Or a large series of novels. Two contemporaries that come to mind are George Martin's Ice and Fire series and Weber's Honor Harrington universe. Both have enough characters and story lines that diverge and then converge that linkages might actually be useful. Where did this character come from? Let me backtrack and follow just them, without all of the other subplots that are going on....
Interesting that one of the Torch novels set in Weber's universe and one of the Harrington novels have an identical (word-for-word) chapter that appears in both where those two major branches came together for a bit.
Yep. I was in graduate school when it first came out, and saw it with my housemate who wasn't a sci-fi fan. On the way out of the theater, we agreed that it was fun and the effects were great (for the time), but the plot was a B-grade western with some odds and ends tacked on.
Of course, the risk they run if the candidate is too bad is damage to the down-ballot offices: US Senate, US House, state legislatures, governors. Lots more right-wingish laws got passed at the state level in the last two years than in the two years before that because of the large gains the Republicans made at the state level in 2010.
There are a surprising number of disciplines, including some academic ones, where the Windows version of Excel is the default computational platform. That is, relatively complex sets of calculations intended to be shared with (and modified by) colleagues at other institutions, use Excel as the tool for implementation. Not only VBA, but components like Solver get incorporated into the model. Excel has gained this status since it is the only computational "engine" that can safely be assumed to be provided on all computers by the powers that be.
Yes, there are better computational engines that are available on essentially all platforms. But Excel is the one that can safely be assumed to be installed with the blessings of the local IT organization.
If they were building the power plant near where there was any industry (and population) to speak of, that would be a reasonable argument. But they're not -- it's 300 or so driving miles from either Denver or Salt Lake City, which have the other infrastructure to support large-scale industry. In the Mountain West, power plants tend to go where they can get water. Some planned power plants have been canceled after the owners spent years trying to buy rights to enough water for cooling, and failed. The water issue also makes it a rather undesirable location to build a new factory or chemical plant or something that could use the excess for industrial process heat -- most industrial processes also consume large amounts of water, and the power plant appears to have gotten the last of any uncommitted water in the river.
Western water law is both obscure and arcane, but dictates an enormous amount of where industry can be located in the West.
The problem in this case is that the power plant is going to be out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest population centers that can make use of a big nuke plant are all located on the other side of one or more mountain ranges. The project includes building at least one long-distance high-voltage transmission line to carry the power from the plant to somewhere that it can be used. In a considerable part of the Mountain West, you locate power plants where you can get access to water, and then move the power to where the people are.
There are problems with this. The power station is separated from any major population centers by one or more mountain ranges -- the project requires that long-distance high-voltage lines be built in order to transport the generated power to markets where it can be sold. Opportunities for local use of the amount of heat (typical nuke rated at 1 GW electric is looking to dump the equivalent of 2 GW in waste heat) are limited. Particularly during summer, which is peak power season.
The location of the plant looks like the real target market is processes for extracting liquid fuels from the Green River basin oil shale deposits. The in situ processes that have been proposed (eg, by Shell) would consume prodigious amounts of electricity, which is not currently available in the region.
The big hyperboloid towers come in two flavors: wet and dry. Wet ones still need a water source because they use evaporative cooling. Dry towers can't cool below exterior dry-bulb temperature, which can be quite high in parts of Utah in the summer, which in turn reduces overall plant efficiency. Summer is peak power load season in the US -- owner/operators will be reluctant to see reduced efficiency (hence output) then. Mixed systems are possible, of course -- wet cooling in the summer and dry cooling in the winter -- but are more expensive.
After a long hiatus from formal teaching, I'm teaching first semester college calculus this term. I spent a lot of time worrying about how the course might be structured other than the traditional lecture and semi-rote learning (eg, now take the second derivative of this function with respect to the other variable). Part of the difficulty is that it's a highly linear subject: if you don't get limits, you don't get where derivatives come from; if you haven't mastered the formulas for taking derivatives, you'll never master the kind of pattern recognition needed for anti-derivatives. Part of the difficulty is that everyone sends their students over to the math department for calculus, and when the students go back, will use calculus in wildly different applied-problem spaces. Part of the difficulty is that everyone wants the math department to force-feed the material as quickly as possible, so they can have their students back to teach them the applications. Part of the problem is that math profs want to teach the material as if all the students were math majors, because after all, to the prof epsilon-delta proofs and existence theorems are cool (to be honest, most of the math profs would much rather be teaching real analysis, where you prove everything from calculus rigorously).
