...when I'm irratated at work, even silence can be distracting.
But it's never truly silent, is it? In my office right now it's three things: Outdoor construction noises, the ventilation system, and my AMD machine plus G5 mac. As far as what bothers me the most: I have sent back hard drives that put out a high pitched whine (10K RPM ones seem to be the worst) even though they were not defective. With those drives I can slowly feel my high frequency hearing melting away. I've gravitated towards the Seagate Barracudas, which are quiet, and quiet power supplies and CPU coolers. The G5 roars like a tornado when it needs to cool off but it's only occasionally, which does not bother me.
The worst for me is the ventilation system. A low level, low frequency rumble that never stops. I only really notice it when the rumble causes the false ceiling, cat5e cabling and whatever other random junk is up there to vibrate and give off high frequency tick-tick-tick type noises. I have been known to bring a chair out in the hallway and bash on the ceiling structure until the ticking noise goes away - it bothers me that much.
Music only works when I'm in the mood for it, and I usually can't concentrate on my work if there are vocals, so it's usually minimalist classical at low levels when I want music and work to happen at the same time.
Same goes to the douche who thinks "CFCs are too heavy to get into the Stratosphere". I'm not going to bother to explain that one to you.
Actually, I'd really like to hear an explanation. I'm not going to claim to know anything about CFC's, but if these gases really are heavier than air and don't readily mix with air, how exactly does a bucket of them in my back yard elevate itself to the upper atmosphere?
Think of it this way: What is "air" in the first place? To a good approximation within the troposphere, it's a mixture of molecular oxygen (molecular weight = 32 grams/mol, 21%), molecular nitrogen (MW = 28 g/mol, 78%) and argon (MW = 40 g/mol,.9%). If the heaviest gases simply sunk to the bottom, we would be suffocated by argon near the ground and all of the nitrogen would be on the top of the atmosphere, with the oxygen in the middle.
The troposphere (tropos in Latin means "turning" or "mixing") is well-mixed and the relative ratio of the three aforementioned permanent gaes to one another is constant. If you introduce a heavier gas (higher MW) it will still get mixed into the lighter gases over time due to the winds. Brownian motion will also cause heavier gases to diffuse in a calm environment.
CFCs will spread laterally across the globe by the horizontal winds. Whenever there is a strong thunderstorm, updrafts will slam air, which originates near the ground, into the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. Very strong updrafts can intrude into the bottom of the stratosphere where the tropospheric air mixes into the stratosphere. Once something gets into the stratosphere (if it's got a very small terminal velocity - think about strong volcanoes spewing ash) it tends to stick around because the stability of the stratosphere is so high (due to the temperature inversion I mentioned before).
Back to "heavier gases" for a moment. It is true that if you "pour" a heavy gas onto the ground it will spread out before mixing. There have been cases where CO2 (MW = 34) has seeped out of the ground and spread laterally, suffocating people (google Lake Nyos). But given a few hours of typical winds, the heavier gas will be diluted and over time mixes into the rest of the atmosphere, contributing slightly towards the atmosphere's own average molecular weight.
Tropospheric ozone is created by many things but is very reactive and does not last long. Lightning does produce ozone in the troposphere as does certain chemical reactions between anthropogenic pollutants.
Stratospheric ozone is created when high-energy ultraviolet light from the sun splits diatomic oxygen (O2) into oxygen atoms (O) which can combine with O2 to create O3. UV also splits O3 into O and O2, and there is constant creation/destruction of O3 in the strasophere. It reaches an eqilibrium which is a function of a bunch of things, but the end result is (a) the creation/destruction of O3 in the stratosphere "absorbs" the most energetic UV from the sun (which is good for life) and (b) this process heats up the stratosphere, making it one big inversion which has the nice side-effect of keeping thunderstorm updrafts from blasting into the mesosphere.
In order to undertsand why there is an ozone "hole" over Antarcitca you have to understand about the dynamics of the atmosphere. Most ozone is actually created in the tropical latitudes and is advected southward/northward via the Hadley Cell circulation. The polar vortex over Antarctica tends to inhibit mixing across its boundary, so stuff that gets in it tends to stay there. Ozone depletion due to CFCs tends to be greatest around this time of year when the Antarctic is entering Spring and the sun is beginning to interact with polar stratospheric clouds which are a major catalyst to the ozone depletion.
Anyone could look this stuff up in a recent undergraduate meteorology textbook. Just about all of the "Mod 5 : informative" posts in this thread are laughingly incorrect.
Same goes to the douche who thinks "CFCs are too heavy to get into the Stratosphere". I'm not going to bother to explain that one to you.
And finally, don't ever mention "global warming" and "ozone hole" in the same sentence as if they are related. They are not.
Not meant to be a threadjack, but I'll ask anway: anyone know if the latest Ipods can do gapless playback, with or without the Rockbox firmware? Or any other MP3 player that isn't riddled with reports of hard drive failures? This page suggest IPODS can. I would really love to get one of these players (any kind) but gapless is an absolute must, and support for OGG and FLAC is highly preferred.
Global warming is indeed due to greenhouse gas emissions, and not some natural cycle.
If we keep a business-as-usual approach to emissions, climate change will be dramatic and catastrophic for many.
