server. Say squid is running on port 1234 and sshd is running on 4567:
ssh -f -N -L 1234:localhost:1234 -p 5678 my.squid.server.com
Configure firefox to use a proxy to localhost:1234 and all traffic is encrypted to the squid server.
Of course, I could just use Tor, which is great, but can be slow. In fact, you could run a tor server on your colo machine and have all tor traffic bounce off of the server, which would be pretty fast if you leave tor running as a daemon and dedicate a decent amount of bandwidth to the tor network.
Finding another solar system with Jupiter-like planets in circular orbits at decent distances from the parent star is big news. There has been speculation (and I would imagine it will continue) that our solar system with its roughly circular orbiting planets was rather anomalous, especially with most of the extrasolar planets discovered having mostly whacked out orbits (of course the method of detection favors this type of discovery to some extent). Highly elliptical orbits would lead to horrible seasonal variations, as well as potentially unstable orbits for multiple planets. Jupiter helps protect Earth and the inner planets from comets and asteroids. I would imagine that the likelihood that life exists in the universe has just gone up (specifically, n_e in the Drake equation).
It excites me greatly to know that before I die, rocky inner planets similar to ours will most likely be discovered!
If the summary was written using the features of this software, I want nothing to do with it.
Generally DX propagation improves near the peak, especially from 20m to 10m, and then there's the magic of 6m... but I've only been licensed since 2002, so have really not had a lot of personal experience having only caught the tail of the last peak. I did make contacts to Iceland and Poland the second day I had my license, with 100W and a short random wire antenna bout 10 feet above the ground. That's whats neat about the peak of the sunspot cycle.
QRZ DE KG4ULP
Yes, it does. You connect it via USB and it automounts asTrekstor Vibez. It also plays FLAC and of course MP3, and WAV and WMA.
http://www.trekstor.de/en/products/detail_mp3.php?pid=66
I spent a couple solid days researching the options, because I also refused to get a player that did not do non-proprietary lossless and lossy audio, and found this to be a decent solution. I thought about doing the RockBox route but wanted something I didn't have to hack right away to get to work. I've had one for a year and have had no problems. Only downside is disk space is lower than similar players - but 12 GB isn't too shabby and moving music to it is a snap.
While your demographic might be a bit different than the General TV Watching Demographic, this is an obvious, free, and valuable way to determine popularity, probably as good as the Nielsons, and mabye slightly less useful than Tivo data (since they can, as I understand, know whether you actually played, and ostensibly watched, the show using Tivo data).
If it weren't for the advertiser-driven model that we currently have, the bittorrent "content delivery system" would be nothing but positive for the industry. What they need to do is make high definition, high quality video files available for download for a reasonable fee, and remove all ads (or at least make that an option). I'd say the removal of commercials is the second most valuable aspect of getting shows off the Internet compared to the tuning in at 8PM (the first being able to watch it when I feel like it, something about as novel as the VCR).
File sharing can't be stopped. Well it could, but it would involve stopping the Internet, and rather large economies would collapse if that happened. The writer's strike is all about writers getting revenue from "new media" and I have to say, I think they have a point since it's pretty clear that before long the boundary what is TV (coming over cable) and what is being delivered by the Internet (which, in my house, comes over cable already) will be less and less distinct.
It is highly doubtful whether human meddling will have a discernible influence on the morphology of any given hurricane. Hurricanes are simply too big and the amount of energy involved is too large. Have you ever seen a kid kick dust into a dust devil? The sucker continues merrily on its path. Think of the scale of dust-devil-to-kid and then think of the scale of a bunch of puny airplanes spewing dust to a hurricane!
I am highly skeptical of any conclusions drawn from simulated data. As a cloud modeler running at very high resolutions (much higher than hurricane simulations since I am studying much smaller individual thunderstorms) I can tell you that even the most sophisticated cloud microphysics parameterizations are extremely crude. Clouds and rain are represented not by droplets, but mixing ratios, and gross assumptions are made about drop size distributions, transfer rates between species, etc. So, to say "we dropped some parameterized soot in the model and it made a difference" is not saying much.
