Don't forget that these security schemes are just fences. There is a way around any security system in the world, including Alcatraz, the issue is only how difficult it is to circumvent it, and to make it not worth the effort.
Yeah even this place is controlled by an unelected gang. Not that public elections would help any, those can be perverted outschemed too. Just look at...
"Face it the market is only in it for FAST x86, nobody cares about power. And if they did they want to see it from intel, or AMD."
Really? I bought an Athlon XP 2500 333 because there was a motherboard for $10 after rebate. Coughed up the dough for the memory too, plus I had to buy a video card because it's 1.5VAGP - they got me in the end, spent well over 200 that started out as 10 bux, still content. In any case, I was still happily chugging along on my 300A Celeron clocked to 450, still working like a charm after 6 years, used mostly for this, browsing the net, reading, playing games. Even MS Rise of Nations Trial was fast on it because it has an nVidia Geforce2MX, that's what counts. And this Athlon does not feel 5x fast.. at all.. maybe twice - the program start time is still mostly controlled by the disk speed, with its 10 ms access time/7200 rpm that hasn't changed much (capacity though went from 10 Gig to 120 Gigs in 6 years). Maybe if I was an http://distributed.net/ RC5 freak trying to brute force crack keys, or if I did heavy video compression, I may need the juice. But this new CPU cooks.. while I read Slashdot.. the room warms up in the winter, I can feel it, unlike with the good old celery. I for one would be quite content to buy a chip that's cheap, consumes 5W and gives 1.5GHz equivalent performance.
Maybe this is a topic where the pathetic dotnet would make sense - as a transition platform from the dinosaur x86 architecture to something new, better, where you only have to execute fast the IL language code, and not the native x86 instructions. Then PPC and x86 and ia64 could all really go at it. Unfortunately, while everything is x86, dotnet sucks because it's slow, bloated, and adds yet another layer or black magic between you and your hard earned cpu cycles. In any case, more power is not what we need anymore, but less power - I'm glad to see the other news about Transmeta. I'd love to see a chip that uses 5Watts and gives me 1.5 GHz P4/Athlon performance. I'd be content.
While the amish represent a very nice and respectable cultural variety that we all need, technology, even as they testify to it, is not necessarily evil, as long as you can keep your priorities vs. your addictions straight. They are like the debian-stable usergroup, as a previous poster said it. Wheel is technology, hammers are technology, the plow is technology. They are just careful at examining anything new thrown at them, and wait for the dust to settle.
Let's take for instance Africa, that's so much in the talk these days - simple lack of technology is by no means a cure-all-your-social-ills-pill, but can be quite the opposite. What kind of life you live still comes down to people and sustainable cultural values, even in Africa. Though it is true that where you used to have luscious grass and a big pond and all you have now is desert sand, when your living foundations are pulled like a rug from under you, it's hard to keep social cohesion and order in place.
Yeah! What up with Basic these days? VB classic is dead, and VB.Net is C# in disguise, with the need to define "using system.standard.feature.math"-like things. The best feature of Basic was that it was, well, basic. Assembler, C and Basic were quite a good spectrum of programming languages, spanning all the needs of control over what happens vs. ease of programming.
Java and.Net and all this object orientedness is a nice concept when you have to manage humongous projects, but they neither give you ease of programming that Basic had, nor the superb level of control that C has. As far as developing a massive system in C only, it works, look at Win32 API. As far as security and buffer overflows go, there should be ways to fix those without changing paradigms. Instead of C++++ (i.e. C#), we need a C----.
There is a natural instinct, irresistible addiction that everyone feels toward sex, unlike toward violence and killing. This is a major difference on how much images viewed will affect you, though the risk of the effect, ie. irresponsible sex is almost ignorable compared to any kind of violence.
That's funny, but the supreme court may actually be better off, because we have no clue about how Neanderthals really were. When you look at a pile of cracked bones, you can make educated guesses, there is only so much you can philosophize over what their songs were like, if they even sang, or what kind of morals and beliefs they held to.
How about the great human migrations? People pick up and move. In case you're in the US, chances are you ended up here 200 years ago, compared to over 10,000 years ago. People move around, what we need is data if we really want to know. But there are special 'genetic privacy' or 'genetic discrimination' issues rearing.
Maybe there is a recessive Neanderthal gene hiding out somewhere in the populations of Europe. With all this sequencing stuff, simply "knowing" your genetics, or others knowing it, and considering it, how it relates to them, that's a scary thought. There is already legislation in the US against genetic discrimination, but what about "genetic privacy?" The nazi's went around looking for jews based on circumcision - so now everybody gets that. But what if someone can run around, and find out "who you are" based on an DNA sample, and treat you differently? Some indians living in reservations say they may be be interbred by europeans and diluted out to be 1/64th indian anymore, but they feel 100% indian. You are what your conscience tells you you are, who you feel you are, or what you consider your culture. Now there is the prospect that you may not be treated or respected based on your conscience, but based on how you happened to be born. Genetics defines a human being quite a bit, but there is a whole lot more to a human being, including culture, education. Case in point, look at the "forbidden experiment," where a baby lost in the forest or on an uninhabited island, doesn't get the chance to learn language, and when discovered after puberty, it becomes impossible to learn language at all. So much for how much the genes matter by themselves, without culture and education.