This is what virtually all climate scientists believe (and by "believe" I mean "have concluded from painstaking scientific research involving paleoclimatology, basic therodynamics, oceanography" etc...). Not "believe" as in "I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster."
I can't tell you how much it frustrates me as a scientists that more people can't see the obvious. I believe (heh) it is due to an overwhelming lack of people exercising critical, scientific thought.
The truth is, unless you at least have a basic understanding of atmospheric radiation theory, you really have no place arguing about the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Let me put it this way: It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that increasing greenhouse gas emissions would *not* lead to a shift in the earth's radiative equilibrium temperature (related to global average temperature). If there were too many negatives in that sentence, I'll put it this way: Global warming is no surprise, it is physics in action.
Pick up any intro meteorology college texbtook - there are several - and read the chapter on radiation and climate change. And climate feedback mechanisms. And the thermohaline circulation. And then argue against global warming being forced by greenhouse gas emissions. I'd love to hear a decent argument which wasn't politically motivated or based upon selective omission of the research on this topic.
I have grown weary of trying to get people to do a small amount of basic science research so that they may use their own goddammed heads and draw a scientifically based conclusion about climate change rather than re-spew crap they heard from some douchebag whose politics aligns with their own. This includes you too Lefties/greenies: Do some homework. If you are right for the wrong resons, you're not helping things. Educate yourself scientifically. Everyone.
Think, people, think. It seems that precious few people (well here in America) do much of this any more.
As a previous commenter stated, this is a mathematical proof that such a solution exists. You cannot explicitly solve the Navier Stokes equations as written. If you could, my job would be much easier (I model thunderstorms at very high resolution on massively parallel supercomputers). The Navier Stokes equations, along with some other conservation laws, and some physical parameterizations, can be "closed" such that you can approximate a solution using numerical tehcniques, given an initial state and boundary conditions. It is not easy. From a practical standpoint, dealing with massively parallel computers is not much fun. I've spent the past couple of months debugging my own stupid coding errors, competing with hundreds of other scientists running their models, and finding ways to manage the terabytes of data these models produce when they do run succesfully.
Back to the paper... While I am not a mathematician, the paper appears kind of rough to me - lots of punctuation errors, commas in the wrong place, unclosed parehtneses... I suspect this paper has not been fully through the peer review process. I don't know how the mathematicians do it, but I would say this paper is a draft (not discrediting the work - I am not quallfied to judge it - but it looks rough).
Exactly. I can't handle anything moving on my screen when I am trying to read text. I have yet to open a book or a magazine where crappy flashy animations cycled infintely (I'm sure the day will come however).
At a recent meteorology conference/workshop (on effective ways of using computer models in the classroom) one of my colleages said something to the effect that high school / college students today who grew up with the internet are used to things like animations on the screen and even suggested that they favor it over a static page. And went on to suggest that textbooks would be obsolete in 20 years.
So I ask all you young-uns out there, is this true? Am I the only one who permanantely has image.animation_mode set to never and has flashblock installed - and who wants to throw the monitor across the room after five minutes of using someone else's computer that doesn't have these settings?
Congratuations. You've just described what I go through trying to simulate tornado-producing thunderstorms. Even the "how do I present the results" part. Something I deal with on a day to day basis. As far as presentation goes, I like raytracers to present scalar data and feature-detection software to find vortices. Throw in stereo viewing, animate the sucker and at the very least you've got some cool pictures and movies.
*I* would *love* to be able to take mass transit to work daily -- problem is that it's just not possible as the transit system here (from the suburbs) was intended for suburb A city rather than being able to go from suburb A suburb B.
Here's another radical idea: live close to where you work.
I realize this is not possible for many people, but for many of us it is.
I am 37 years old, have been working in academia one way or another for the past 15 years, and I have never bought a parking sticker for my car. I have always lived within 3 miles of my workplace (a university). And my wife and I made a conscious decision to either rent or buy close to my workplace (she works from home). Or in one case when that was not possible, on a bus line.
I walk to work (currently 1.5 miles each way) through just about any atmospheric conditions, only very occasionally driving in and parking at a meter and crossing my fingers that I don't get a ticket (usually on days of heavy rain). As a bonus, I get a little more than an hour's worth of daily exercise in the form of brisk walking, and while doing so, formulating what I'll be doing in class/research today, listening to music, etc.
I am sick of that term being thrown around by journalists, politicians and the like. A fine example is "The Gay And Lesbian Community". It's like, just because you're gay, you are suddenly the member of some really nifty group where you are magically surrounded by other gay people, being invited to gay potlucks and such, going to gay community-building meetings, babysitting each other's adopted children, walking gaily hand in hand, building your "community" with gay politicians, gay policement, grocers, teachers etc. Look at me!! I'm in a community! Isn't that special!
I do large 3D thunderstorm simulations. With some of the larger simulations I am integrating lots of things, contained in 3D floating point arrays, over 1 billion or more gridpoints (using distributed computing, such as a beowulf cluster made up of dual Xeons or an SGI Altix system). Each scientific calculation requires accessing floating point values stored in these arrays, doing some math, and updating another array.
