Thats kind of what I'm getting at. You can't take a situation, sprinkle "engineering" on top, and it'll work, like star trek. Just like you can't add the "security" checkbox to code you're writing. Most of the time these solutions don't pencil out. Its not driven by a hatred of the earth, its just thermodynamics.
Get some petri dishes, and try to purify a line of bacteria or protists or whatever from your backyard. Then using some mostly off the shelf gear figure out the optimum growth conditions. Or... do enviro research. Remember when MTBE was "new" well figure out how many ppm a off the shelf back yard fungi line can tolerate. Or modern pink slime.
Basically, you can do stuff at home that is not "profitable".
First it was raspberry pi now its goog i/o. With all the shortages (not to mention other issues), USA in 2012 is sounding more and more like Russia in 1980. We even have a centrally controlled failing economy. All we need is some teenage german kid to fly his cessna halfway across the country under the radar, and land in our equivalent of red square, I guess that'd be some place in D.C. And some crappy Rambo movies where we're friends with the Taliban again.
Could be that physical sciences have about two or three generations more experience with the concept of pounding the data set with computers for statistical analysis. Maybe give the soft sciences another generation or two?
A big factor might be that datasets are no longer handwritten in a lab notebook on the experimenters desk, but are living on flash drives, DVD-Rs, dropbox, ftp sites...
Your best hope for home science is in bio and astronomy, not so much physics.
Its a risk thing... you can't study something "at work" unless you can guarantee it'll pay off and feed you and your family with better odds than everything else you could do. However, at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day, or go variable star and nova searching during the night. If it doesn't work, that's OK, you still get paid and get to eat, and all you miss is an Oprah rerun on TV. If it works, then publish.
Its a fashion choice rather than an engineering choice. Oh look, pink skirts are "in" this spring. No wait, throw those out, the new "in" thing is blue lacy skirts. If it was based on carefully reasoned decision making, then it would be wise of them to re-evaluate, but its the green equivalent of watching the Style cable channel therefore not respectable.
Regarding the subjectline, I was surprised that a google search indicated via linkedin that she lives in Minnesota. I would have guessed California. Usually you hear people trash talking hoover dam because they live out west where water is scarce, and hoover is "legendary" for being pretty close to running out of water and having to shut down "soon", therefore since the whole world revolves around CA, that means all hydroelectric plants will be shutting down soon.
Out east we have more water than we know what to do with, and she's close enough that you'd expect her to know that and laugh at the CA and NV people.
Admittedly, since govt and corps have merged, lots of stupid things are done to maintain power. I would not be surprised if most of the new hydro sites will be built in bone dry deserts as a jobs program, rather than where an engineer would put them to get maximum power...
We're surrounded by well insulated energy sources.
Corrected that for you. The delta-T at zero watts transmitted isn't as interesting as the delta-T at a couple KW. A icecube is about 40 degrees cooler than my house, which sounds great, but the rate of cooling from one icecube cannot cool my house at a couple KW rate for very long.
Be careful because you can easily get into a situation where 500 feet of plastic pipe can only transfer, over the life of the pipes, the equivalent of 50 barrels of oil energy yet take the equivalent of 100 barrels of oil to manufacture, bury, pump, decommission, etc.
Also you can easily get into a situation where you get a whopping kilowatt of cooling... by running a 2 HP liquid circulation pump. That same 2 HP motor running a reasonable COP around 8 could generate over 6 KW of cooling across a much higher delta T.
and/or the environmental impact of making the economy 18 GW poorer. So... now we have less profit, so we can't afford to donate to the nature preserve fund, and people can't afford environmental luxuries if they can't eat, so lets just pave over that swamp, I mean wetland, instead of making it a nature preserve.
Supposedly economic activity creates environmental damage. But I drive thru nice suburbs and slums in my commute, and the slums are literally an open air dump. Somehow I don't think growing slums is an environmental cure all.
technology also finds new ways to get at and find oil.
If that were the case, then the energy returned on energy invested would be increasing, instead of decreasing. It doesn't have to hit "1" to stop, either.
For reasons which are far beyond this post, I can't port my old phone number to my new phone provider, but I CAN port my old number to the mighty GOOG. Basically its a forwarding service pointing my old number to my android phone.