Some of the math department's problem would be solved if other departments taught calculus to their own students, using their own examples as motivation.
There are a variety of organic molecules that can be produced by fermentation (ethanol, butanol, etc) suitable for use as liquid fuels, that would be enormously more practical if the distillation process could be made more efficient. When the goal is water removal, this type of filter should be able to make industrial-scale vacuum distillation much simpler.
A number of European designers and engineers have looked at the issues of vehicle safety in tiny cars. The best rules for very small vehicles, particularly when mixed with larger vehicles, are quite different than current automotive designs. The fundamental issue for most types of collision are "ride down" space -- the distance over which the occupant is decelerated. Some of the different approaches include (1) extremely rigid frame so that the vehicle can make use of crumple zones in the other vehicle; (2) alternate control mechanisms like sidesticks in place of steering wheels and pedals, in order to gain the space those would otherwise occupy; (3) better restraint systems, such as inflating shoulder belts that spread the forces over larger portions of the body; and (4) sensors and software that monitor surroundings and take action, like slowing when the closing rate on the vehicle ahead is too high (a surprising number of impacts would be considerably smaller if people weren't distracted, had better depth perception, or had faster reflexes).
You need an external party that reviews the device and software thoroughly ( which is not happening for the software currently ).
So who, that is competent to conduct such a review, is willing to do so?
Reading the code for one such device
pretty much precludes ever being able to write code for similar devices,
at least for a considerable period of time.
The case law was settled back in a variety of reverse-engineering cases:
anyone who has ever seen the source code for the software in question
is hopelessly tainted,
and is not allowed to write (or even, in some cases, read) the code going into the reverse-engineered device.
How many people are there competent to review the code
for an embedded medical device
who are also willing to give up writing code for such devices?
In any case people tend to compensate through knowledge and experience.
And various sorts of mental crutches.
I've lost the reference,
but the study suggested that people with higher cognitive skills
were more likely to recognize that their skills were declining,
and figure out substitutes to make up for the difference,
like a greater dependency on "to do" lists.
The concluding hypothesis was that this explained some of the observations that
people with higher IQs who succumbed to various dementias
appeared to decline more rapidly after onset;
that the actual onset was missed due to the use of crutches,
and the decline appeared more rapid once the dementia had reached a stage
where the crutches were no longer sufficient.
Speaking anecdotally, I can still retrieve and explain the real analysis I learned when I was 22.
What I can't do, now that I'm approaching 60,
is soak up and retain new math at the same pace I could then.
We raised taxes in the early 1990s and got an eight-year boom where unemployment fell to record low levels for peacetime, and at the end of the business cycle got a very mild recession. In response, we cut taxes dramatically and got eight years of mediocre-at-best job growth followed by the worst recession since WWII and a fall in the worker-to-p0pulation ratio that took us back to the 1980s.
Based on the last 20 years, you can conclude that tax rates and job growth are directly (not inversely) related, or you can conclude (more likely, IMO) that job growth depends on other things and is unrelated to tax rates across a broad range of values. But there's no evidence to support the theoretical position that increasing tax rates results in lower job growth.
Other great apes are not basically savannah-dwelling, heavily-perspiring, two-legged long-distance runners -- why should their behavior or diet be appropriate for humans? And mountain gorillas come dang close to being couch potatoes, traveling less than 500 meters on an average day.
Not a joke, but presumably zero American peasants, as the hand assembly parts of the job are mind-numbingly boring and would soon be automated or designed out for QC reasons. For former Chinese peasants, the job is still mind-numbing, but then, so is setting out rice seedlings, with the added benefit that you get to work on the iPhone while sitting inside, rather than standing outside, up past your ankles in mud, bent over, all day. Of course, Foxconn (largest electronics assembly firm in the world) has announced that it intends to replace a half-million Chinese workers with robots, so within a few years the answer is also zero Chinese peasants.
Jobs.
China still has on the order of 600 million subsistence-level peasants.
Leaving those people in that state while a smaller number get
comparatively richer working in the cities at manufacturing, construction, and related jobs
is highly unstable.
The government doesn't care about profits;
it cares about creating enough jobs to continually employ more peasants.
King's Salem's Lot if you like classic vampire stories. The first time I read it, I finished about 2:00 in the morning while reading in bed. Faced with a choice of getting up to turn the lights off and having to walk back across the room in the dark, or sleeping with the lights on, I opted for leaving the lights on and hiding under the covers.