Memory latency, and memory bandwidth, both impact how long it takes my simulations to complete. Let's say it is the difference between a simulation taking a week vs. five days... this is significant to me and how much I can get done. With these heavy duty scientific models and such, you really can see a noticable benefit with the fancier hardware, and clock speed is certainly not the the only factor to consider by a long shot.
such as one storm 1902 that killed about 8000 people on the Texas coast, making it one of the worst disasters in American history.
Actually it was 1900, and it was the city of Galveston which was hit, and the high death toll was largely due to the fact that nobody was evacuated, and this was due in part to a turf war between the weather forecast offices in Galveson and Cuba.
"Isaac's Storm" written Erik Larson chronicles this storm and the events leading up to it. Highly recommended.
As others have stated "podcasting" is nothing but people putting audio files online. What a revolution! Remember how the WWW was going to change the world when everybody with a computer could become their own publishers for pennies and a vast wealth of creativity and quality would reshape the world of publishing etc. blah blah? What happened was there sure was a glut of "publishing" but 99% of it was pure crap.
And so goes podcasting. Just because I can buy a $5 microphone and free-associate into an mp3 file and put it on my web page doesn't mean that I should, or that anyone should care.
If you're looking for good radio, look to your local community radio station. I volunteered at one for most of the '90s and it was an incredible experience. Granted, you will occasionally hear some gawd-awful stuff on community radio - but it's more than mad up for by the amazing radio you'll hear from folks who have some sort of niche specialty - like 500,000 vinyl jazz albums in their record library. Or a passion for reporting news that goes unreported elsewhere. Or a talent for reading their own bizarre fiction at 1 AM.
If you don't have a local community radio station, see if you can find streaming audio of one. Unfortunately the DMCA is especially toxic to community radio station - no more "New disc at nine" (can't play too many songs from one artist in an hour, etc.). So some stations will have to either have dead internet air during certain periods, or not stream at all, or just archive some shows.
Finally I wish the "pod" would go away from podcasting. It's a terrible word. Worse than weblog.
From TFA: "This is the new Nasa. If we cannot prove this is safe, we don't want to go there. It exceeded our threshold and we needed to take action," Mr Hale said.
Spaceflightnow.com: "Today at the mission management team meeting we had a very long discussion about aerodynamics," Hale said. "I went in with a very simple question: Did we have the engineering knowledge and analysis that would, without a shadow of a doubt, allow us to be 100 percent confident the vehicle could fly safely during entry?
"without a shadow of a doubt..." "100 percent confident..." "If we cannot prove this is safe, we don't want to go there..."
C'mon, Dr. Hale. I mean, Columbia was a tragedy and all, but who are you trying to fool? Most people understand that space travel in 2005 is Really Fricking Dangerous. These absolute statements are ridiculous. Of course there is never going to be 100 percent confidence levels, of course you cannot prove that the damned thing won't explode.
I can't help but feel that this problem, and many others like it, have occurred on many previous missions. The first flight following Columbia, with the new spacewalk-to-fix-problems policy, ends up with a spacewalk. Hmm....
I certainly understand there is an uknown risk with the possibility of high heating due to a transition to high speed turbulent flow. But maybe the entire space shuttle needs to be scrapped for a new design if the thing is going to need a 'risky' spacewalk every flight (on the other hand, valuable experience will be gained as it always is when something like this happens).
Let's face it, with a Mac you get Unix AND a great GUI.
Am I the only one out there who doesn't really care for Apple's "great GUI"? I currently have the latest greatest dual proc. G5 with 4 GB of memory running Jaguar on my desktop sitting next to my vanilla Athlon running FC3. Guess which one gets used 99% of the time? I am a hard core Linux user from the start who cares most about three things: the terminal (gnome-terminal with tabs), the editor (vim/gvim) and whatever handles my personal key and mouse bindings (which is why I hate Metacity and stick with sawfish). I don't care if I have 64 bit rendered window borders with buttons that look stunningly like cough drops. Honestly, the only software I run regularly on the G5 is the Palm software which syncs up my Zire. It's broken in FC3 right now.
I got the G5 with grant money (I'm a meteorology professor/researcher) because I am interested in creating movies of renderings of my model data, and got the Final Cut Pro / Motion / DVD burner suite and it works fine. I also wanted to see how the IBM processor stacked up to the Athlon/Intel for large floating point model runs (now that seems to be less of an issue). But you can bet if those movie making apps ran under Linux, I wouldn't have bothered with the Mac.
Unless something much, much better comes along, I will probably run Linux as my primary "Desktop" and research OS until I retire in twenty-odd years.
This is only tangentially related to the security issue, but I found that disabling hyperthreading on a cluster of dual Xeons running Linux greatly improved performance with a distributed memory (MPI) numerical model. Short summary: even if you only run your model on physical CPUs, hyperthreading will apparently bounce jobs around in a somewhat random way. Not sure if it's a hardware issue or a software (Linux) issue.
Scientific American Frotntiers, the PBS science show hosted by Alan Alda, recently did a segment on this technology and how it worked for a man who was blinded as an adult. The other segment was on a deaf girl who received a cochlear implant.
Same here. Base pay here is not much more than 50k but I'm not complaining. I work 40+ hours a week too. Most nontenured faculty do, as do most tenured who still want to get promoted or who actually want to stay active in the field. I know of a few faculty who just show up and teach but they are a year or two from retirement.