It was customary to hunt buffalo by the thousands 150 years ago, then have your picture taken. Good thing machine guns weren't invented yet. 100 years ago even president Teddy Roosevelt went on an African hunting trip, called a "safari," where he shot a bunch of animals for entertainment. At least native people hunt down an animal to eat it, and even our ancestors that drove large mammals to extinction probably did so to eat them. Nowadays, just 100 year later, we're much more conservation minded. It's interesting to see these swings in human mentality.
You know how a horse and a donkey makes a mule, because they are genetically compatible enough? I still can't believe there wasn't co-mixing between neanderthals and homo sapiens. In all the conflict and hate that arises when people of different "kinds" (culture, color, genetics, you name it) encounter each other, there is still sex. Where do you think the word "missionary style" comes from, especially when the catholic church forbade sex?
As a current example to relate to this story, you could say the native americans were almost wiped out by white man, but that's not true. I see a lot of indian faces, who speak perfect english.
On the US reservations they count the indians by bloodline, that they interbred, great grandmother married a frenchman, great-great-great grandmother an englishman, etc, and all in all they are 1/32nd and 1/64th indian anymore. Then they are told that the peace treaty signed by the US Government back in say 1812 that guarantees them sovereignty is void, because they are no longer indians, at least by blood. Moreover they get special casino rights in exchange to fully give up their sovereign rights - and when your stomach is churching hungry, it's a difficult dilemma: money, freedom, money, freedom, what do you choose? I think those people who were not stranded on reservations had a lot more change to live happily, because they were not so carefully monitored and purposefully bred away. That sad bloodline story is only about US America. When you look at Latin America, the variety of people is just amazingly beautiful. Just think of the Rio Carnival. They say Spanish will sooner or later be a majority language in the US, and they are promoted probably because they are so Catholic, but if you look at these folks, a lot of them look like great indian chiefs. In a sense you could call this justice, in the end.:)
What happened to the Neanderthals is that they probably just happened to get diluted away. It's completely alright if it just happens randomly, as long as people are happy living together, it doesn't matter whose genes survive in the end - one couple having 5 kids, the other only 1, so what? Of course I care more about my 1 kid or my 5 kids than that other family's kids, but I care the other family's kids too, it's not all or nothing, not 1/0, but more like 66/33, or 51/49, or 99/1 - you can't stick numbers on these things. I don't mind if my 1 kid gets married with one of the 5 kids of the other family, and my genes get diluted out and go extinct in the end, so what? I care about my son and daughter to be happy, and when they are married, I care about the son in law and daughter in law to be happy too, and the grandkids to be happy too. And if my great grandchildren are (1/5)^2 ratio other genes vs. my genes, and the great-grandchildren (1/5)^3, so what? If it happens happens, life goes on, humanity goes on, and I'll be completely happy with it. Or does this mean I should have 200 kids, because that's the purpose of life? What about adoptions? Do genes really matter that much? We can understand that raising a child, compassion and all these humans needs exist because that's how survival of the genes was maintained, that's how we are here, but that doesn't make survival of the genes is the purpose of life. For one, what kind of overpopulation problems does such behavior lead to? A lot of smart people didn't have any kids - Newton, Kant, you name it - does this mean they should give up caring about humanity because it's not their genes? But it's whole other thing when you become consciously aware that someone or some group hates your very being, your very existence, your genes, and manipulates your life purposefully into genetic extinction. That's not fair. Native American's felt that. African Americans felt that too for a while, until it subsided, but there is still the saying "the Man always tryin to keep a brotha down." Even Native Americans are getting their rights back a bit lately, including medals from Bush for having their spoken languag
Maybe I'm just lazy to not have figured out a way around this, if there is a way, but when modding I view the posts "flat" because it displays every single post. When viewing them via "threads," it doesn't matter if I set the threshhold to -1, it still shows me links, instead of fully spanning out the thread tree. Therefore I just see the posts by themselves, and often have idea about the parents only because of remembering the context, having read something on the same topic 2 minutes ago. I really hate firing every thread link into a new browser tab, then having 30-some tabs to read then accidentally closing the one tab I really wanted to keep open.
You are right. When dealing with low steam cracking temperatures, and Carnot engines thermal efficiencies are 1-T1/T2, so even though you do get the energy, it's not in a useful form, it's not something that sounds very tasty. Clearly the best route is to forget steam cracking, and just use CH4+O2 directly, whether via fuel cell or via combustion, then condense the water out, and deal with your CO2. And yes, whatever CO2 you have in your carbonated water soda, that's not too much, and can be gassed out at high temp.
When I first read the story, I thought they finally built a huge bacteria farm to absorb the effluent CO2. But that's not a very tasty solution either, you're basically just using solar energy in the end, at a very low photosynthetic energy conversion efficiency, however you're pumping these bacteria full of CO2, so your local solar "efficiency"(areal efficiency, before saturation/m2 is achieved and the photons are ignored) could increase. Still, you'd need to absorb energy equivalent to the power plant output, and at 1kW/m2 solar input, and photoconversion efficiency of 2% theoretical, 0.3% practical, that's only 3-20 Watts/m2 (times flux cosine of your global latitude.) so you need quite a few hectars of algea/bacteria farm to keep up with your power plant's CO2 production.
