You can't plot the weather here on Earth more than 3 days from now accurately, but you expect us to believe you can plot the sun's weather 2 years from now?
I call BS.
We know arbitrarily far in advance that winter is colder on average than summer. Similarly, we can forecast the timing of solar-cycle peaks pretty well out into the future. I.e, this forecast based on climatology, not an initial value problem (weather; chaotic).
Basically, Earth's size, rotation rate, and stratification only support 1-2 jet streams, and there is a lot of variability. This variability, and the strong wave-radiative potential near the jet streams does not allow large-scale coherent structure to persist for "long" periods of time. Jupiter supports many jets having nearly fixed positions, which allows coherent material eddies to persist without disruption in the mixing layers between the jets.
Earth has similar eddies, on shorter timescales, in both the atmosphere and ocean. Examples include warm and cold rings in the ocean, and "cut-off" cyclones in the atmosphere. There are also less well-known vortices over the arctic that are apparent in analyses of the tropopause. Examples can be found here (try the loop feature to see the motion of vortices over the arctic):
This "news for nerds site" has better coverage of battlestar galactica, and whatever RMS and linus torvalds has for breakfast this morning than anything substantive about the sciences. I for one would like to see some effort to improve on the part of the editorial staff. If you are with me on this and would like slashdot to become a more informative and less glitzy news site, please post replies outlining problems you've seen and possible solutions.
I couldn't agree more with you. Improvements in the editorial staff would definitely help, but what would help more is if moderators were limited to rating subject matter that they understand. I'm tired of seeing posts like "i knew a guy at caltech in the 70s who wrote a lisp program to solve this problem over lunch one day, and he said..." get rate "+5 interesting."
Even though I read/. a few times a day to keep tabs on issues in computing, I've largely given up on science here, and particularly posting on science. I suspect I'm representative of a larger group with similar sentiment, which is why I'm replying to your post. I would be happy to re-engage if I thought it was worth the effort.
And they have been setting records for years but unfortunately they have been banned by the UIC (they define the standard bike as a bike). It is said a mediocre (professional) cyclist could beat someone like Armstrong in a normal one day race due to the inherent advantages of the recumbent.
Unlikely, even if you had a clone of Armstrong riding the recumbent. Road races take place on rolling terrain, and involve acceleration tactics. Recumbants lose their efficiency uphill because you can't change position on the bike to exploit different muscle groups. Tactics involve a lot of short burst acceleration followed by recovery. The recumbant advantage is due to sustained power, not sprinting.
Parsing through all the attitude in bluster in your post it is clear that you are not dealing with the same user base as the author (engineers or scientists). Although I'll get it if I ask, I don't want root privs on my machine, because when I ping my admin I want it to be his problem, not mine. Furthermore, I can build and install most code myself in ~/ without root privs.
Sure, we have a lot to learn about hurricanes, but this is not one of the deeper mysteries. It's long been noted that hurricanes undergoing very rapid intensification (such as Katrina and Rita) often have unusual amounts of lightning. The reason for this is that charge seperation requires vertical air velocities sufficient to create graupel (spongey small hail). Hurricane convection is set primarily by the underlying sea-surface temperature, which generally has small CAPE (convectively available potential energy), and small vertical velocities (little or no graupel). Storms that move over "hot spots" in SST, acquire CAPE, strong updrafts, graupel, and lightning.
Since this depends on the slop of the Earth's interior, it's not a fully regular and predictable thing - we might even have to remove a second one year.
The dominant high-frequency change to the length of day is primarily atmospheric, with inter-annual variations from the oceans (El Nino). These changes are on the order of milliseconds.
I really enjoy daylight unaided sightings of venus; it just feels amazing to me to see a planet in broad daylight. The funny thing is that after you find it, if you look away, and then look back, you can't miss it! A good empheris is helpful to narrow the search to a small part of the sky. This one at JPL is my favorite.
Granted many "low flow" toilets such as the ones available in many areas of California are not so great if you have a fruit/vegetable intensive diet, but for some reason the toilets available in the US simply don't have the "power" that other more advanced designs...
