Ok, I know this would displace some fossil fuel energy use (that is increasing the greenhouse effect and trapping heat on Earth.)
But beaming electromagnetic energy (infrared, microwaves, whatever) from part of the Sun's radiation that was going to miss Earth in the first place seems to be adding energy to the Earth (and thus eventually adding heat to the Earth, as the organized EM energy degrades (gets used and entropized).
Has anyone done the calculations to make sure that the GHG emission replacement factor of this new energy (thus its reduction of heat trapping) is more than the brand new heat it is adding to the Earth system?
Can you explain the test setup you used to make sure the effect was not random chance?
1. How many tests in different areas did you do? 2. How many false positives and false negatives were there? - A false positive would be the stick moving and their being no water immediately below. - A false negative would be you stopping somewhere where the stick did not move, and digging there, and finding water. 3. What was the distribution of water underground where you were, so that one might calculate the chance of randomly finding it? 4. What criteria did you use to determine whether water was found versus not found?
Science is way harder to do right than most people think. And we haven't even started to talk about statistical significance yet.
On the other hand: A few stolen personal emails by a few scientists in Britain had some ambiguously interpretable language, that could have been talking about trickery or how to format some summary data, or how exactly to interpolate in the presence of uncertainty.
You can be sure that if any harmful link had been scientifically established to this point, even just on the balance of probabilities, a class action lawyer would already be in there pursuing a billion dollar case for the class of "neighbours of wi-fi basestations.
I'm still open minded about all this. I don't really think cell phone radiation is bad for me, but I would move or protest if someone put up the cell transmitter on my roof.
And I ain't superstitious, but a black cat just crossed my path.
To the defendant: Make sure a judge hears the case, not a jury.
In the global human energy use game, the network energy use is close to noise level, and can be probably thought of as offset by the efficiencies the net brings to other business activities (like removing the need to fly to conferences, eliminating personal sales calls, coordinating supply-demand chains to reduce waste and idling production lines, allowing rapid global dissemination of technical and process best practices etc.)
Perhaps its most important effect on energy use and environment will be that it provides a more efficient forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge about environmental problems and solutions. Ambitious Google Earth visualisation projects and civilisation-strategy games which allow more and more people to be able to get their head around some of these large-scale, long-term issues that are hard to grok if you are not a math/science nerd. That and all the free public lectures on advanced topics, and of course the vast knowledge base of wikipedia, which can allow rapid but fairly precise communication and debate about important environmental and technology choice issues (e.g. are electric cars cool? practical? affordable? effective at reducing climate change? why or why not? How do I insulate my house properly in a cold but humid climate? etc.)
Knowledge sharing and the rapid spreading of radical new cultural and technological memes and attitudes. That is the most important effect that the net will have on energy use and contribution to global warming or its solution.
The electrically efficient net is a nice-to-have, but pales in comparison to these other factors.
I think a good approach would be to build our own layer on top of whatever else gets built with massive funding.
A kind of steganographic approach. Hide the new freedom-loving Internet in the nooks and crannies of their new fascist Internet.
All we need is the continued right to use our own strong encryption without asking anyone's permission, and then we can build whatever rules we want in the layer that is inside that encrypted cell wall isolated from the lower medium.
Freedom of thought (especially if expressed, and more especially if some wacky new idea is organized around), is supremely dangerous to the existing hierarchical order of governance (whatever/whomever that may be.)
You may or may not have realized it, but even in your so-called liberal democratic nations, you only have freedom to the extent that you are unable to effectively exercise it against the prevailing order.
There is a cleverness of statecraft, however, in giving citizens the "impression" of free expression rights. Because then you set up a din of clamouring voices effectively drowning each other out, so that no one dangerous idea can really grab hold of enough peoples' attention to do much harm.
Before you realize there is no God, and no Guinness, in the non-afterlife.
But seriously, "God" is a concept (specifically an abstract counterfactual hypothetical) which seems to fill several human psychological and social needs.
"God" gives us hope that the struggle has a purpose "God" helps us overcome fear of death "God" gives us some common moral stories and an ethos and helps align the efforts of groups of us, so we can survive better. "God" puts some kind of authority behind generally useful advise passed down from the ancestors and elders, like "do unto others as..." and "don't covet the neigbour's wife if you know what's good for you" etc.