It will be very humbling to think about people working in car factories, restaurants, Walmart, etc. in an age where robots do all the manual labor and people just play sports, theatre plays, or pretty much just keep busy with what the english snob lord community did when they went to their clubs and didn't ever do a day's of work. Man, if I tell about this in my club!
Well you're right and not about the energetic downhill. Wrong about this: Theoretically, if you start with methane, and you end up with CO2 + H2O, it doesn't matter what catalysts you use in between, your net energy in the end should be the same (without considering efficiency losses.) However, the more steps you go through, the more losses in efficiency you can expect, so you're right on that part. But something for something, everything has some kind of cost.
I don't understand, why they don't just burn methane, condense all the water into a liquid, and keep the CO2 as gas. Wait I know why.. because CO2 is soluble in water, so the CO2-full water you reuse, instead of purging it to the outer world. Hydrogen is not soluble in water, so this way you can fully separate CO2 and H2, and keep recirculating a CO2 saturated steam as your reaction medium.
By the way there is significant energy loss in fuel cells too, because of the ionic resistance of your molten or solid electrolyte. Though true, it beats the pants off simple thermal engines, especially if you combine the fuel cell electricity with the thermal engine to capture the waste heat. I've seen total efficiency numbers near 80% with fuel cell/waste heat turbine combinations.
Here are some thoughts, but we're really going off on tangents, but it's fun.
I can feel the direction of your text was to give examples of rotating time into space and space into time.
First of all I fully agree with your statement that any time measurement ultimately comes down to measuring the speed of light. But same is with length measurement.
Picking on the statement: All objects travel through spacetime at c? If the object is stationary, x=const, yet it's speed is c, dx/dt=c, plus it's ds^2=dx^2+(icdt)^2=0, that means if dx=0 then dt=0. If a stationary object moved through spacetime at the speed of light, it would have to experience no time change. That doesn't make sense to me, because I'm a prime counterexample right now, sitting still, yet experiencing dt. However it's not that simple, I'm made up of traveling electrons, plus we don't even know what protons and neutrons do, and part of why an atom doesn't collapse, why an electron doesn't fall down into the nucleus, could be some requirement that it has to move.
Also, back to the "if a stationary object is moving through space at the speed of light it has to experinece no timechange" and remove the "stationary" part, Let's assume I can live with the remaining. It seems the faster something moves, the slower its clocks go, but what happens when it moves with the full speed of light? You could say all its clocks stop, or entities moving with c experience no time change at all. You say this means they are rotated into the flat space dimension completely, and have none of the time component in them, so they don't experience the change of change, the time of time, the dt/dTau. The hair stands up on my back when seeing such phrases, when you talk about the expansion of time, the change of change, the time of time etc. You're basically either just doing a variable change, a scaling, or summoning yet another "space dimension" as the 4th axis, then you still abstract time away, as something subconsciously in the background, as your Tau. In any case a photon experiences dt, simply because it stays in my world, in my 3d-cut of spacetime, I don't leave it behind in time. Or does it stay in my world? This is a neat koan. For one, you could not talk about speed of light, the dx/dt=c, without the dt part. You could say photons don't really exist, except momentarily, for a dt=0 time, just when they happen to hit me, and then they disappear into the past, but what kind of utility do such concepts have? How did the photon get to me from that star. Well, the star emits an effect, not really a photon, just some effect, that propagates at the speed of light, then when the photon gets to me, it suddenly appears into reality, hits me and puff it's gone into the past, or absorbed away in the present? The effect is not really an object, so rules of existence don't really apply to it - can you feel the mess, the inutility of these ideas?
Since most stationary objects are not really stationary but made up of moving parts (atoms), and nothing except photons move with c, let's come back to the stuff that moves with v, yet they move through spacetime at c. Well, dx/dt=v, but you want dx/dt=c. One way to deal with this is to mess with the t part, the other is to mess with the x part. You mess with the t part, and saying that dx/dtau=c, while dx/dt=v, and you consider the dt/dtau. Have you considered the other way? dXau/dt=c, while dx/dt=v? In this case it is space that is contracted and stretched, which is at the guts of Lorentz transformations. Can you say "wavefronts of space", or "ether" pass through an object, make it expand or contract? You can pretty much find all the math and derivations in the trials and tribulations of making an ether work, between 1850 to 1930, and just simply flip the x variables into your t variables. Whatever reason those things didn't work out, you have to see how it applies to your tau things, except you are on even shakier and less intuitive ground. Because any time/length measurement comes down to the measurement
I also meant electron interference, not just diffraction, meaning sudden wave collapse everywhere, or, particles acting deterministically individually but statistically add up to wave behavior. I don't buy yet the need for the observer for a reality to exist.