For gravity feed (i.e. most residential) toilets, the key to the "power" problem is the quality of the porcelane. I think the problems some people have with these "low flow" toilets is with the cheapest models. I got a mid-range 1.6 gpf model a few years ago and have not had a single problem in a family of vegetarians with very high fiber diets.:)
Python... doesn't allow you to use Python in the HTML templates, because Python is white-space dependent (okay, some people disagree about that last one, but I personally think the same language should be used in the templates).
The Federalist Papers, at the time they were written, were an advertising campaign meant to sway the electorate to support the constitution. Although they were published under an alias, the authors were widely known. In the end, the marketing campaign didn't work, and it was only once several other key states ratified that NY caved (FP was aimed at NYers). The Constitutional Congress, where the original draft of the Constitution was debated, was not anonymously attended, although the minutes were not publically released (the tin foil hat crowd would have gone wild).
So, yes, we would likely still have a constitution if Hamilton et al. could not publish under an alias.
Links to about 20 such efforts can be found toward the bottom of this page.
And for the other posters wondering about whether there's a market for accurate forecasts, the answer is yes, a very big one. When you operate a power grid, for example, a difference of a few degrees a day or two out saves a lot of money. There's a reason that Enron et al. were trying to run their own models in house.
The big problem with NOAA is getting the data out the door. Even their NWS field offices only get a small piece of what's available, and they have very tight bandwidth limitations. For example, it would be great to get all of the GFS ensemble member grids in real time, but they're largely unavailable; and it's really a small ensemble compared to what the future (should) hold.
On the flipside, the internet makes document delivery "free" and instantaneous, so the overnight document delivery end of their business may have shrunk.
Weather simulation is not a tast you can cut up into a bunch of smaller tasks and farm out.
This is true if you think deterministically (i.e. only one solution). In fact, weather prediction is fundamentally probabilistic and Monte Carlo techniques ("ensemble prediction") can be trivially parallized (one job per node = zero communication). My group routinely runs O(100) forecasts for a state-of-the-art weather model on a modest sized cluster.
Nicely put. I would add that since it's now very easy to wrap Fortran with a high-level scripting language like Python (via f2py), we have the best of both worlds (highly optimized, but also object orientation, GUIs, easy access to OS, etc.)
You may want to make an exception for young children, where parents are making decisions that affect the rest of their lives. I'm no expert in this area, but apparently there is research demonstrating that television viewing during the first two years of life, when the brain is rapidly developing, has permanent adverse effects.
We haven't had TV since my daughter was born, and after about 3 months I din't miss it at all. Of the children we know, it's obvious which ones watch TV. The kids that don't have amazingly long attention spans by comparison.
I remember first using one ca. 1986. Up until that point most weather data was still distributed via fax. Having the ability to loop satellite imagery and make custom graphics with real-time data was somewhat revolutionary.
Slashdot Mirror
You can't plot the weather here on Earth more than 3 days from now accurately, but you expect us to believe you can plot the sun's weather 2 years from now?
I call BS.
We know arbitrarily far in advance that winter is colder on average than summer. Similarly, we can forecast the timing of solar-cycle peaks pretty well out into the future. I.e, this forecast based on climatology, not an initial value problem (weather; chaotic).
Basically, Earth's size, rotation rate, and stratification only support 1-2 jet streams, and there is a lot of variability. This variability, and the strong wave-radiative potential near the jet streams does not allow large-scale coherent structure to persist for "long" periods of time. Jupiter supports many jets having nearly fixed positions, which allows coherent material eddies to persist without disruption in the mixing layers between the jets.
Earth has similar eddies, on shorter timescales, in both the atmosphere and ocean. Examples include warm and cold rings in the ocean, and "cut-off" cyclones in the atmosphere. There are also less well-known vortices over the arctic that are apparent in analyses of the tropopause. Examples can be found here (try the loop feature to see the motion of vortices over the arctic):
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~hakim/tropo/
I couldn't agree more with you. Improvements in the editorial staff would definitely help, but what would help more is if moderators were limited to rating subject matter that they understand. I'm tired of seeing posts like "i knew a guy at caltech in the 70s who wrote a lisp program to solve this problem over lunch one day, and he said..." get rate "+5 interesting."
Even though I read /. a few times a day to keep tabs on issues in computing, I've largely given up on science here, and particularly posting on science. I suspect I'm representative of a larger group with similar sentiment, which is why I'm replying to your post. I would be happy to re-engage if I thought it was worth the effort.