Small perturbations in a highly unstable chaotic simulations such as a hurricane simulation will result in noticeable changes in the simulation days down the road. This is not a surprise. But even a small perturbation in a model would involve a huge amount of matter or energy in the real world, and whether these perturbations could be orchestrated to create a predictable change in course is very highly doubtful.
Another problem that plagues all forms of weather modifications is that you'll never know for sure if the modifications themselves caused a shift in storm evolution, or if an observed shift was something that would have happened anyway. Causality is the hardest thing to prove - even in a model where you know the state of your system to seven decimal points of precision.
I really hope federal money is not spent on this kind of research. Is there a limit to the hubris of mankind?
When I was younger I used to have fun with a variable transformer that originally was used for a model train set. It had a wiper-type slider that would go from 0 to 12(?) volts from left to right. I discovered by placing the contacts across the graphite in a pencil I could heat the graphite until it glowed cherry red and caused the wood of the pencil to start smoking. Good times.
Indeed. No specifics whatsoever. I mean, the scale of this is mind boggling. Consider the Earth's atmosphere is about 78% nitrogen, providing much of the mass that gives us comfortable pressures. What gas will fill this role on Mars? Also, where is all the water going to come from? There is a lot of evidence of lots of water having flowed on Mars in the past, but that was billions of years ago. And finally, where is the oxygen going to come from? How can you liberate all that breathable oxygen from the iron oxide soil, which I would imagine where it would come from? The amount of energy required to to these things is absolutely mind boggling.
Finally consider the fact that Mars' mass is considerably less than that of the Earth, and that being able to gravitationally bind a terrestrial atmosphere may not be feasible in the long run.
Without any specifics, I put this guy in the loony-bin category.
FTA:
"Money costs money to transport. I am therefore predicting the demise of cash within three to five years."
Haven't we heard that before? Like, 20 years ago? Seems that cash is just as prevalent as it always was. I just got back from a vacation to the UK and loved the fact that I could use my debit card to withdraw cash without getting socked with a 3% 'foreign transaction fee' that comes with credit card purchases (rather, there was a $1.50 flat fee from my bank for every withdrawal - so for 200 UKP, or about $400 with today's exchange rate, that's about 0.37%). Along with the fact that *everyone* accepts cash, including that remote pub in Nowhere, Scotland, I don't see cash going away any time soon. Yay cash.
Environmental groups have argued that producing ethanol -- whether from corn, beets, wheat, or other crops -- requires more energy than can be derived from the product.
News Flash: Environmental groups argue for the second law of thermodynamics!
Really... the whole reason fossil fuels are so compelling is the energy that went into making them was used eons ago. Ethanol requires resources *now*. The big advantage of ethanol (from a climate change standpoint) is it's a zero-sum game with regards to carbon dioxide emissions. We're not taking concentrated carbon from millions of years ago and turning it into an atmospheric gas, we're using plant material that was created, in part, from recently utilized atmospheric CO2.
In my opinion, feeding people now trumps using a fuel source which consumes enormous resources. Let's also not forget irrigation - our aquifers are being depleted faster than then can get restored. I doubt California is going to embrace growing corn, which can require large amounts of irrigation, for ethanol when they are running out of drinking water.
White boys should not try to talk like they grew up in the hood, lesbians should not piss standing up, and corporations with US$50 thousand million in the bank should not try to act "scrappy".
.sig gold!
That's
I think a lot of good points have been raised about this type of approach towards getting kids interested in the subject.
But for those of you who think this is limited to grade school... at the college level I am familiar with a professor who uses a similar approach. Imagine looking at a Snickers bar and talking about conglomerate rocks, or talking about geological stratification with a peanut butter sandwich. And getting numerous teaching awards for it.