With regards to students' written work: My field is meteorology. I too used to give students in my survey-level meteorology class opportunities to "express themselves" via short answers (a paragraph or two) on exams. I stopped because it was so hard to grade many of them because they were written so poorly. In addition to that, it is very difficult to grade short answers in a consistent way. For many of the short-answer questions I would usually end up just writing a number down ("Hmm.. this feels like a 3-points-out-of-5 answer") which real doesn't feel right... but what do you do when the concepts are confused, spelling and grammar are terrible but they have expressed some knowledge of the material?
I have talked with professors who have been doing this stuff for a much longer time than I (some of whom are into the latest trends in teaching etc.) and many of them are gravitating towards all objective tests (multiple choice and true false) for their survey level classes (and some upper level). A well-written objective test should adequately test a student's knowledge of the material in a fair way, especially in the sciences where there truly are right and wrong answers. Still, I don't like giving these kinds of tests - it just doesn't feel right - but like grading the others even less.
In my upper level classes all of my testing is subjective, and I do assign papers such as case studies where a storm system is described and analyzed. Some of my seniors can write well, most of them are so-so and a few are truly terrible. I tell them up front that spelling, grammar, style etc. counts on these assignments, and I find that if you tell students that these things are part of their grade they will put in an effort to write well.
I suppose I could just "blame the high schools" but I think the problem is deeper than that. In the US grade inflation is a huge problem in many universities and at the college level, student evaluations of faculty are often very highly regarded (and if you are evaluated poorly it can keep you from getting tenured or promoted). So a logical response is for faculty to go easy on students, rightly assuming that this will return higher evaluations. I don't know if that is a part of the writing problem, but I know an A today isn't an A 20 years ago at many universities.
that is why raindrops have that famous teardrop shape
NO! Large falling raindrops do not have a teardrop shape - they are flattened with the major axis roughly parallel with the ground - shaped more like a hamburger bun before they break apart. Friction with the air causes the drop to distort as you indicate and high pressure is found below the drop, low above it.
Incidentally SSH, FTP, mozilla and so forth need to be told to use Kerberos, they will not use it simply because you have a valid ticket.
Maybe you can answer me a question that has bugged me for ages... how does one 'kerberize' a client? For instance, the mass store ftp site for a research facility I use can only be accessed by a kerberized ftp client which is the brain-dead UNIX client, and it has to be downloaded in binary form. I would love to have something like ncftp be able to access the files. Any idea how this can be done? I've googled far and wide and have not found an answer.
I do not want to live forever. I believe death is a very important part of life.
I want to live my life fully knowing full well that I will eventually cease to exist. This keeps me in the present and makes me grateful for the slice of time I have found myself existing in. I want to do my thing and be gone with it like billions have done before me, leaving room for the next generations.
I do not believe in an afterlife yet I do wonder if any remnants of my consciousness will remain after I die. If so, neat; if not, I won't be around to deal with it.
I believe we humans need certain death as a motivation to have a good life!
Actually, I like the fact that they have presented a more complicated, less refined and "perfect" Vulcan. It's all in tune with the idea that this is taking place further in the past than any of the other Star Trek shows. I find this to be a highly postitive thing, although I have to agree with you that they just about clobbered you over the head with the mind-meld taboo although I interpreted it less as a gay thing and more of a sex thing, like a mind meld was some form of kinky depraved Vulcan sex.
Personally, I thought the Xindi storyline was quite good.
Then this awful, awful storyline on Soong's mutants or whatever. Almost too painful to watch. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
Then the Vulcan thing - pretty good again. But, alas, that storyline seems to have come to a somewhat abrupt close.
I haven't seen the latest episode. Tivo tells me it's about transporter technology or something. I wish they could have extended the Vulcan thing, I think there is some good stuff to explore there.
I just think the show has been uneven, not horrible, when you average the good and the bad you kind of end up on the good side of "meh." I am "Berman agnostic" - quite honestly I don't know or care why people hate him so. I enjoy what I enjoy and I think it will be too bad if Enterprise dies, and I certainly think there is more ground to explore in the Stark Trek future.
By the way - if somebody knows what I'm talking about and has a good link to the material, I'd love to see it. Telling people about the TV show I saw that one time gets old.
Google the following: Thermohaline Circulation Younger Dryas Lake Agassiz
If deep convection in the Labrador/Greenland sea ceases, the Gulf Stream will cease and England will get mighty chilly. Roughly speaking, if you don't have cold, salty water sinking downward in this region, no surface currents will move to fill the void (kind of like plugging the drain in the bathtub).
As the northern hemisphere began coming out of the last glacial maximum about 13,000 years ago, it abruptly became colder again - slammed back into the cold regime. A leading hypothesis as to why this occurred is that a lot of ice was melting in modern-day Canada the northern US and forming a large lake (Lake Agassiz). Suddenly, the dam broke (probalby down the St. Lawrence) and a gazillion gallons of fresh water was spilled into the North Atlantic, creating a freshwater "lid" which kept the surface waters from getting dense enough to convect downward like they do sporadically today.
I did some post-doc modeling research on deep convection in the Greenland Sea. Neat stuff. There are only a very few places where this sinking occurs in the ocean, and without it the climate of the world would be much different.
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...when I'm irratated at work, even silence can be distracting.