In the long run, if "phone service" went away and all I had was data service, and I ran google voice over that data service, I'd be OK with that. If I had ubiquitous wifi and could connect to google voice over that, I wouldn't even need "phone" service.
They didn't come with Pandora, or computers or wireless network adapters. They keep doing what TVs do - not much reason to replace them.
Mine spends 95% of its time acting as a VGA monitor for my mythtv box, and about 1 hour in 20 playing wii games off the component inputs.
My mother-in-law has one of those epic "internet enabled TV" complete with all manner of apps. Of course she doesn't have internet access, and no idea why she bought a TV with all this internet app garbage, but she's old and you can pretty much sell old people anything, or maybe its a selection pressure thing like only people who are gullible have the stress level to survive to be old, or something like that. She could also plug a flash drive into the USB port on the side and watch pictures... if she owned a flash drive, or a computer, or a digital camera. And it has about 5 HDMI inputs, although all she uses is the OTA RF input to an antenna.
Why? Its not like high def makes the shows any better. I'm not watching any more tv than before I upgraded, certainly not enjoying it any more. I don't watch much TV to begin with. I'd say I spend about 4 hours looking at a monitor for every hour I spend looking at the TV. Its a pretty low priority. Aside from that I have two factors I didn't mention, but are kind of important.
1) I have two kids just barely old enough that I now expect them not to throw a ball thru the new TV or shove it off the stand. There's no way in hell I'm blowing a mortgage payment on a TV with feisty toddlers until I absolutely have to... Crash!!! Somehow they never broke the old CRT despite bouncing balls and fists and toys off the screen. Of course now that I bought a new LCD TV, they'll probably smash the damn thing next week. To be honest I'm surprised its made it 6 months. Secretly, if/when they smash the TV, I'm not buying another... and this would probably be good for everyone involved, on average.
2) I failed to mention that I spent a couple days rebuilding the built in "SD-shaped" entertainment center into what amounts to merely a coffee table. I'm somewhat handy with tools and this was a Very major job. There was a SD shaped hole to the left and a column stack with a door to the right that held all my devices (game consoles, mythtv box, surround sound stereo amp, dvd player, dvd and game cases, etc, and a shelf along the top holding remotes and a shelf along the top of that shelf (two shelves). And of course the only way to get access to the screws attaching the "coffee table like bottom" to the top was to disassemble the base almost completely. And then wedge the works back into the built in brick-work. And a bit of time refinishing some of the wood... of course the top of the "table" was unfinished where the upper part attached, some wood putty to fill most of the screw holes, etc. At least this was assembled with screws and nails instead of glue... In some ways it would have been easier to rip the whole thing out and start over, or rip the whole thing out, leave a gaping hole in the wall, and get a TV big enough to cover the gaping hole.
Last week they overturned a patent on painting a car such that it reflects light with a spectral peak at 650 nm, in other words, its painted red, with the justification that red being a certain wavelength is a fairly obvious natural fact rather than a patentable invention. Today they kicked a patent on "a car cooling system that cools by accepting cool air at the radiator intake, heating it, and exhausting the heated air thus cooling the engine" back for further review based on last weeks overturning because the laws of thermodynamics are also mere laws of nature.
they did a pretty good job of balancing difficulty so that you could almost always succeed, but you always *felt like* you just barely succeeded.
Freespace 1 was like that, I greatly enjoyed that about ten years ago! Freespace 2 was a little more annoyingly difficult. This new game uses the old freespace engine... I wonder if aside from all the graphic and sound stuff, the engine provides some adaptive gameplay mechanics.
I also installed on Friday night, but have not done the literary "whatever" as seen in the article (I still shower on a regular basis, etc). Its a pretty good game.
They do not have permission from EA. They're kind of ignoring each other. Kind of like my relationship with Canada... They're a lot bigger than I am, but we don't talk much. That is why I hurried up and downloaded last week, "just in case"
Speaking of downloads, life sucks if you run windows. You cannot get this game by running "apt-get install wc-darkest-dawn". You have to visit all these slimy download sites where you have to wait and watch ads until you can download and unblock all scripting and flash so you can get infected. Supposedly there is a torrent... cool I'll go there and left click save and... Oh noes... graphics art explosion fest... I can't get the blasted torrent file to torrent the darn game. And at least as of Friday there was no way to get to the torrent site and the goofy link wouldn't work with firefox. As I recall I got stuck at "push button to download torrent" or something like that. Lovely. I'm sure that after posting this tale of woe someone will provide a TPB link to it that "just works". That's the suffering of an early adopter... You get used to the idea that something "open" or "free" in the real computing world probably has easy to use mirrors instead of cruddy download sites but in the windows world its all about ad ladden ugly download sites. Ugh.