There are some of us who scratch our heads and wonder exactly what he is doing in college. He doesn't teach the upper level classes, but he is a hit with the intro classes. I have seen absolutely no assessment data indicating whether his approach is actually helping these students learn. Perhaps it is, perhaps not.
Over the years I have come to the realization that there is no one right way to teach, and that not everybody responds equally to a given teaching approach. I (a college professor) and my sister (an MD) both like the "soak up as much knowledge from the knowledgeable professor at the head of the class" approach. Chalk notes on the board, copied by hand to to the notebook, working on assignments outside of class, asking specific questions after getting stuck on something for hours, etc... that approach works for us. I really hate games and interactive working-with-other-students approaches in the classroom. I find it to be a copout by the professor; he or she is the one with the knowledge, not my fellow students (who are likely to be less knowledgeable than myself).
But some students do respond more to this approach. The "inquiry based learning" approach is catching on like wildfire in some schools, and some of this has bubbled up to the college level. There are many who sing its praises profess its superiority to "chalk and talk" but from what I can glean from conversations with those in the field of Education, this approach is not clearly better (as determined by test scores), but that it does work better for some (just like the traditional method works better for my sister and me).
As someone in the sciences, I have found that learning is really hard, and not always pleasant, and I do not hesitate to remind my students who are struggling with the material. I feel their pain. But no amount of entertainment will substitute sitting down with the text/notes/assignment and slogging through this stuff alone in the library for hours. I think the idea of individual hard, grueling work as an approach to learning has fallen out of favor. The majority of my students do not study outside of class until a day or two before the test. I can pretty much gage what the scores will be before I even collect the tests based upon the kinds of questions I am asking, and the depth of knowledge required to answer these questions correctly (think thermodynamics here).
In conclusion, I see some - not all - of these approaches as style vs. substance. I think we can all agree that engaging students with the material is always good, but that there is no single approach which will engage all students at the same level. Perhaps the best approach (one which I am gravitating towards) is a mixture of traditional and somewhat less traditional approaches.
Unfortunately, no. Hurricanes are way too big and generate way too much energy for us to have an effect.
This will answer all of your questions about trying to destroy hurricanes.
There was an article in Scientific American about a year or so ago that had a cover story about this. The authors posited that if we had accurate enough forecasts, we could modify the initial conditions (through some sort of perturbation) before the storm even started, and get it to, for instance, form over the open sea instead of over land.
But such forecasts are probably not possible for, say, 50 years at least, and that assumes we have much, much better observational data than we do today (and of course Moore's Law holds true, or something like it).
Nice find submitter. Unfortunately the article isn't in print yet, I'd like to look at what model they used (I presume it was WRF. We are able to simulate hurricanes at unprecedented resolution today, resolving convective features that just weren't there before in coarsers simulations. Coupling this numerical finding with observations makes a strong case.
This is big news, if it pans out, by the way. Certain aspects of hurricanes are still somewhat of a mystery. We are pretty good at tracking their path today but are still pretty bad at forecasting their intensity. This work will certainly help with understanding what determines the intensity. Very nifty stuff.
Yes, I know. I did RTFA :)
I was writing primarily to the AGW doubters that popped up like mushrooms on an old log, like they always do in any discussion involving global warming.
You have to start there before you can talk intelligently about implications. I'm still trying to convince people that it exists, and that humans are very likely primarily responsible.
Some of the results of GW may be positive from a human standpoint, but only if you look at the situation with a very narrow focus. Perhaps in 100 years you will be able to grow corn in northern Saskatchewan, but that may be grossly outbalanced by the global negatives to humans and the biosphere in general. It's just happening too fast for much of the biosphere to respond comfortably.
Disclaimer: I have a PhD in meteorology. While paleoclimatology and climate change are not my research areas, I am fascinated by climate change and try to keep up on the research.
I naively thought once the IPCC report came out these types of "debates" about climate change would end. I was wrong. If anything, the naysayers are louder than ever.