Also, here are some thoughts about photons being emitted and reabsorbed. I don't believe in the "probabilistic" mumbo jumbo, even though the results are impressive, therefore pragmatic. Those funky Feynman diagrams are impressive, they give an awesome view and have a lot of value, but I'm still not convinced they tell the whole story. In particular, though electron diffraction is mind-boggling, I don't think determinism is done with. How about quantization of space, and spacetime, like the quantization of the dots on your computer monitor screen, and when an object passes through the dots, nothing really moves, except the color of dots changes according to some rules, including conservation of energy, momentum, etc. Behold your new understanding of how energy and mass and rest mass can be of the same nature - you could be just dealing with different floors and an elevator inside each space quantum-office-building. We know vacuum is not empty, but could it be that everything is vacuum, just space, just dots on a screen, and whether that portion of vacuum is an electron or a photon is only the state, or color of the dot, and motion, exchanging states happens according to some simple set of axioms? Also you don't do it with 'real' tiles such as squares or hexagons (do you even need to completely fill space, or can you leave random holes in it?), but come up with some unimaginable imaginary tiles that work all the time via math, but you can't picture them with your mind. Then you could say the electron is behaving randomly because of the way it encounters the next dot, or space quantum, and it has to decide which one to fall into on its path. Brownian motion is random, but it can be explained nicely on purely deterministic grounds. I think quantum mechanics is a temporary stage, like describing Brownian motion on probabilitic grounds because we simply have no evidence of atoms and molecules. We have to look at the smaller scale, and measure something, some experiment. Remember why Leonardo was chastized by the church? Because he believed in the piccolissimo. Infinite itself is mindboggling, if there is a way to avoid it, I welcome it, and I prefer imaginary numbers compared to infinity as an explanation. If you notice Schroedinger's equation has an ugly i in it (sqrt(-1)), which means the math of space quantization is hopelessly thrown into the world that doesn't make sense, and you have to walk on very firm mathematical ground, and ignore the naysayers and your own instincts. There are a lot of ways to describe the same thing, just think of Fourier series vs. regular Taylor series, which are just two ways of looking at the same thing, and equivalent. There are probably many other ways to look at the same thing, but we care about those ways that have the most 'meaning' and utility to us human beings, that fit our mental makeup. Just like in entropy we describe order as a single state, and disorder all the other states we can't really grasp, each one of those disordered states is really equivalent to our "preferred" ordered state, that we're biased towards. What I'm saying is that describing the same thing via Schroedinger's wave mechanics, or Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, or Feynman diagrams, or some funky space quanta, could be the same thing, and what really matters is not which one is true, because they all are, but which one pleases us most, and lets us head on towards the next discoveries, because we can comprehend it. Sometimes you have to give up comfort when you wander into new territory, including the acceptance of imaginary numbers, but look how much utility they have, if nothing else, in electrical engineering! Bewilderingly useful!
See the reply to the previous message. In particular, "The null vector, which represents a vector of zero length in space-time, can only imply zero movement through space-time" is a false statement, because I can come up with a myriad of x^2+(ict)^2=0 numbers, so the (x,t) coordinate pairings can change, even though the "length" defined through ds^2=x^2+(ict)^2=x^2-(ct)^2=0 stays 0. Depends on your definition of "motion", are you looking at the ds^2 quantity, or (x,t)=const. Note that we're not dealing with moduli of complex numbers, which are always a positive real number, or 0, we're dealing with the guts of imaginary numbers. This is not your usual 2d-3d-4d vector space that you can picture, because of the definition of the invariant quantity called ds is not the same as the definition of unimaginary-uncomplex length used in Lorentz transformations.
The reason why a moving photon doesn't move in spacetime is because you're dealing with the imaginary axis. Explain how the equation x^2+1=0 makes sense? How can the square of something be negative, so when you add it to something, it cancels it to 0? This is the fundemantal issue, and the existence of imaginary numbers was debated for a long time because they don't make sense, until Gauss settled and whole thing saying they have just as much right to exist as the rest of the numbers, even if they don't make sense. You could call this pragmatist philosophical stance - do imaginary numbers have any good use, value? If yes, good, we accept them as something valid. But you gotta be careful with the arguments around them.
If you metamoderate all the time, why would they give you regular mod points? It's harder to get that thankless job done, and people who do it, you don't wanna lose them. When they stop metamoderating, then you sweeten the deal and give them mod points, so they keep at it, it's like free work. (But it's not really work when it's fun doing.) All in all, they say the system randomly assigns mod points, but if those in charge 'care' about the quality of moderation, they might cut a few corners that give the system more efficiency at the expense of fairness and decency to human beings (Especially if they don't know they are being treated unfairly. I'm not saying they are cutting corners, but it could be a possibility, ya never know.) What matters though, metamoderators, is that you/we should feel proud, because we are the ones who really carry the weight, who keep the system in check, and that's why we come here, it's our collective work. I said 'we, metamoderators' but I'm guilty of being lazy too, because lately I've been getting a lot of mod points, and I don't really meta-moderate much when get regular mod points. By the way, mandatory joke: Don't ask what slashdot can do for you, ask what you can do for slashdot!:)
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget that these security schemes are just fences. There is a way around any security system in the world, including Alcatraz, the issue is only how difficult it is to circumvent it, and to make it not worth the effort.