This sort of explanation, elaborated into finer detail and specifics, explains all of the phenomenology of God-worship, God belief, and religion so well, that there really is no need for and no room left for a supernatural aspect to it all.
If that be blasphemy, bring it on. I only wish I were Irish so I could prove in court beyond a reasonable doubt that a supernatural God does not exist, so therefore the blasphemous statements are defensible because they are true. If other people cannot handle the truth, that is their issue. You cannot blame the messenger. That is irrational and immoral and illegal.
Let me ask you this? Can telling the truth ever be a crime? Unless the truth is a state secret? So is the "non-existence of God" an Irish State Secret? God does not exist. "God" exists and is a most powerful meme.
Is it ok to call initCamera possibly multiple times, because I don't know if it is inited already? If not, how do I tell if the camera is initialized?
What is a frame? What is a frame a part of? Where did I grab it from? Where is the data that I presumeably grabbed this frameworth of. i.e. where did I grab it to? In what format is it represented? How much processing does it take to grab a frame? A trivial amount? Or can I have my code call grabFrame 1000 times a second?
I guess that stuff was all obvious from the names.
Except that a programmer should be able to use (call) your api / public methods without having to read their implementation. The method signature and comments should be enough.
Therefore, as well as conveying the gist of what the thing/method is and how it fits into its context, you should also document all significant corner cases or unexpected behaviours of your object/method.
And if you change the implementation in such a way that you falsify one of those comments, without modifying the comment, thats a fail, and renders your code library low quality in one stroke.
Not commenting is a sign of not thinking or caring
on
Myths About Code Comments
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
If you don't header-comment your class or public method, I have to conclude that you cannot articulate what it is or what it means or is for. So probably the code is incoherent/inconsistent too.
So that's going to make me write my own instead of using your code.
Or maybe you can articulate what it is about but are borderline autistic and don't see the need to communicate meaning to others. To me this just means you are so inexperienced in programming that you a) don't understand the costs of maintenance, and b) don't even realize that you yourself aren't going to be able to figure out your code in six months. Either way, I'm not using that code if I can help it.
I need a real computer. I would like to be able to have it anytime, anywhere, and net-connected of course.
I want to be a contributor, a producer, a writer, a creator, with my computer, not just a consumer whose expresion of choice amounts to little more than clicking the channel changer on the advertainment opiate-for-the-masses drip.
So I need a full keyboard or equivalent. NOT a touchscreen virtual keyboard.
I just need continued miniaturization, so that my current 4.5 pounder iBook G4 12" becomes a 1 pound "wafer thing" wonder that I can stuff in a big pocket of my jacket and go. But somehow, I need at LEAST 1024x768 resolution.
Hey but that's just me. Maybe the real deal will be a separate 1024x768 or better tablet with a separate bluetooth fold-up keyboard optional.
That stampeded the US public into a frenzy of redneck bloodlust against "some random Arab country" (happened to be Iraq) that had zip to do with any terrorist actions against the US?
You do know that the opposite of "liberal" i.e. "allowing responsible citizens a measure of liberty and pursuit of their own judgement about how to conduct their lives"
is tribalist/authoritarian/totalitarian, don't you?
What we need next is a news story motivation analyzer program.
It reads gazillions of news stories, has general models of human motivations and human loyalty groupings etc, has a model of situation logic which models the likely or perceived gains and losses that different people or groups would experience depending on how situations evolve, match that with what is being reported about the situation, and...
Annotate the news stories or statements within them with credibility colour markings (with supporting notes.)
(So don't try to patent that by the way. It's now public domain.)
I learned with old Apple II+ Basic. It had a crucial fun aspect in that it could control the coloured graphics and the speaker tones. But more importantly, the goto statements made it sort of clear the step by step sequential evaluation that the computer was doing of your language statements. Without that mental model of the program counter going over the statements, it's all going to remain "magic".
After those initial clumsy Basic programs, I added two different things, and I think both are essential.
1. I went downwards, and studied how the assembly language and machine language and memory bytes/words etc. worked (and kind of how they related to the high-level basic statements and variables etc.