But it's never truly silent, is it? In my office right now it's three things: Outdoor construction noises, the ventilation system, and my AMD machine plus G5 mac. As far as what bothers me the most: I have sent back hard drives that put out a high pitched whine (10K RPM ones seem to be the worst) even though they were not defective. With those drives I can slowly feel my high frequency hearing melting away. I've gravitated towards the Seagate Barracudas, which are quiet, and quiet power supplies and CPU coolers. The G5 roars like a tornado when it needs to cool off but it's only occasionally, which does not bother me.
The worst for me is the ventilation system. A low level, low frequency rumble that never stops. I only really notice it when the rumble causes the false ceiling, cat5e cabling and whatever other random junk is up there to vibrate and give off high frequency tick-tick-tick type noises. I have been known to bring a chair out in the hallway and bash on the ceiling structure until the ticking noise goes away - it bothers me that much.
Music only works when I'm in the mood for it, and I usually can't concentrate on my work if there are vocals, so it's usually minimalist classical at low levels when I want music and work to happen at the same time.
Same goes to the douche who thinks "CFCs are too heavy to get into the Stratosphere". I'm not going to bother to explain that one to you.
.9%). If the heaviest gases simply sunk to the bottom, we would be suffocated by argon near the ground and all of the nitrogen would be on the top of the atmosphere, with the oxygen in the middle.
Actually, I'd really like to hear an explanation. I'm not going to claim to know anything about CFC's, but if these gases really are heavier than air and don't readily mix with air, how exactly does a bucket of them in my back yard elevate itself to the upper atmosphere?
Think of it this way: What is "air" in the first place? To a good approximation within the troposphere, it's a mixture of molecular oxygen (molecular weight = 32 grams/mol, 21%), molecular nitrogen (MW = 28 g/mol, 78%) and argon (MW = 40 g/mol,
The troposphere (tropos in Latin means "turning" or "mixing") is well-mixed and the relative ratio of the three aforementioned permanent gaes to one another is constant. If you introduce a heavier gas (higher MW) it will still get mixed into the lighter gases over time due to the winds. Brownian motion will also cause heavier gases to diffuse in a calm environment.
CFCs will spread laterally across the globe by the horizontal winds. Whenever there is a strong thunderstorm, updrafts will slam air, which originates near the ground, into the tropopause, the boundary between the troposphere and the stratosphere. Very strong updrafts can intrude into the bottom of the stratosphere where the tropospheric air mixes into the stratosphere. Once something gets into the stratosphere (if it's got a very small terminal velocity - think about strong volcanoes spewing ash) it tends to stick around because the stability of the stratosphere is so high (due to the temperature inversion I mentioned before).
Back to "heavier gases" for a moment. It is true that if you "pour" a heavy gas onto the ground it will spread out before mixing. There have been cases where CO2 (MW = 34) has seeped out of the ground and spread laterally, suffocating people (google Lake Nyos). But given a few hours of typical winds, the heavier gas will be diluted and over time mixes into the rest of the atmosphere, contributing slightly towards the atmosphere's own average molecular weight.
My God where did you get your meteorology degree?
Tropospheric ozone is created by many things but is very reactive and does not last long. Lightning does produce ozone in the troposphere as does certain chemical reactions between anthropogenic pollutants.
Stratospheric ozone is created when high-energy ultraviolet light from the sun splits diatomic oxygen (O2) into oxygen atoms (O) which can combine with O2 to create O3. UV also splits O3 into O and O2, and there is constant creation/destruction of O3 in the strasophere. It reaches an eqilibrium which is a function of a bunch of things, but the end result is (a) the creation/destruction of O3 in the stratosphere "absorbs" the most energetic UV from the sun (which is good for life) and (b) this process heats up the stratosphere, making it one big inversion which has the nice side-effect of keeping thunderstorm updrafts from blasting into the mesosphere.
In order to undertsand why there is an ozone "hole" over Antarcitca you have to understand about the dynamics of the atmosphere. Most ozone is actually created in the tropical latitudes and is advected southward/northward via the Hadley Cell circulation. The polar vortex over Antarctica tends to inhibit mixing across its boundary, so stuff that gets in it tends to stay there. Ozone depletion due to CFCs tends to be greatest around this time of year when the Antarctic is entering Spring and the sun is beginning to interact with polar stratospheric clouds which are a major catalyst to the ozone depletion.
Anyone could look this stuff up in a recent undergraduate meteorology textbook. Just about all of the "Mod 5 : informative" posts in this thread are laughingly incorrect.
Same goes to the douche who thinks "CFCs are too heavy to get into the Stratosphere". I'm not going to bother to explain that one to you.
And finally, don't ever mention "global warming" and "ozone hole" in the same sentence as if they are related. They are not.
Not meant to be a threadjack, but I'll ask anway: anyone know if the latest Ipods can do gapless playback, with or without the Rockbox firmware? Or any other MP3 player that isn't riddled with reports of hard drive failures? This page suggest IPODS can. I would really love to get one of these players (any kind) but gapless is an absolute must, and support for OGG and FLAC is highly preferred.
Global warming is real. The data is clear.
Global warming is indeed due to greenhouse gas emissions, and not some natural cycle.
If we keep a business-as-usual approach to emissions, climate change will be dramatic and catastrophic for many.