Yeah even this place is controlled by an unelected gang. Not that public elections would help any, those can be perverted outschemed too. Just look at...
"Face it the market is only in it for FAST x86, nobody cares about power. And if they did they want to see it from intel, or AMD."
Really? I bought an Athlon XP 2500 333 because there was a motherboard for $10 after rebate. Coughed up the dough for the memory too, plus I had to buy a video card because it's 1.5VAGP - they got me in the end, spent well over 200 that started out as 10 bux, still content. In any case, I was still happily chugging along on my 300A Celeron clocked to 450, still working like a charm after 6 years, used mostly for this, browsing the net, reading, playing games. Even MS Rise of Nations Trial was fast on it because it has an nVidia Geforce2MX, that's what counts. And this Athlon does not feel 5x fast.. at all.. maybe twice - the program start time is still mostly controlled by the disk speed, with its 10 ms access time/7200 rpm that hasn't changed much (capacity though went from 10 Gig to 120 Gigs in 6 years). Maybe if I was an http://distributed.net/ RC5 freak trying to brute force crack keys, or if I did heavy video compression, I may need the juice. But this new CPU cooks.. while I read Slashdot.. the room warms up in the winter, I can feel it, unlike with the good old celery. I for one would be quite content to buy a chip that's cheap, consumes 5W and gives 1.5GHz equivalent performance.
Maybe this is a topic where the pathetic dotnet would make sense - as a transition platform from the dinosaur x86 architecture to something new, better, where you only have to execute fast the IL language code, and not the native x86 instructions. Then PPC and x86 and ia64 could all really go at it. Unfortunately, while everything is x86, dotnet sucks because it's slow, bloated, and adds yet another layer or black magic between you and your hard earned cpu cycles. In any case, more power is not what we need anymore, but less power - I'm glad to see the other news about Transmeta. I'd love to see a chip that uses 5Watts and gives me 1.5 GHz P4/Athlon performance. I'd be content.
While the amish represent a very nice and respectable cultural variety that we all need, technology, even as they testify to it, is not necessarily evil, as long as you can keep your priorities vs. your addictions straight. They are like the debian-stable usergroup, as a previous poster said it. Wheel is technology, hammers are technology, the plow is technology. They are just careful at examining anything new thrown at them, and wait for the dust to settle.
Let's take for instance Africa, that's so much in the talk these days - simple lack of technology is by no means a cure-all-your-social-ills-pill, but can be quite the opposite. What kind of life you live still comes down to people and sustainable cultural values, even in Africa. Though it is true that where you used to have luscious grass and a big pond and all you have now is desert sand, when your living foundations are pulled like a rug from under you, it's hard to keep social cohesion and order in place.
Last I heard a shuttle launch costs about 470 million bux. So 7 million out of that is piece of cake.
Yeah! What up with Basic these days? VB classic is dead, and VB.Net is C# in disguise, with the need to define "using system.standard.feature.math"-like things. The best feature of Basic was that it was, well, basic. Assembler, C and Basic were quite a good spectrum of programming languages, spanning all the needs of control over what happens vs. ease of programming.
Java and .Net and all this object orientedness is a nice concept when you have to manage humongous projects, but they neither give you ease of programming that Basic had, nor the superb level of control that C has. As far as developing a massive system in C only, it works, look at Win32 API. As far as security and buffer overflows go, there should be ways to fix those without changing paradigms. Instead of C++++ (i.e. C#), we need a C----.
There is a natural instinct, irresistible addiction that everyone feels toward sex, unlike toward violence and killing. This is a major difference on how much images viewed will affect you, though the risk of the effect, ie. irresponsible sex is almost ignorable compared to any kind of violence.
That's funny, but the supreme court may actually be better off, because we have no clue about how Neanderthals really were. When you look at a pile of cracked bones, you can make educated guesses, there is only so much you can philosophize over what their songs were like, if they even sang, or what kind of morals and beliefs they held to.
How about the great human migrations? People pick up and move. In case you're in the US, chances are you ended up here 200 years ago, compared to over 10,000 years ago. People move around, what we need is data if we really want to know. But there are special 'genetic privacy' or 'genetic discrimination' issues rearing.
Maybe there is a recessive Neanderthal gene hiding out somewhere in the populations of Europe. With all this sequencing stuff, simply "knowing" your genetics, or others knowing it, and considering it, how it relates to them, that's a scary thought. There is already legislation in the US against genetic discrimination, but what about "genetic privacy?" The nazi's went around looking for jews based on circumcision - so now everybody gets that. But what if someone can run around, and find out "who you are" based on an DNA sample, and treat you differently? Some indians living in reservations say they may be be interbred by europeans and diluted out to be 1/64th indian anymore, but they feel 100% indian. You are what your conscience tells you you are, who you feel you are, or what you consider your culture. Now there is the prospect that you may not be treated or respected based on your conscience, but based on how you happened to be born. Genetics defines a human being quite a bit, but there is a whole lot more to a human being, including culture, education. Case in point, look at the "forbidden experiment," where a baby lost in the forest or on an uninhabited island, doesn't get the chance to learn language, and when discovered after puberty, it becomes impossible to learn language at all. So much for how much the genes matter by themselves, without culture and education.