And most importantly, in writing an assembler program, I came up with assembly code "templates" that would do a standard "if then else" or another template for a standard while loop etc. Learning the representation of one of these levels of organization in the other was fundamental to a solid complete grasp of what was going on and what would be possible or advisable.
2. I went upwards, realizing that the undisciplined use of gotos in the basic would be bad, as programs got bigger, so I should create standard if then else constructs (copy-paste templates again) and use of gosub statements to reduce the size and complexity of each block of code etc. So I taught myself the "why"s of structured programming from first principles and painful frustration with long complex unstructured "goto" basic programs.
Eventually in University, we went all the way down to transistors as logic gates, and TTL NAND/NOR gates, and building up to structured programs based on combining those together.
And we went all the way up to LISP and Prolog, and modules with interfaces, and the beginnings of O-O.
I would recommend a similar bottom up approach for someone to full appreciate what they are working with, and what its fundamental limitations and quality dimensions might be.
For the purpose of storing intermittent wind and solar power, the electric utility companies could use mass installations of these batteries. Assuming they don't have hydro dams to run in reverse using the wind and solar, that is.
Just like it doesn't actually make sense for everyone on your block to own a lawnmower or circular saw or carpet steam cleaning machine, it doesn't really make economic sense for everyone to have their own batteries either. A central utility could buy and maintain batteries with economies of scale.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, I know this would displace some fossil fuel energy use (that
is increasing the greenhouse effect and trapping heat on Earth.)
But beaming electromagnetic energy (infrared, microwaves, whatever)
from part of the Sun's radiation that was going to miss Earth in the
first place seems to be adding energy to the Earth (and thus eventually
adding heat to the Earth, as the organized EM energy degrades
(gets used and entropized).
Has anyone done the calculations to make sure that the GHG emission
replacement factor of this new energy (thus its reduction of heat trapping)
is more than the brand new heat it is adding to the Earth system?
Can you explain the test setup you used to make sure the effect was not random chance?
1. How many tests in different areas did you do?
2. How many false positives and false negatives were there?
- A false positive would be the stick moving and their being no water immediately below.
- A false negative would be you stopping somewhere where the stick did not move, and digging there, and finding water.
3. What was the distribution of water underground where you were, so that one might calculate the chance of randomly finding it?
4. What criteria did you use to determine whether water was found versus not found?
Science is way harder to do right than most people think. And we haven't even started
to talk about statistical significance yet.
It is truly pathetic how these gas-guzzlin' deniers are grasping at straws to maintain
their totally untenable position.
On the one hand: 800 Scientist contributors + 2500 scientific reviewers work went into the latest IPCC
assessment report.
http://www.ucsusa.org/assets/documents/global_warming/IPCCflyer_lr.pdf
On the other hand: A few stolen personal emails by a few scientists in Britain had some ambiguously interpretable language, that could have been talking about trickery or how to format some summary
data, or how exactly to interpolate in the presence of uncertainty.
Hmmmmmm. You figure it out.
You can be sure that if any harmful link had been scientifically established to this point, even just on the
balance of probabilities, a class action lawyer would already be in there pursuing a billion dollar
case for the class of "neighbours of wi-fi basestations.
I'm still open minded about all this. I don't really think cell phone radiation is bad for me, but
I would move or protest if someone put up the cell transmitter on my roof.
And I ain't superstitious, but a black cat just crossed my path.
To the defendant: Make sure a judge hears the case, not a jury.
In the global human energy use game, the network energy use is close to noise level,
and can be probably thought of as offset by the efficiencies the net brings to other
business activities (like removing the need to fly to conferences, eliminating personal
sales calls, coordinating supply-demand chains to reduce waste and idling production
lines, allowing rapid global dissemination of technical and process best practices etc.)
Perhaps its most important effect on energy use and environment will be that it
provides a more efficient forum for discussion and dissemination of knowledge about
environmental problems and solutions. Ambitious Google Earth visualisation projects
and civilisation-strategy games which allow more and more people to be able to get their
head around some of these large-scale, long-term issues that are hard to grok if
you are not a math/science nerd. That and all the free public lectures on advanced
topics, and of course the vast knowledge base of wikipedia, which can allow rapid
but fairly precise communication and debate about important environmental and
technology choice issues (e.g. are electric cars cool? practical? affordable? effective
at reducing climate change? why or why not? How do I insulate my house properly in
a cold but humid climate? etc.)