This is what virtually all climate scientists believe (and by "believe" I mean "have concluded from painstaking scientific research involving paleoclimatology, basic therodynamics, oceanography" etc...). Not "believe" as in "I believe in the Flying Spaghetti Monster."
I can't tell you how much it frustrates me as a scientists that more people can't see the obvious. I believe (heh) it is due to an overwhelming lack of people exercising critical, scientific thought.
The truth is, unless you at least have a basic understanding of atmospheric radiation theory, you really have no place arguing about the effect of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.
Let me put it this way: It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever that increasing greenhouse gas emissions would *not* lead to a shift in the earth's radiative equilibrium temperature (related to global average temperature). If there were too many negatives in that sentence, I'll put it this way: Global warming is no surprise, it is physics in action.
Pick up any intro meteorology college texbtook - there are several - and read the chapter on radiation and climate change. And climate feedback mechanisms. And the thermohaline circulation. And then argue against global warming being forced by greenhouse gas emissions. I'd love to hear a decent argument which wasn't politically motivated or based upon selective omission of the research on this topic.
I have grown weary of trying to get people to do a small amount of basic science research so that they may use their own goddammed heads and draw a scientifically based conclusion about climate change rather than re-spew crap they heard from some douchebag whose politics aligns with their own. This includes you too Lefties/greenies: Do some homework. If you are right for the wrong resons, you're not helping things. Educate yourself scientifically. Everyone.
Think, people, think. It seems that precious few people (well here in America) do much of this any more.
And yes, I have a PhD in meteorology.
As a previous commenter stated, this is a mathematical proof that such a solution exists. You cannot explicitly solve the Navier Stokes equations as written. If you could, my job would be much easier (I model thunderstorms at very high resolution on massively parallel supercomputers). The Navier Stokes equations, along with some other conservation laws, and some physical parameterizations, can be "closed" such that you can approximate a solution using numerical tehcniques, given an initial state and boundary conditions. It is not easy. From a practical standpoint, dealing with massively parallel computers is not much fun. I've spent the past couple of months debugging my own stupid coding errors, competing with hundreds of other scientists running their models, and finding ways to manage the terabytes of data these models produce when they do run succesfully.
Back to the paper... While I am not a mathematician, the paper appears kind of rough to me - lots of punctuation errors, commas in the wrong place, unclosed parehtneses... I suspect this paper has not been fully through the peer review process. I don't know how the mathematicians do it, but I would say this paper is a draft (not discrediting the work - I am not quallfied to judge it - but it looks rough).
A new slashdot record - the *first word* of an article summary is misspelled! Congratulations!
Exactly. I can't handle anything moving on my screen when I am trying to read text. I have yet to open a book or a magazine where crappy flashy animations cycled infintely (I'm sure the day will come however).
At a recent meteorology conference/workshop (on effective ways of using computer models in the classroom) one of my colleages said something to the effect that high school / college students today who grew up with the internet are used to things like animations on the screen and even suggested that they favor it over a static page. And went on to suggest that textbooks would be obsolete in 20 years.
So I ask all you young-uns out there, is this true? Am I the only one who permanantely has image.animation_mode set to never and has flashblock installed - and who wants to throw the monitor across the room after five minutes of using someone else's computer that doesn't have these settings?
Congratuations. You've just described what I go through trying to simulate tornado-producing thunderstorms. Even the "how do I present the results" part. Something I deal with on a day to day basis. As far as presentation goes, I like raytracers to present scalar data and feature-detection software to find vortices. Throw in stereo viewing, animate the sucker and at the very least you've got some cool pictures and movies.
*I* would *love* to be able to take mass transit to work daily -- problem is that it's just not possible as the transit system here (from the suburbs) was intended for suburb A city rather than being able to go from suburb A suburb B.
Here's another radical idea: live close to where you work.
I realize this is not possible for many people, but for many of us it is.
I am 37 years old, have been working in academia one way or another for the past 15 years, and I have never bought a parking sticker for my car. I have always lived within 3 miles of my workplace (a university). And my wife and I made a conscious decision to either rent or buy close to my workplace (she works from home). Or in one case when that was not possible, on a bus line.
I walk to work (currently 1.5 miles each way) through just about any atmospheric conditions, only very occasionally driving in and parking at a meter and crossing my fingers that I don't get a ticket (usually on days of heavy rain). As a bonus, I get a little more than an hour's worth of daily exercise in the form of brisk walking, and while doing so, formulating what I'll be doing in class/research today, listening to music, etc.
I would never have it any other way.
I am sick of that term being thrown around by journalists, politicians and the like. A fine example is "The Gay And Lesbian Community". It's like, just because you're gay, you are suddenly the member of some really nifty group where you are magically surrounded by other gay people, being invited to gay potlucks and such, going to gay community-building meetings, babysitting each other's adopted children, walking gaily hand in hand, building your "community" with gay politicians, gay policement, grocers, teachers etc. Look at me!! I'm in a community! Isn't that special!
Wait, I just described San Francisco. Never mind.
I do large 3D thunderstorm simulations. With some of the larger simulations I am integrating lots of things, contained in 3D floating point arrays, over 1 billion or more gridpoints (using distributed computing, such as a beowulf cluster made up of dual Xeons or an SGI Altix system). Each scientific calculation requires accessing floating point values stored in these arrays, doing some math, and updating another array.