Unlikely, even if you had a clone of Armstrong riding the recumbent. Road races take place on rolling terrain, and involve acceleration tactics. Recumbants lose their efficiency uphill because you can't change position on the bike to exploit different muscle groups. Tactics involve a lot of short burst acceleration followed by recovery. The recumbant advantage is due to sustained power, not sprinting.
Parsing through all the attitude in bluster in your post it is clear that you are not dealing with the same user base as the author (engineers or scientists). Although I'll get it if I ask, I don't want root privs on my machine, because when I ping my admin I want it to be his problem, not mine. Furthermore, I can build and install most code myself in ~/ without root privs.
Sure, we have a lot to learn about hurricanes, but this is not one of the deeper mysteries. It's long been noted that hurricanes undergoing very rapid intensification (such as Katrina and Rita) often have unusual amounts of lightning. The reason for this is that charge seperation requires vertical air velocities sufficient to create graupel (spongey small hail). Hurricane convection is set primarily by the underlying sea-surface temperature, which generally has small CAPE (convectively available potential energy), and small vertical velocities (little or no graupel). Storms that move over "hot spots" in SST, acquire CAPE, strong updrafts, graupel, and lightning.
The dominant high-frequency change to the length of day is primarily atmospheric, with inter-annual variations from the oceans (El Nino). These changes are on the order of milliseconds.
I really enjoy daylight unaided sightings of venus; it just feels amazing to me to see a planet in broad daylight. The funny thing is that after you find it, if you look away, and then look back, you can't miss it! A good empheris is helpful to narrow the search to a small part of the sky. This one at JPL is my favorite.
The library is still alive. Apparently a group of the DEC developers are now at intel, and the the library is called the Math Kernel Library (MKL). http://www.intel.com/cd/software/products/asmo-na/ eng/perflib/219769.htm
For gravity feed (i.e. most residential) toilets, the key to the "power" problem is the quality of the porcelane. I think the problems some people have with these "low flow" toilets is with the cheapest models. I got a mid-range 1.6 gpf model a few years ago and have not had a single problem in a family of vegetarians with very high fiber diets. :)
Me too. That's why I use spyce.
So, yes, we would likely still have a constitution if Hamilton et al. could not publish under an alias.
Try spyce
And for the other posters wondering about whether there's a market for accurate forecasts, the answer is yes, a very big one. When you operate a power grid, for example, a difference of a few degrees a day or two out saves a lot of money. There's a reason that Enron et al. were trying to run their own models in house.
The big problem with NOAA is getting the data out the door. Even their NWS field offices only get a small piece of what's available, and they have very tight bandwidth limitations. For example, it would be great to get all of the GFS ensemble member grids in real time, but they're largely unavailable; and it's really a small ensemble compared to what the future (should) hold.
On the flipside, the internet makes document delivery "free" and instantaneous, so the overnight document delivery end of their business may have shrunk.
This is true if you think deterministically (i.e. only one solution). In fact, weather prediction is fundamentally probabilistic and Monte Carlo techniques ("ensemble prediction") can be trivially parallized (one job per node = zero communication). My group routinely runs O(100) forecasts for a state-of-the-art weather model on a modest sized cluster.
Nicely put. I would add that since it's now very easy to wrap Fortran with a high-level scripting language like Python (via f2py), we have the best of both worlds (highly optimized, but also object orientation, GUIs, easy access to OS, etc.)
if you really want to wow them, mention your skills in FORTRAN, or GEMPAK.
Even the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV in the first two years of life.
We haven't had TV since my daughter was born, and after about 3 months I din't miss it at all. Of the children we know, it's obvious which ones watch TV. The kids that don't have amazingly long attention spans by comparison.
Kurt Vonnegut's book Jailbird (1979) takes on this very topic. It's not one of his better known books, but I really enjoyed it.
http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/
Conservation still makes the most sense to me. We should get serious about reducing our energy needs with government incentives for energy efficiency.
I remember first using one ca. 1986. Up until that point most weather data was still distributed via fax. Having the ability to loop satellite imagery and make custom graphics with real-time data was somewhat revolutionary.
IBM also has the contract for the central supercomputing facilitity.