It was customary to hunt buffalo by the thousands 150 years ago, then have your picture taken. Good thing machine guns weren't invented yet. 100 years ago even president Teddy Roosevelt went on an African hunting trip, called a "safari," where he shot a bunch of animals for entertainment. At least native people hunt down an animal to eat it, and even our ancestors that drove large mammals to extinction probably did so to eat them. Nowadays, just 100 year later, we're much more conservation minded. It's interesting to see these swings in human mentality.
You know how a horse and a donkey makes a mule, because they are genetically compatible enough? I still can't believe there wasn't co-mixing between neanderthals and homo sapiens. In all the conflict and hate that arises when people of different "kinds" (culture, color, genetics, you name it) encounter each other, there is still sex. Where do you think the word "missionary style" comes from, especially when the catholic church forbade sex?
:)
As a current example to relate to this story, you could say the native americans were almost wiped out by white man, but that's not true. I see a lot of indian faces, who speak perfect english.
On the US reservations they count the indians by bloodline, that they interbred, great grandmother married a frenchman, great-great-great grandmother an englishman, etc, and all in all they are 1/32nd and 1/64th indian anymore. Then they are told that the peace treaty signed by the US Government back in say 1812 that guarantees them sovereignty is void, because they are no longer indians, at least by blood. Moreover they get special casino rights in exchange to fully give up their sovereign rights - and when your stomach is churching hungry, it's a difficult dilemma: money, freedom, money, freedom, what do you choose? I think those people who were not stranded on reservations had a lot more change to live happily, because they were not so carefully monitored and purposefully bred away.
That sad bloodline story is only about US America. When you look at Latin America, the variety of people is just amazingly beautiful. Just think of the Rio Carnival. They say Spanish will sooner or later be a majority language in the US, and they are promoted probably because they are so Catholic, but if you look at these folks, a lot of them look like great indian chiefs. In a sense you could call this justice, in the end.
What happened to the Neanderthals is that they probably just happened to get diluted away. It's completely alright if it just happens randomly, as long as people are happy living together, it doesn't matter whose genes survive in the end - one couple having 5 kids, the other only 1, so what? Of course I care more about my 1 kid or my 5 kids than that other family's kids, but I care the other family's kids too, it's not all or nothing, not 1/0, but more like 66/33, or 51/49, or 99/1 - you can't stick numbers on these things. I don't mind if my 1 kid gets married with one of the 5 kids of the other family, and my genes get diluted out and go extinct in the end, so what? I care about my son and daughter to be happy, and when they are married, I care about the son in law and daughter in law to be happy too, and the grandkids to be happy too. And if my great grandchildren are (1/5)^2 ratio other genes vs. my genes, and the great-grandchildren (1/5)^3, so what? If it happens happens, life goes on, humanity goes on, and I'll be completely happy with it. Or does this mean I should have 200 kids, because that's the purpose of life? What about adoptions? Do genes really matter that much? We can understand that raising a child, compassion and all these humans needs exist because that's how survival of the genes was maintained, that's how we are here, but that doesn't make survival of the genes is the purpose of life. For one, what kind of overpopulation problems does such behavior lead to? A lot of smart people didn't have any kids - Newton, Kant, you name it - does this mean they should give up caring about humanity because it's not their genes?
But it's whole other thing when you become consciously aware that someone or some group hates your very being, your very existence, your genes, and manipulates your life purposefully into genetic extinction. That's not fair. Native American's felt that. African Americans felt that too for a while, until it subsided, but there is still the saying "the Man always tryin to keep a brotha down." Even Native Americans are getting their rights back a bit lately, including medals from Bush for having their spoken languag
Maybe I'm just lazy to not have figured out a way around this, if there is a way, but when modding I view the posts "flat" because it displays every single post. When viewing them via "threads," it doesn't matter if I set the threshhold to -1, it still shows me links, instead of fully spanning out the thread tree. Therefore I just see the posts by themselves, and often have idea about the parents only because of remembering the context, having read something on the same topic 2 minutes ago. I really hate firing every thread link into a new browser tab, then having 30-some tabs to read then accidentally closing the one tab I really wanted to keep open.
You are right. When dealing with low steam cracking temperatures, and Carnot engines thermal efficiencies are 1-T1/T2, so even though you do get the energy, it's not in a useful form, it's not something that sounds very tasty. Clearly the best route is to forget steam cracking, and just use CH4+O2 directly, whether via fuel cell or via combustion, then condense the water out, and deal with your CO2. And yes, whatever CO2 you have in your carbonated water soda, that's not too much, and can be gassed out at high temp.
When I first read the story, I thought they finally built a huge bacteria farm to absorb the effluent CO2. But that's not a very tasty solution either, you're basically just using solar energy in the end, at a very low photosynthetic energy conversion efficiency, however you're pumping these bacteria full of CO2, so your local solar "efficiency"(areal efficiency, before saturation/m2 is achieved and the photons are ignored) could increase. Still, you'd need to absorb energy equivalent to the power plant output, and at 1kW/m2 solar input, and photoconversion efficiency of 2% theoretical, 0.3% practical, that's only 3-20 Watts/m2 (times flux cosine of your global latitude.) so you need quite a few hectars of algea/bacteria farm to keep up with your power plant's CO2 production.