Memory latency, and memory bandwidth, both impact how long it takes my simulations to complete. Let's say it is the difference between a simulation taking a week vs. five days... this is significant to me and how much I can get done. With these heavy duty scientific models and such, you really can see a noticable benefit with the fancier hardware, and clock speed is certainly not the the only factor to consider by a long shot.
such as one storm 1902 that killed about 8000 people on the Texas coast, making it one of the worst disasters in American history.
Actually it was 1900, and it was the city of Galveston which was hit, and the high death toll was largely due to the fact that nobody was evacuated, and this was due in part to a turf war between the weather forecast offices in Galveson and Cuba.
"Isaac's Storm" written Erik Larson chronicles this storm and the events leading up to it. Highly recommended.
As others have stated "podcasting" is nothing but people putting audio files online. What a revolution! Remember how the WWW was going to change the world when everybody with a computer could become their own publishers for pennies and a vast wealth of creativity and quality would reshape the world of publishing etc. blah blah? What happened was there sure was a glut of "publishing" but 99% of it was pure crap.
And so goes podcasting. Just because I can buy a $5 microphone and free-associate into an mp3 file and put it on my web page doesn't mean that I should, or that anyone should care.
If you're looking for good radio, look to your local community radio station. I volunteered at one for most of the '90s and it was an incredible experience. Granted, you will occasionally hear some gawd-awful stuff on community radio - but it's more than mad up for by the amazing radio you'll hear from folks who have some sort of niche specialty - like 500,000 vinyl jazz albums in their record library. Or a passion for reporting news that goes unreported elsewhere. Or a talent for reading their own bizarre fiction at 1 AM.
If you don't have a local community radio station, see if you can find streaming audio of one. Unfortunately the DMCA is especially toxic to community radio station - no more "New disc at nine" (can't play too many songs from one artist in an hour, etc.). So some stations will have to either have dead internet air during certain periods, or not stream at all, or just archive some shows.
Finally I wish the "pod" would go away from podcasting. It's a terrible word. Worse than weblog.
From TFA:
"This is the new Nasa. If we cannot prove this is safe, we don't want to go there. It exceeded our threshold and we needed to take action," Mr Hale said.
Spaceflightnow.com:
"Today at the mission management team meeting we had a very long discussion about aerodynamics," Hale said. "I went in with a very simple question: Did we have the engineering knowledge and analysis that would, without a shadow of a doubt, allow us to be 100 percent confident the vehicle could fly safely during entry?
"without a shadow of a doubt..."
"100 percent confident..."
"If we cannot prove this is safe, we don't want to go there..."
C'mon, Dr. Hale. I mean, Columbia was a tragedy and all, but who are you trying to fool? Most people understand that space travel in 2005 is Really Fricking Dangerous. These absolute statements are ridiculous. Of course there is never going to be 100 percent confidence levels, of course you cannot prove that the damned thing won't explode.
I can't help but feel that this problem, and many others like it, have occurred on many previous missions. The first flight following Columbia, with the new spacewalk-to-fix-problems policy, ends up with a spacewalk. Hmm....
I certainly understand there is an uknown risk with the possibility of high heating due to a transition to high speed turbulent flow. But maybe the entire space shuttle needs to be scrapped for a new design if the thing is going to need a 'risky' spacewalk every flight (on the other hand, valuable experience will be gained as it always is when something like this happens).
Let's face it, with a Mac you get Unix AND a great GUI.
Am I the only one out there who doesn't really care for Apple's "great GUI"? I currently have the latest greatest dual proc. G5 with 4 GB of memory running Jaguar on my desktop sitting next to my vanilla Athlon running FC3. Guess which one gets used 99% of the time? I am a hard core Linux user from the start who cares most about three things: the terminal (gnome-terminal with tabs), the editor (vim/gvim) and whatever handles my personal key and mouse bindings (which is why I hate Metacity and stick with sawfish). I don't care if I have 64 bit rendered window borders with buttons that look stunningly like cough drops. Honestly, the only software I run regularly on the G5 is the Palm software which syncs up my Zire. It's broken in FC3 right now.
I got the G5 with grant money (I'm a meteorology professor/researcher) because I am interested in creating movies of renderings of my model data, and got the Final Cut Pro / Motion / DVD burner suite and it works fine. I also wanted to see how the IBM processor stacked up to the Athlon/Intel for large floating point model runs (now that seems to be less of an issue). But you can bet if those movie making apps ran under Linux, I wouldn't have bothered with the Mac.
Unless something much, much better comes along, I will probably run Linux as my primary "Desktop" and research OS until I retire in twenty-odd years.
This is only tangentially related to the security issue, but I found that disabling hyperthreading on a cluster of dual Xeons running Linux greatly improved performance with a distributed memory (MPI) numerical model. Short summary: even if you only run your model on physical CPUs, hyperthreading will apparently bounce jobs around in a somewhat random way. Not sure if it's a hardware issue or a software (Linux) issue.
Here is a link which goes into detail
Scientific American Frotntiers, the PBS science show hosted by Alan Alda, recently did a segment on this technology and how it worked for a man who was blinded as an adult. The other segment was on a deaf girl who received a cochlear implant.