Knowledge sharing and the rapid spreading of radical new cultural and technological
memes and attitudes. That is the most important effect that the net will have on
energy use and contribution to global warming or its solution.
The electrically efficient net is a nice-to-have, but pales in comparison to these
other factors.
Check out this advertisement and order your own amazing Intel 8080 powered "Interact" machine for your home.
http://picasaweb.google.com/eric.hawthorne/Ad#5425016782063717746
is one half mental.
of course that explains why 90% of all programs written are CRUD.
-with apologies to Yogi Berra, Theodore Sturgeon, and a 20% apology, as a matter of principle, to a guy called Pareto.
I can hardly wait for the flurry of sandboxing
patents.
I think a good approach would be to build our own layer on top of whatever else gets built with massive funding.
A kind of steganographic approach. Hide the new freedom-loving Internet in the nooks and crannies of their new fascist Internet.
All we need is the continued right to use our own strong encryption without asking anyone's permission, and then
we can build whatever rules we want in the layer that is inside that encrypted cell wall isolated from the lower medium.
It was artistic license for my joke
I don't know what is.
After all, last time, all the Chinese did to warrant invasion by Britain was cut off the opium supply. (google it if doubtful.)
Freedom of thought (especially if expressed, and more especially if some wacky new idea is organized around),
is supremely dangerous to the existing hierarchical order of governance (whatever/whomever that may be.)
You may or may not have realized it, but even in your so-called liberal democratic nations, you only have
freedom to the extent that you are unable to effectively exercise it against the prevailing order.
There is a cleverness of statecraft, however, in giving citizens the "impression" of free expression rights.
Because then you set up a din of clamouring voices effectively drowning each other out, so that no one
dangerous idea can really grab hold of enough peoples' attention to do much harm.
Of course the theologian would respond with: "God is incredulous."
I mean, even though s/he is all-powerful, did s/he realize he had
created atheists? Oh, yeah. I forgot. We're just here to test the faithful.
Before you realize there is no God, and no Guinness, in the non-afterlife.
But seriously, "God" is a concept (specifically an abstract
counterfactual hypothetical) which seems to fill several human
psychological and social needs.
"God" gives us hope that the struggle has a purpose
"God" helps us overcome fear of death
"God" gives us some common moral stories and an ethos and
helps align the efforts of groups of us, so we can survive better.
"God" puts some kind of authority behind generally useful advise
passed down from the ancestors and elders, like "do unto others as..."
and "don't covet the neigbour's wife if you know what's good for you"
etc.
This sort of explanation, elaborated into finer detail and specifics,
explains all of the phenomenology of God-worship, God belief, and
religion so well, that there really is no need for and no room left for a supernatural
aspect to it all.
If that be blasphemy, bring it on.
I only wish I were Irish so I could prove in court beyond a reasonable doubt
that a supernatural God does not exist, so therefore the blasphemous statements
are defensible because they are true. If other people cannot handle the truth, that
is their issue. You cannot blame the messenger. That is irrational and immoral and illegal.
Let me ask you this? Can telling the truth ever be a crime? Unless the
truth is a state secret? So is the "non-existence of God" an Irish State Secret?
God does not exist. "God" exists and is a most powerful meme.
Is it ok to call initCamera possibly multiple times, because I don't know if it is inited already?
If not, how do I tell if the camera is initialized?
What is a frame? What is a frame a part of? Where did I grab it from? Where is the data
that I presumeably grabbed this frameworth of. i.e. where did I grab it to? In what format is it
represented? How much processing does it take to grab a frame? A trivial amount? Or can
I have my code call grabFrame 1000 times a second?
I guess that stuff was all obvious from the names.
Except that a programmer should be able to use (call) your api / public methods without having to read their
implementation. The method signature and comments should be enough.
Therefore, as well as conveying the gist of what the thing/method is and how it fits into its context,
you should also document all significant corner cases or unexpected behaviours of your object/method.
And if you change the implementation in such a way that you falsify one of those comments, without
modifying the comment, thats a fail, and renders your code library low quality in one stroke.