No such thing. As long as someone has an incentive to keep turning the rocks and not leave the issue alone, it will always be a vigilent struggle.
It will be very humbling to think about people working in car factories, restaurants, Walmart, etc. in an age where robots do all the manual labor and people just play sports, theatre plays, or pretty much just keep busy with what the english snob lord community did when they went to their clubs and didn't ever do a day's of work. Man, if I tell about this in my club!
Well you're right and not about the energetic downhill. Wrong about this: Theoretically, if you start with methane, and you end up with CO2 + H2O, it doesn't matter what catalysts you use in between, your net energy in the end should be the same (without considering efficiency losses.) However, the more steps you go through, the more losses in efficiency you can expect, so you're right on that part. But something for something, everything has some kind of cost.
I don't understand, why they don't just burn methane, condense all the water into a liquid, and keep the CO2 as gas. Wait I know why.. because CO2 is soluble in water, so the CO2-full water you reuse, instead of purging it to the outer world. Hydrogen is not soluble in water, so this way you can fully separate CO2 and H2, and keep recirculating a CO2 saturated steam as your reaction medium.
By the way there is significant energy loss in fuel cells too, because of the ionic resistance of your molten or solid electrolyte. Though true, it beats the pants off simple thermal engines, especially if you combine the fuel cell electricity with the thermal engine to capture the waste heat. I've seen total efficiency numbers near 80% with fuel cell/waste heat turbine combinations.
Here are some thoughts, but we're really going off on tangents, but it's fun.
I can feel the direction of your text was to give examples of rotating time into space and space into time.
First of all I fully agree with your statement that any time measurement ultimately comes down to measuring the speed of light. But same is with length measurement.
Picking on the statement: All objects travel through spacetime at c? If the object is stationary, x=const, yet it's speed is c, dx/dt=c, plus it's ds^2=dx^2+(icdt)^2=0, that means if dx=0 then dt=0. If a stationary object moved through spacetime at the speed of light, it would have to experience no time change. That doesn't make sense to me, because I'm a prime counterexample right now, sitting still, yet experiencing dt. However it's not that simple, I'm made up of traveling electrons, plus we don't even know what protons and neutrons do, and part of why an atom doesn't collapse, why an electron doesn't fall down into the nucleus, could be some requirement that it has to move.
Also, back to the "if a stationary object is moving through space at the speed of light it has to experinece no timechange" and remove the "stationary" part, Let's assume I can live with the remaining. It seems the faster something moves, the slower its clocks go, but what happens when it moves with the full speed of light? You could say all its clocks stop, or entities moving with c experience no time change at all. You say this means they are rotated into the flat space dimension completely, and have none of the time component in them, so they don't experience the change of change, the time of time, the dt/dTau. The hair stands up on my back when seeing such phrases, when you talk about the expansion of time, the change of change, the time of time etc. You're basically either just doing a variable change, a scaling, or summoning yet another "space dimension" as the 4th axis, then you still abstract time away, as something subconsciously in the background, as your Tau. In any case a photon experiences dt, simply because it stays in my world, in my 3d-cut of spacetime, I don't leave it behind in time. Or does it stay in my world? This is a neat koan. For one, you could not talk about speed of light, the dx/dt=c, without the dt part. You could say photons don't really exist, except momentarily, for a dt=0 time, just when they happen to hit me, and then they disappear into the past, but what kind of utility do such concepts have? How did the photon get to me from that star. Well, the star emits an effect, not really a photon, just some effect, that propagates at the speed of light, then when the photon gets to me, it suddenly appears into reality, hits me and puff it's gone into the past, or absorbed away in the present? The effect is not really an object, so rules of existence don't really apply to it - can you feel the mess, the inutility of these ideas?
Since most stationary objects are not really stationary but made up of moving parts (atoms), and nothing except photons move with c, let's come back to the stuff that moves with v, yet they move through spacetime at c. Well, dx/dt=v, but you want dx/dt=c. One way to deal with this is to mess with the t part, the other is to mess with the x part. You mess with the t part, and saying that dx/dtau=c, while dx/dt=v, and you consider the dt/dtau. Have you considered the other way? dXau/dt=c, while dx/dt=v? In this case it is space that is contracted and stretched, which is at the guts of Lorentz transformations. Can you say "wavefronts of space", or "ether" pass through an object, make it expand or contract? You can pretty much find all the math and derivations in the trials and tribulations of making an ether work, between 1850 to 1930, and just simply flip the x variables into your t variables. Whatever reason those things didn't work out, you have to see how it applies to your tau things, except you are on even shakier and less intuitive ground. Because any time/length measurement comes down to the measurement
I also meant electron interference, not just diffraction, meaning sudden wave collapse everywhere, or, particles acting deterministically individually but statistically add up to wave behavior. I don't buy yet the need for the observer for a reality to exist.
I meant Galileo, not Leonardo. I can't find the reference where I read it.