I'm fond of the Honorverse books for entertainment, although the series has gotten to the point where you need a scorecard to keep track of the characters. One of the nice things is that recent hardcover books in the series have a CD-ROM with the entire thing in multiple e-book formats tucked into the back. Copying is allowed, and you can usually find one at the local public library.
I generally find Niven is better as a collaborator than as an individual author. Mote in God's Eye is one of the great "first contact" stories. I though Dream Park was an interesting near-future take on role-playing games, especially with the "behind the curtain" aspect of how it all works.
Whether this can work or not is problematic. When a worker aged 55+ loses a job, there are "good" reasons for firms to be reluctant to hire them. Two fairly obvious ones:
Once they're past 45, they're a member of a protected class with respect to discrimination. The case law on age discrimination is pretty clear: it doesn't matter what the motivation was, if there's a demonstrable history that layoffs fall disproportionately on the older workers, then the firm is in trouble. The easiest way out is to simply not hire older workers.
Particularly at smaller firms that provide health insurance benefits, hiring workers aged 55+ will result in significant hikes in the group premium. It's not anyone's "fault"; it's just that once people reach that age, they are much more likely to develop expensive-to-treat degenerative conditions like cataracts, cancer, or complications from arthritis.
I have long argued that the first social crisis the Boomer generation (full disclosure: I'm a member) will precipitate will not be their effect on Social Security or Medicare; it will be that the US private sector is unable or unwilling to provide meaningful employment for the Boomers who want/need to continue working into their late 60s and 70s.
Let's be honest; you haven't provided the information the grandparent post is asking for. No date for "Stage: stable"; no predictable quantity-one price. The Raspberry Pi has made a commitment to a known quantity-one price: $25 w/o Ethernet, $35 w/, shipping date unknown but Feb 2012 looks like a reasonable expectation. The beaglebone has a quantity-one MSRP: $89, and I can order from Digi-Key USA at that price today.
I have multiple small projects in mind for which this type of system on a card would be useful, but the hardware and the software need to be stable and reliable. The question, "When can I buy one such board, and what will the price be?" is reasonable, and so far as I can tell, not yet answered.
A kilt fastens on the right hand side, whereas a woman's skirt usually closes on the left.
And women's blouses reverse the sides the buttons and buttonholes are on
compared to men's shirts.
Lots of reasons are given for this.
The one that I've seen most often over the years is that
that arrangement makes it easiest for
right-handed men to dress themselves and
right-handed maids to dress their mistress.
The same argument would apply to the side on which the skirt or kilt fastens.
Wikipedia offers a number of other possibilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Or a large series of novels. Two contemporaries that come to mind are George Martin's Ice and Fire series and Weber's Honor Harrington universe. Both have enough characters and story lines that diverge and then converge that linkages might actually be useful. Where did this character come from? Let me backtrack and follow just them, without all of the other subplots that are going on....
Interesting that one of the Torch novels set in Weber's universe and one of the Harrington novels have an identical (word-for-word) chapter that appears in both where those two major branches came together for a bit.
Yep. I was in graduate school when it first came out, and saw it with my housemate who wasn't a sci-fi fan. On the way out of the theater, we agreed that it was fun and the effects were great (for the time), but the plot was a B-grade western with some odds and ends tacked on.
Of course, the risk they run if the candidate is too bad is damage to the down-ballot offices: US Senate, US House, state legislatures, governors. Lots more right-wingish laws got passed at the state level in the last two years than in the two years before that because of the large gains the Republicans made at the state level in 2010.
There are a surprising number of disciplines, including some academic ones, where the Windows version of Excel is the default computational platform. That is, relatively complex sets of calculations intended to be shared with (and modified by) colleagues at other institutions, use Excel as the tool for implementation. Not only VBA, but components like Solver get incorporated into the model. Excel has gained this status since it is the only computational "engine" that can safely be assumed to be provided on all computers by the powers that be.
Yes, there are better computational engines that are available on essentially all platforms. But Excel is the one that can safely be assumed to be installed with the blessings of the local IT organization.
If they were building the power plant near where there was any industry (and population) to speak of, that would be a reasonable argument. But they're not -- it's 300 or so driving miles from either Denver or Salt Lake City, which have the other infrastructure to support large-scale industry. In the Mountain West, power plants tend to go where they can get water. Some planned power plants have been canceled after the owners spent years trying to buy rights to enough water for cooling, and failed. The water issue also makes it a rather undesirable location to build a new factory or chemical plant or something that could use the excess for industrial process heat -- most industrial processes also consume large amounts of water, and the power plant appears to have gotten the last of any uncommitted water in the river.