One thing I noticed was they have a non-traditionally large amount of text compared to recent games. The tutorial is probably the equivalent of a traditional sci fi short story. Nice. Enjoying it. The tutorial is well made and non-traditionally its complete and actually works, at least so far. Most commercial games seem to have a release goal to make the tutorial suck.
The voice acting is excellent. No obvious big names, they don't have the Rock or Lenord Nimoy. The gameplay is hacked up freespace, near as I can see. Since freespace was excellent, that means its very good. The graphics are fine. Nobody plays a game for more than 5 minutes because of the graphics anyway. I think it was optimized for a lower resolution than 1600x1200, but it still looks OK at my normal rez.
Back when color film was first created, it was a new aspect of the image that film makers had to learn how to use. In fact, in the early days the studios would employ Color Supervisors, who would work with the director to make sure that the colors of the frame were not only pleasing aesthetically, but could be used to enhance the story emotionally. Of course as time goes on we don't need Color Supervisors anymore; film makers have a grasp of how to use color.
For a/. compatible demonstration of this effect, compare some pastel psychedelic star trek original series sets to the somewhat more modern TNG sets, especially on planet. TNG looks almost realistic, TOS has some sets that WRT color look like something right out of the old willie wonka movie.
My god guys, that is abstract. Let me explain how people in the real world buy a TV using myself as an example.
So last october ye olde magnavox 25-year old CRT in the living room started giving weird colors, seems the red gun is going out, and also its having some convergence problems, and occasionally some HV probs. The TV is dead! The TV is dead! Oh no the TV is dead! (or terminal, anyway) Off we go to Best Buy with a budget, and we spent what we budgeted. I was completely uninterested in the bells and whistles, all I wanted was a really big monitor with VGA and/or HDMI input from my mythtv box (most people would use a cablebox, eh, same difference) so I got a somewhat featureless TV that is larger than a feature-ful TV at the same price.
I did not bother trying to debate Keynesian economics with a wife going thru reality TV withdrawl. And frankly I also missed the women in bikinis suntanning on Survivor.
Conclusion sounds good, written logic is horrible.
found that the moon's proportion was effectively the same as Earth's
This contradicts the so-called Giant Impact Hypothesis, which posits that Earth collided with a hypothetical, Mars-sized planet called Theia early in its existence, and the resulting smash-up produced a disc of magma orbiting our planet that later coalesced to form the moon.
Does not explain why that doesn't work. The summary makes it sound very likely that something "smooshed off" the earth and became the moon, because both have the same ratios. Also does a poor job of explaining the more likely alternative explanation, by not discussing it at all. Fail.
I think part of the fail is assuming:
different from elsewhere in the solar system
That means we've sampled everything in the entire solar system both now and infinitely in the past? ha ha I think not.
I don't see any indication that spinal cord or brain injuries or birth defects will be gone in fifty years.
Lack of medical care for all but the 1% means they'll be dead, not disabled.
There was a day when middle class people had houseservants, maids, etc. That sounds kinda laughable today. In the future thats how they'll look back on pensions, social security, medical care for all but the 1%...
Slashdot Mirror
That's why these solutions are engineered.
Thats kind of what I'm getting at. You can't take a situation, sprinkle "engineering" on top, and it'll work, like star trek. Just like you can't add the "security" checkbox to code you're writing. Most of the time these solutions don't pencil out. Its not driven by a hatred of the earth, its just thermodynamics.
Get some petri dishes, and try to purify a line of bacteria or protists or whatever from your backyard. Then using some mostly off the shelf gear figure out the optimum growth conditions. Or... do enviro research. Remember when MTBE was "new" well figure out how many ppm a off the shelf back yard fungi line can tolerate. Or modern pink slime.
Basically, you can do stuff at home that is not "profitable".
True de-milling is when you cut various major structural elements. I haven't heard of anything like that.