Same here. Base pay here is not much more than 50k but I'm not complaining. I work 40+ hours a week too. Most nontenured faculty do, as do most tenured who still want to get promoted or who actually want to stay active in the field. I know of a few faculty who just show up and teach but they are a year or two from retirement.
With regards to students' written work: My field is meteorology. I too used to give students in my survey-level meteorology class opportunities to "express themselves" via short answers (a paragraph or two) on exams. I stopped because it was so hard to grade many of them because they were written so poorly. In addition to that, it is very difficult to grade short answers in a consistent way. For many of the short-answer questions I would usually end up just writing a number down ("Hmm.. this feels like a 3-points-out-of-5 answer") which real doesn't feel right... but what do you do when the concepts are confused, spelling and grammar are terrible but they have expressed some knowledge of the material?
I have talked with professors who have been doing this stuff for a much longer time than I (some of whom are into the latest trends in teaching etc.) and many of them are gravitating towards all objective tests (multiple choice and true false) for their survey level classes (and some upper level). A well-written objective test should adequately test a student's knowledge of the material in a fair way, especially in the sciences where there truly are right and wrong answers. Still, I don't like giving these kinds of tests - it just doesn't feel right - but like grading the others even less.
In my upper level classes all of my testing is subjective, and I do assign papers such as case studies where a storm system is described and analyzed. Some of my seniors can write well, most of them are so-so and a few are truly terrible. I tell them up front that spelling, grammar, style etc. counts on these assignments, and I find that if you tell students that these things are part of their grade they will put in an effort to write well.
I suppose I could just "blame the high schools" but I think the problem is deeper than that. In the US grade inflation is a huge problem in many universities and at the college level, student evaluations of faculty are often very highly regarded (and if you are evaluated poorly it can keep you from getting tenured or promoted). So a logical response is for faculty to go easy on students, rightly assuming that this will return higher evaluations. I don't know if that is a part of the writing problem, but I know an A today isn't an A 20 years ago at many universities.
that is why raindrops have that famous teardrop shape
NO! Large falling raindrops do not have a teardrop shape - they are flattened with the major axis roughly parallel with the ground - shaped more like a hamburger bun before they break apart. Friction with the air causes the drop to distort as you indicate and high pressure is found below the drop, low above it.
Incidentally SSH, FTP, mozilla and so forth need to be told to use Kerberos, they will not use it simply because you have a valid ticket.
Maybe you can answer me a question that has bugged me for ages... how does one 'kerberize' a client? For instance, the mass store ftp site for a research facility I use can only be accessed by a kerberized ftp client which is the brain-dead UNIX client, and it has to be downloaded in binary form. I would love to have something like ncftp be able to access the files. Any idea how this can be done? I've googled far and wide and have not found an answer.
Leigh
I do not want to live forever. I believe death is a very important part of life.
I want to live my life fully knowing full well that I will eventually cease to exist. This keeps me in the present and makes me grateful for the slice of time I have found myself existing in. I want to do my thing and be gone with it like billions have done before me, leaving room for the next generations.
I do not believe in an afterlife yet I do wonder if any remnants of my consciousness will remain after I die. If so, neat; if not, I won't be around to deal with it.
I believe we humans need certain death as a motivation to have a good life!
<homer>
Mmmmmmmmmmm.... kinky depraved Vulcan sex.... aaiugglaghhglaughh
</homer>
Personally, I thought the Xindi storyline was quite good.
Then this awful, awful storyline on Soong's mutants or whatever. Almost too painful to watch. Terrible, terrible, terrible.
Then the Vulcan thing - pretty good again. But, alas, that storyline seems to have come to a somewhat abrupt close.
I haven't seen the latest episode. Tivo tells me it's about transporter technology or something. I wish they could have extended the Vulcan thing, I think there is some good stuff to explore there.
I just think the show has been uneven, not horrible, when you average the good and the bad you kind of end up on the good side of "meh." I am "Berman agnostic" - quite honestly I don't know or care why people hate him so. I enjoy what I enjoy and I think it will be too bad if Enterprise dies, and I certainly think there is more ground to explore in the Stark Trek future.
By the way - if somebody knows what I'm talking about and has a good link to the material, I'd love to see it. Telling people about the TV show I saw that one time gets old.
Google the following:
Thermohaline Circulation
Younger Dryas
Lake Agassiz
If deep convection in the Labrador/Greenland sea ceases, the Gulf Stream will cease and England will get mighty chilly. Roughly speaking, if you don't have cold, salty water sinking downward in this region, no surface currents will move to fill the void (kind of like plugging the drain in the bathtub).
As the northern hemisphere began coming out of the last glacial maximum about 13,000 years ago, it abruptly became colder again - slammed back into the cold regime. A leading hypothesis as to why this occurred is that a lot of ice was melting in modern-day Canada the northern US and forming a large lake (Lake Agassiz). Suddenly, the dam broke (probalby down the St. Lawrence) and a gazillion gallons of fresh water was spilled into the North Atlantic, creating a freshwater "lid" which kept the surface waters from getting dense enough to convect downward like they do sporadically today.
I did some post-doc modeling research on deep convection in the Greenland Sea. Neat stuff. There are only a very few places where this sinking occurs in the ocean, and without it the climate of the world would be much different.