I have read the Summary for Policymakers (and actually used it as a teaching tool in my numerical weather prediction undergraduate class). Have you? It's written at a relatively non-scientific level (hey, it's for politicians after all) but is very, very clear.
The results of this international (intergovernmental) exhaustive literature review? Humans are very likely (90%) responsible for the bulk of observed global warming.
That's it. Plain and simple.
Yet, no other topic in the world brings out the armchair scientists more than global warming. It's a frustrating phenomenon for me as a scientist. It's sort of like being an oncologist dealing with a chronic smoker who blames his lung cancer on some genetic anomaly, or living 50 miles away from a nuclear power plant, rather than the bloody obvious fact that smoking two packs of cigarettes for 40 years just might have something to do with the cancer.
This is science, not faith. Just about every climate change doubter starts his sentence with "I don't believe humans cause global warming because..." or "I don't believe in global warming." This clearly demonstrates a huge misunderstanding of the scientific process. Belief has nothing to do with it. It's about physics, meteorology, climatology, astronomy, biology, oceanography, chemistry etc., all of which rely on the peer-reviewed scientific process to further our understanding of the physical world.
I challenge any of the naysayers to do a little research of their own, not simply rely on cherry picking viewpoints which align with their own. It's sort of like a game, holding up their "most credible scientist" as a shield, challenging me to do the same. Never mind the fact that my "army" of scientists is about three orders of magnitude greater than their own... but I digress...
The very least anyone should do before arguing against... or for... anthropogenic climate change is to pick up an undergraduate meteorology textbook and opening up to (usually) chapter 3, the chapter on heat transfer. The section on radiation is the most crucial one. Read about blackbody radiation. The solar spectrum and the terrestrial spectrum are a function of their temperatures. Because the Earth is much colder than than the sun, it emits in the infrared (longer wavelength than visible light etc. from the sun).
Then read about greenhouse gases, those by-and-large trace gases which exist in our atmosphere. Understand how they respond to longwave and shortwave radiation. A little light bulb should eventually go on over your head when you realize "oh, so *that's* why the Earth is habitable." You see, without these trace gases (CO2, H20, CH4) the earth would be in a deep freeze - estimated at about 50 degrees F colder global average temperature.
Once you make it that far, you're almost there. Realize that humans are responsible for increasing atmospheric CO2 levels from preindustrial levels of 280 ppm to a modern day value of 380 ppm, an increase of over 30%. It takes very little stretch to realize that this would lead to a shift in the radiative equilibrium temperature of the earth (related to the global average temperature).
You see, this is really easy science. There is NO REASON TO ASSUME that CO2 values increasing the way they have would NOT lead to an increase in global average temperature!! This is exactly what we'd expect! And this doesn't even involve the scary discussion of feedbacks (water vapor feedback, snow/ice albedo feedback) which may accelerate the warming.
And that's just the back of the envelope part. Yes, there are still unknowns. Not, it's not the sun (we've checked into that if you can believe it). No, it's n
...if she had a research position, the story should have ended there (there are many professors with no undergrad or even grad degrees)
Uh, I disagree.
I am also an academic. If I had lied about my degrees, it means I hadn't done the work required to get the degree. It means that I not qualified to be a college professor at any university (that I am familiar with).
Note that I do not mean to say that all college professors with degrees are doing good work / are good teachers, nor am I saying that you *have* to have a degree to be an effective teacher, or maybe even researcher, at the undergraduate level (I would say graduate level: no way). The most tremendous failures I have personally seen in the classroom are people with lots of "life experience" but who are not lifelong academics.
I also disagree about "general education" being treated differently. It's a sore spot for me, because I put a *lot* into my gen-ed classes (e.g., "weather for poets") and believe my research and breadth/depth of knowledge makes me a much better teacher than a temp. faculty member with, say, a Geography degree who is looking for a better job while "teaching on the side."
You say there are many "college professors" with no degrees. Can you provide examples? I've never heard of such a thing. Even our temporary faculty for intro-level courses have to have at least a Master's Degree.