Certainly it is not going to fly again. Where would you get SRBs? Where would you get a ET?
First it was raspberry pi now its goog i/o. With all the shortages (not to mention other issues), USA in 2012 is sounding more and more like Russia in 1980.
We even have a centrally controlled failing economy.
All we need is some teenage german kid to fly his cessna halfway across the country under the radar, and land in our equivalent of red square, I guess that'd be some place in D.C. And some crappy Rambo movies where we're friends with the Taliban again.
Could be that physical sciences have about two or three generations more experience with the concept of pounding the data set with computers for statistical analysis. Maybe give the soft sciences another generation or two?
A big factor might be that datasets are no longer handwritten in a lab notebook on the experimenters desk, but are living on flash drives, DVD-Rs, dropbox, ftp sites...
Your best hope for home science is in bio and astronomy, not so much physics.
Its a risk thing... you can't study something "at work" unless you can guarantee it'll pay off and feed you and your family with better odds than everything else you could do. However, at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day, or go variable star and nova searching during the night. If it doesn't work, that's OK, you still get paid and get to eat, and all you miss is an Oprah rerun on TV. If it works, then publish.
Its a fashion choice rather than an engineering choice. Oh look, pink skirts are "in" this spring. No wait, throw those out, the new "in" thing is blue lacy skirts.
If it was based on carefully reasoned decision making, then it would be wise of them to re-evaluate, but its the green equivalent of watching the Style cable channel therefore not respectable.
Regarding the subjectline, I was surprised that a google search indicated via linkedin that she lives in Minnesota. I would have guessed California. Usually you hear people trash talking hoover dam because they live out west where water is scarce, and hoover is "legendary" for being pretty close to running out of water and having to shut down "soon", therefore since the whole world revolves around CA, that means all hydroelectric plants will be shutting down soon.
Out east we have more water than we know what to do with, and she's close enough that you'd expect her to know that and laugh at the CA and NV people.
Admittedly, since govt and corps have merged, lots of stupid things are done to maintain power. I would not be surprised if most of the new hydro sites will be built in bone dry deserts as a jobs program, rather than where an engineer would put them to get maximum power...
We're surrounded by well insulated energy sources.
Corrected that for you. The delta-T at zero watts transmitted isn't as interesting as the delta-T at a couple KW. A icecube is about 40 degrees cooler than my house, which sounds great, but the rate of cooling from one icecube cannot cool my house at a couple KW rate for very long.
Be careful because you can easily get into a situation where 500 feet of plastic pipe can only transfer, over the life of the pipes, the equivalent of 50 barrels of oil energy yet take the equivalent of 100 barrels of oil to manufacture, bury, pump, decommission, etc.
Also you can easily get into a situation where you get a whopping kilowatt of cooling... by running a 2 HP liquid circulation pump. That same 2 HP motor running a reasonable COP around 8 could generate over 6 KW of cooling across a much higher delta T.
and/or the environmental impact of making the economy 18 GW poorer. So... now we have less profit, so we can't afford to donate to the nature preserve fund, and people can't afford environmental luxuries if they can't eat, so lets just pave over that swamp, I mean wetland, instead of making it a nature preserve.
Supposedly economic activity creates environmental damage. But I drive thru nice suburbs and slums in my commute, and the slums are literally an open air dump. Somehow I don't think growing slums is an environmental cure all.
technology also finds new ways to get at and find oil.
If that were the case, then the energy returned on energy invested would be increasing, instead of decreasing. It doesn't have to hit "1" to stop, either.
Luckily for BP overfishing wiped out those areas years ago. When I was a kid I heard a lot about the gulf mackerel stocks being pretty much wiped out.
For reasons which are far beyond this post, I can't port my old phone number to my new phone provider, but I CAN port my old number to the mighty GOOG.
Basically its a forwarding service pointing my old number to my android phone.
In the long run, if "phone service" went away and all I had was data service, and I ran google voice over that data service, I'd be OK with that. If I had ubiquitous wifi and could connect to google voice over that, I wouldn't even need "phone" service.
They didn't come with Pandora, or computers or wireless network adapters. They keep doing what TVs do - not much reason to replace them.
Mine spends 95% of its time acting as a VGA monitor for my mythtv box, and about 1 hour in 20 playing wii games off the component inputs.