Also, here are some thoughts about photons being emitted and reabsorbed. I don't believe in the "probabilistic" mumbo jumbo, even though the results are impressive, therefore pragmatic. Those funky Feynman diagrams are impressive, they give an awesome view and have a lot of value, but I'm still not convinced they tell the whole story. In particular, though electron diffraction is mind-boggling, I don't think determinism is done with. How about quantization of space, and spacetime, like the quantization of the dots on your computer monitor screen, and when an object passes through the dots, nothing really moves, except the color of dots changes according to some rules, including conservation of energy, momentum, etc. Behold your new understanding of how energy and mass and rest mass can be of the same nature - you could be just dealing with different floors and an elevator inside each space quantum-office-building. We know vacuum is not empty, but could it be that everything is vacuum, just space, just dots on a screen, and whether that portion of vacuum is an electron or a photon is only the state, or color of the dot, and motion, exchanging states happens according to some simple set of axioms? Also you don't do it with 'real' tiles such as squares or hexagons (do you even need to completely fill space, or can you leave random holes in it?), but come up with some unimaginable imaginary tiles that work all the time via math, but you can't picture them with your mind. Then you could say the electron is behaving randomly because of the way it encounters the next dot, or space quantum, and it has to decide which one to fall into on its path. Brownian motion is random, but it can be explained nicely on purely deterministic grounds. I think quantum mechanics is a temporary stage, like describing Brownian motion on probabilitic grounds because we simply have no evidence of atoms and molecules. We have to look at the smaller scale, and measure something, some experiment. Remember why Leonardo was chastized by the church? Because he believed in the piccolissimo. Infinite itself is mindboggling, if there is a way to avoid it, I welcome it, and I prefer imaginary numbers compared to infinity as an explanation. If you notice Schroedinger's equation has an ugly i in it (sqrt(-1)), which means the math of space quantization is hopelessly thrown into the world that doesn't make sense, and you have to walk on very firm mathematical ground, and ignore the naysayers and your own instincts. There are a lot of ways to describe the same thing, just think of Fourier series vs. regular Taylor series, which are just two ways of looking at the same thing, and equivalent. There are probably many other ways to look at the same thing, but we care about those ways that have the most 'meaning' and utility to us human beings, that fit our mental makeup. Just like in entropy we describe order as a single state, and disorder all the other states we can't really grasp, each one of those disordered states is really equivalent to our "preferred" ordered state, that we're biased towards. What I'm saying is that describing the same thing via Schroedinger's wave mechanics, or Heisenberg's matrix mechanics, or Feynman diagrams, or some funky space quanta, could be the same thing, and what really matters is not which one is true, because they all are, but which one pleases us most, and lets us head on towards the next discoveries, because we can comprehend it. Sometimes you have to give up comfort when you wander into new territory, including the acceptance of imaginary numbers, but look how much utility they have, if nothing else, in electrical engineering! Bewilderingly useful!
See the reply to the previous message. In particular, "The null vector, which represents a vector of zero length in space-time, can only imply zero movement through space-time" is a false statement, because I can come up with a myriad of x^2+(ict)^2=0 numbers, so the (x,t) coordinate pairings can change, even though the "length" defined through ds^2=x^2+(ict)^2=x^2-(ct)^2=0 stays 0. Depends on your definition of "motion", are you looking at the ds^2 quantity, or (x,t)=const. Note that we're not dealing with moduli of complex numbers, which are always a positive real number, or 0, we're dealing with the guts of imaginary numbers. This is not your usual 2d-3d-4d vector space that you can picture, because of the definition of the invariant quantity called ds is not the same as the definition of unimaginary-uncomplex length used in Lorentz transformations.
The reason why a moving photon doesn't move in spacetime is because you're dealing with the imaginary axis. Explain how the equation x^2+1=0 makes sense? How can the square of something be negative, so when you add it to something, it cancels it to 0? This is the fundemantal issue, and the existence of imaginary numbers was debated for a long time because they don't make sense, until Gauss settled and whole thing saying they have just as much right to exist as the rest of the numbers, even if they don't make sense. You could call this pragmatist philosophical stance - do imaginary numbers have any good use, value? If yes, good, we accept them as something valid. But you gotta be careful with the arguments around them.
If you metamoderate all the time, why would they give you regular mod points? It's harder to get that thankless job done, and people who do it, you don't wanna lose them. When they stop metamoderating, then you sweeten the deal and give them mod points, so they keep at it, it's like free work. (But it's not really work when it's fun doing.) All in all, they say the system randomly assigns mod points, but if those in charge 'care' about the quality of moderation, they might cut a few corners that give the system more efficiency at the expense of fairness and decency to human beings (Especially if they don't know they are being treated unfairly. I'm not saying they are cutting corners, but it could be a possibility, ya never know.) What matters though, metamoderators, is that you/we should feel proud, because we are the ones who really carry the weight, who keep the system in check, and that's why we come here, it's our collective work. I said 'we, metamoderators' but I'm guilty of being lazy too, because lately I've been getting a lot of mod points, and I don't really meta-moderate much when get regular mod points. By the way, mandatory joke: Don't ask what slashdot can do for you, ask what you can do for slashdot! :)