If you don't header-comment your class or public method,
I have to conclude that you cannot articulate what it is or what it
means or is for. So probably the code is incoherent/inconsistent too.
So that's going to make me write my own instead of using your code.
Or maybe you can articulate what it is about but are borderline
autistic and don't see the need to communicate meaning to others.
To me this just means you are so inexperienced in programming that
you a) don't understand the costs of maintenance, and
b) don't even realize that you yourself aren't going to be able to figure
out your code in six months.
Either way, I'm not using that code if I can help it.
I need a real computer. I would like to be able to have it anytime, anywhere,
and net-connected of course.
I want to be a contributor, a producer, a writer, a creator, with my computer,
not just a consumer whose expresion of choice amounts to little more
than clicking the channel changer on the advertainment opiate-for-the-masses drip.
So I need a full keyboard or equivalent. NOT a touchscreen virtual keyboard.
I just need continued miniaturization, so that my current 4.5 pounder iBook G4 12"
becomes a 1 pound "wafer thing" wonder that I can stuff in a big pocket of my
jacket and go. But somehow, I need at LEAST 1024x768 resolution.
Hey but that's just me. Maybe the real deal will be a separate 1024x768 or better
tablet with a separate bluetooth fold-up keyboard optional.
"Inconceivably Big Mind"
as in "If it weren't for my Inconceivably Big Mind I wouldn't have been
able to think up expanding the acronyms using a lookup table!"
Hint: It's Scottish!
That stampeded the US public into a frenzy of redneck bloodlust against
"some random Arab country" (happened to be Iraq) that had zip
to do with any terrorist actions against the US?
You do know that the opposite of "liberal"
i.e. "allowing responsible citizens a measure of liberty and pursuit of their own judgement about how to conduct their lives"
is tribalist/authoritarian/totalitarian, don't you?
What we need next is a news story motivation analyzer program.
It reads gazillions of news stories, has general models of human motivations
and human loyalty groupings etc, has a model of situation logic
which models the likely or perceived gains and losses that different
people or groups would experience depending on how situations evolve,
match that with what is being reported about the situation, and...
Annotate the news stories or statements within them with credibility
colour markings (with supporting notes.)
(So don't try to patent that by the way. It's now public domain.)
I learned with old Apple II+ Basic.
It had a crucial fun aspect in that it could control the coloured graphics and the speaker tones.
But more importantly, the goto statements made it sort of clear the step by step sequential
evaluation that the computer was doing of your language statements. Without that mental model
of the program counter going over the statements, it's all going to remain "magic".
After those initial clumsy Basic programs, I added two different things, and I think both are
essential.
1. I went downwards, and studied how the assembly language and machine language
and memory bytes/words etc.
worked (and kind of how they related to the high-level basic statements and variables etc.
And most importantly, in writing an assembler program, I came up with assembly code
"templates" that would do a standard "if then else" or another template for a standard while loop
etc. Learning the representation of one of these levels of organization in the other was
fundamental to a solid complete grasp of what was going on and what would be possible or
advisable.
2. I went upwards, realizing that the undisciplined use of gotos in the basic would be bad, as
programs got bigger, so I should create standard if then else constructs (copy-paste templates again)
and use of gosub statements to reduce the size and complexity of each block of code etc. So
I taught myself the "why"s of structured programming from first principles and painful frustration
with long complex unstructured "goto" basic programs.
Eventually in University, we went all the way down to transistors as logic gates, and TTL NAND/NOR gates, and building up to
structured programs based on combining those together.
And we went all the way up to LISP and Prolog, and modules with interfaces, and the beginnings of O-O.
I would recommend a similar bottom up approach for someone to full appreciate what they are working with, and
what its fundamental limitations and quality dimensions might be.
For the purpose of storing intermittent wind and solar power,
the electric utility companies could use mass installations of
these batteries. Assuming they don't have hydro dams to
run in reverse using the wind and solar, that is.
Just like it doesn't actually make sense for everyone on your block
to own a lawnmower or circular saw or carpet steam cleaning machine,
it doesn't really make economic sense for everyone to have their own
batteries either. A central utility could buy and maintain batteries
with economies of scale.