Western water law is both obscure and arcane, but dictates an enormous amount of where industry can be located in the West.
The problem in this case is that the power plant is going to be out in the middle of nowhere. The nearest population centers that can make use of a big nuke plant are all located on the other side of one or more mountain ranges. The project includes building at least one long-distance high-voltage transmission line to carry the power from the plant to somewhere that it can be used. In a considerable part of the Mountain West, you locate power plants where you can get access to water, and then move the power to where the people are.
There are problems with this. The power station is separated from any major population centers by one or more mountain ranges -- the project requires that long-distance high-voltage lines be built in order to transport the generated power to markets where it can be sold. Opportunities for local use of the amount of heat (typical nuke rated at 1 GW electric is looking to dump the equivalent of 2 GW in waste heat) are limited. Particularly during summer, which is peak power season.
The location of the plant looks like the real target market is processes for extracting liquid fuels from the Green River basin oil shale deposits. The in situ processes that have been proposed (eg, by Shell) would consume prodigious amounts of electricity, which is not currently available in the region.
The big hyperboloid towers come in two flavors: wet and dry. Wet ones still need a water source because they use evaporative cooling. Dry towers can't cool below exterior dry-bulb temperature, which can be quite high in parts of Utah in the summer, which in turn reduces overall plant efficiency. Summer is peak power load season in the US -- owner/operators will be reluctant to see reduced efficiency (hence output) then. Mixed systems are possible, of course -- wet cooling in the summer and dry cooling in the winter -- but are more expensive.
After a long hiatus from formal teaching, I'm teaching first semester college calculus this term. I spent a lot of time worrying about how the course might be structured other than the traditional lecture and semi-rote learning (eg, now take the second derivative of this function with respect to the other variable). Part of the difficulty is that it's a highly linear subject: if you don't get limits, you don't get where derivatives come from; if you haven't mastered the formulas for taking derivatives, you'll never master the kind of pattern recognition needed for anti-derivatives. Part of the difficulty is that everyone sends their students over to the math department for calculus, and when the students go back, will use calculus in wildly different applied-problem spaces. Part of the difficulty is that everyone wants the math department to force-feed the material as quickly as possible, so they can have their students back to teach them the applications. Part of the problem is that math profs want to teach the material as if all the students were math majors, because after all, to the prof epsilon-delta proofs and existence theorems are cool (to be honest, most of the math profs would much rather be teaching real analysis, where you prove everything from calculus rigorously).
Some of the math department's problem would be solved if other departments taught calculus to their own students, using their own examples as motivation.
There are a variety of organic molecules that can be produced by fermentation (ethanol, butanol, etc) suitable for use as liquid fuels, that would be enormously more practical if the distillation process could be made more efficient. When the goal is water removal, this type of filter should be able to make industrial-scale vacuum distillation much simpler.
A number of European designers and engineers have looked at the issues of vehicle safety in tiny cars. The best rules for very small vehicles, particularly when mixed with larger vehicles, are quite different than current automotive designs. The fundamental issue for most types of collision are "ride down" space -- the distance over which the occupant is decelerated. Some of the different approaches include (1) extremely rigid frame so that the vehicle can make use of crumple zones in the other vehicle; (2) alternate control mechanisms like sidesticks in place of steering wheels and pedals, in order to gain the space those would otherwise occupy; (3) better restraint systems, such as inflating shoulder belts that spread the forces over larger portions of the body; and (4) sensors and software that monitor surroundings and take action, like slowing when the closing rate on the vehicle ahead is too high (a surprising number of impacts would be considerably smaller if people weren't distracted, had better depth perception, or had faster reflexes).
There are textbooks on the subject.
So who, that is competent to conduct such a review, is willing to do so? Reading the code for one such device pretty much precludes ever being able to write code for similar devices, at least for a considerable period of time. The case law was settled back in a variety of reverse-engineering cases: anyone who has ever seen the source code for the software in question is hopelessly tainted, and is not allowed to write (or even, in some cases, read) the code going into the reverse-engineered device. How many people are there competent to review the code for an embedded medical device who are also willing to give up writing code for such devices?