"The bubble-era vision of a Utopian Internet is dented and dirty... The Lexus has collided with the olive tree, and its crumpled hulk spins in a ditch as the orchard smolders."
Yeah, this stops me on the tracks alright - I'd rather the train run me over than read a book full of this lousy attempt at metaphor.
I keep blog (what I used to call an online journal before that stupid term came about) but I disable comments. I think this would solve a lot of the problem. If developers simply want to do a brain dump every once in a while and share it with the world they should not feel obliged to turn on comments and subsequently respond to them. As a journaller from way back (junior high school) I have found journalling to be a very valuable process for collecting my thoughts and forcing myself to take stock of where I am currently at. The process itself is rewarding. But I feel no obligation to share my journalling with others (although I do in one venue, but in a self-censored way) or enable responses. I certainly see how enabling feedback/comments adds a whole new dimension to the process, but it's certainly not a necessary quality of a blog.
Another good theory on it can be found here, where it is claimed that he observed warming actually reflects the Urban Heat Island effect...
Climatologists long realized this effect and have corrected for it. They are not stupid. This a not a "good theory" because even the most cursory research on the topic will debunk it.
And it's not about "slowing down glaciation" - it's about hitting the system way too hard way too fast.
If it is real, is it permanent and not just an earth/solar cycle?
It is real. Nothing is permanent. It is not due to solar forcing.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), is it due to greenhouse gases? (i.e. not deforestation, urban heat islands, the hole in the ozone, or other causes or even a combination of these causes)
The primary forcing is greenhouse gas emissions, notably CO2 but also methane. Water vapor provides the strongest greenhouse forcing - and a warmer atmosphere will have more water vapor, which will lead to a warmer earth due to its greenhouse forcing, rinse, lather, repeat. This is known as a positive feedback. If it was the only game in town (it is not) we would probably end up like Venus.
Deforesteation and other messing with the carbon cycle may play a role which may go in either direction. One must look at the albedo effect as well.
Do not - ever - talk about ozone depletion and global warming in the same sentence. They are entirely unrelated. Thank you.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), what is the real impact if nothing is done? (Even if the cause is greenhouse gases, it may make more sense to grow the necessary number of forests to absorb the gas as our gas output increases or find some other way to solidify/trap greenhouse gases.)
"Business as usual" will lead to a much different world in 100-200 years.
You can't just "grow more forests" to take up the extra CO2. Does not work that way. Even if it did: trees decompose. Guess what a product of decomposition is?
Some people are beginning to seriously consider carbon sequestering. This is a horrible situation we have set up for ourselves. I wonder where the energy is going to come from to power this sequestering technology? Fossil fuels?
And just wait until a reservoir of CO2 that didn't manage to form other compounds when you sequestered it manages to burp itself into the lower troposphere and suffocate life in low-lying areas.
I repeat: business as usual will lead to extremely different conditions across the planet in a couple hundred years.
Earth's climate system is nonlinear. This means a focring of A does not necessarily lead to a response of some fraction of A. If you push the climate system far enough it may (and indeed has in the past) flip into another very different regime. Once you reach this so-called tipping point you cannot get back to the original state.
If it is real (whether or not it is caused by us), can anything be done to reverse it? (If not, then while it's common sense to try to reduce the impact, it makes a lot of sense to either invest in technologies to either live with it or leave earth).
Transition out of fossil fuel dependence. Pure and simple. Even then we may reach the tipping point. But it is thought we can turn things around if we begin to act now.
Seriously folks - educate yourselves. Learn some physics, raditive transfer, etc. Get an introductory meteorology textbook at the very least. This is about science, pure and simple, and in order to be taken seriously in this discussion you need to understand the science beneath it. Armchair climatologists are a dime a dozen and are mostly making fools of themselves simply because they don't understand the basic fundamentals. Unfortunately most people are not educated enough to realize this and think there is some sort of big debate on the causes of recent climate change. There isn't. It's all about how much, and when.