And various sorts of mental crutches. I've lost the reference, but the study suggested that people with higher cognitive skills were more likely to recognize that their skills were declining, and figure out substitutes to make up for the difference, like a greater dependency on "to do" lists. The concluding hypothesis was that this explained some of the observations that people with higher IQs who succumbed to various dementias appeared to decline more rapidly after onset; that the actual onset was missed due to the use of crutches, and the decline appeared more rapid once the dementia had reached a stage where the crutches were no longer sufficient.
Speaking anecdotally, I can still retrieve and explain the real analysis I learned when I was 22. What I can't do, now that I'm approaching 60, is soak up and retain new math at the same pace I could then.
We raised taxes in the early 1990s and got an eight-year boom where unemployment fell to record low levels for peacetime, and at the end of the business cycle got a very mild recession. In response, we cut taxes dramatically and got eight years of mediocre-at-best job growth followed by the worst recession since WWII and a fall in the worker-to-p0pulation ratio that took us back to the 1980s.
Based on the last 20 years, you can conclude that tax rates and job growth are directly (not inversely) related, or you can conclude (more likely, IMO) that job growth depends on other things and is unrelated to tax rates across a broad range of values. But there's no evidence to support the theoretical position that increasing tax rates results in lower job growth.
Or, closer to what actually happened, we could invade Iraq AND cut taxes by $500 billion.
Other great apes are not basically savannah-dwelling, heavily-perspiring, two-legged long-distance runners -- why should their behavior or diet be appropriate for humans? And mountain gorillas come dang close to being couch potatoes, traveling less than 500 meters on an average day.
Not a joke, but presumably zero American peasants, as the hand assembly parts of the job are mind-numbingly boring and would soon be automated or designed out for QC reasons. For former Chinese peasants, the job is still mind-numbing, but then, so is setting out rice seedlings, with the added benefit that you get to work on the iPhone while sitting inside, rather than standing outside, up past your ankles in mud, bent over, all day. Of course, Foxconn (largest electronics assembly firm in the world) has announced that it intends to replace a half-million Chinese workers with robots, so within a few years the answer is also zero Chinese peasants.
Jobs. China still has on the order of 600 million subsistence-level peasants. Leaving those people in that state while a smaller number get comparatively richer working in the cities at manufacturing, construction, and related jobs is highly unstable. The government doesn't care about profits; it cares about creating enough jobs to continually employ more peasants.
King's Salem's Lot if you like classic vampire stories. The first time I read it, I finished about 2:00 in the morning while reading in bed. Faced with a choice of getting up to turn the lights off and having to walk back across the room in the dark, or sleeping with the lights on, I opted for leaving the lights on and hiding under the covers.
I'm fond of the Honorverse books for entertainment, although the series has gotten to the point where you need a scorecard to keep track of the characters. One of the nice things is that recent hardcover books in the series have a CD-ROM with the entire thing in multiple e-book formats tucked into the back. Copying is allowed, and you can usually find one at the local public library.
I generally find Niven is better as a collaborator than as an individual author. Mote in God's Eye is one of the great "first contact" stories. I though Dream Park was an interesting near-future take on role-playing games, especially with the "behind the curtain" aspect of how it all works.
I have long argued that the first social crisis the Boomer generation (full disclosure: I'm a member) will precipitate will not be their effect on Social Security or Medicare; it will be that the US private sector is unable or unwilling to provide meaningful employment for the Boomers who want/need to continue working into their late 60s and 70s.
Let's be honest; you haven't provided the information the grandparent post is asking for. No date for "Stage: stable"; no predictable quantity-one price. The Raspberry Pi has made a commitment to a known quantity-one price: $25 w/o Ethernet, $35 w/, shipping date unknown but Feb 2012 looks like a reasonable expectation. The beaglebone has a quantity-one MSRP: $89, and I can order from Digi-Key USA at that price today.
I have multiple small projects in mind for which this type of system on a card would be useful, but the hardware and the software need to be stable and reliable. The question, "When can I buy one such board, and what will the price be?" is reasonable, and so far as I can tell, not yet answered.
Yep. My wife has a Masters in CS; I have assorted math degrees; and we couldn't get either our son or our daughter to be math/engineering nerds.
And women's blouses reverse the sides the buttons and buttonholes are on compared to men's shirts. Lots of reasons are given for this. The one that I've seen most often over the years is that that arrangement makes it easiest for right-handed men to dress themselves and right-handed maids to dress their mistress. The same argument would apply to the side on which the skirt or kilt fastens. Wikipedia offers a number of other possibilities.