My mother-in-law has one of those epic "internet enabled TV" complete with all manner of apps. Of course she doesn't have internet access, and no idea why she bought a TV with all this internet app garbage, but she's old and you can pretty much sell old people anything, or maybe its a selection pressure thing like only people who are gullible have the stress level to survive to be old, or something like that. She could also plug a flash drive into the USB port on the side and watch pictures... if she owned a flash drive, or a computer, or a digital camera. And it has about 5 HDMI inputs, although all she uses is the OTA RF input to an antenna.
Why? Its not like high def makes the shows any better. I'm not watching any more tv than before I upgraded, certainly not enjoying it any more. I don't watch much TV to begin with. I'd say I spend about 4 hours looking at a monitor for every hour I spend looking at the TV. Its a pretty low priority. Aside from that I have two factors I didn't mention, but are kind of important.
1) I have two kids just barely old enough that I now expect them not to throw a ball thru the new TV or shove it off the stand. There's no way in hell I'm blowing a mortgage payment on a TV with feisty toddlers until I absolutely have to... Crash!!! Somehow they never broke the old CRT despite bouncing balls and fists and toys off the screen. Of course now that I bought a new LCD TV, they'll probably smash the damn thing next week. To be honest I'm surprised its made it 6 months. Secretly, if/when they smash the TV, I'm not buying another... and this would probably be good for everyone involved, on average.
2) I failed to mention that I spent a couple days rebuilding the built in "SD-shaped" entertainment center into what amounts to merely a coffee table. I'm somewhat handy with tools and this was a Very major job. There was a SD shaped hole to the left and a column stack with a door to the right that held all my devices (game consoles, mythtv box, surround sound stereo amp, dvd player, dvd and game cases, etc, and a shelf along the top holding remotes and a shelf along the top of that shelf (two shelves). And of course the only way to get access to the screws attaching the "coffee table like bottom" to the top was to disassemble the base almost completely. And then wedge the works back into the built in brick-work. And a bit of time refinishing some of the wood ... of course the top of the "table" was unfinished where the upper part attached, some wood putty to fill most of the screw holes, etc. At least this was assembled with screws and nails instead of glue... In some ways it would have been easier to rip the whole thing out and start over, or rip the whole thing out, leave a gaping hole in the wall, and get a TV big enough to cover the gaping hole.
Whoosh....
Please rate my standard /. car analogy:
Last week they overturned a patent on painting a car such that it reflects light with a spectral peak at 650 nm, in other words, its painted red, with the justification that red being a certain wavelength is a fairly obvious natural fact rather than a patentable invention. Today they kicked a patent on "a car cooling system that cools by accepting cool air at the radiator intake, heating it, and exhausting the heated air thus cooling the engine" back for further review based on last weeks overturning because the laws of thermodynamics are also mere laws of nature.
they did a pretty good job of balancing difficulty so that you could almost always succeed, but you always *felt like* you just barely succeeded.
Freespace 1 was like that, I greatly enjoyed that about ten years ago! Freespace 2 was a little more annoyingly difficult. This new game uses the old freespace engine... I wonder if aside from all the graphic and sound stuff, the engine provides some adaptive gameplay mechanics.
I also installed on Friday night, but have not done the literary "whatever" as seen in the article (I still shower on a regular basis, etc). Its a pretty good game.
They do not have permission from EA. They're kind of ignoring each other. Kind of like my relationship with Canada... They're a lot bigger than I am, but we don't talk much. That is why I hurried up and downloaded last week, "just in case"
Speaking of downloads, life sucks if you run windows. You cannot get this game by running "apt-get install wc-darkest-dawn". You have to visit all these slimy download sites where you have to wait and watch ads until you can download and unblock all scripting and flash so you can get infected. Supposedly there is a torrent... cool I'll go there and left click save and ... Oh noes... graphics art explosion fest... I can't get the blasted torrent file to torrent the darn game. And at least as of Friday there was no way to get to the torrent site and the goofy link wouldn't work with firefox. As I recall I got stuck at "push button to download torrent" or something like that. Lovely. I'm sure that after posting this tale of woe someone will provide a TPB link to it that "just works". That's the suffering of an early adopter... You get used to the idea that something "open" or "free" in the real computing world probably has easy to use mirrors instead of cruddy download sites but in the windows world its all about ad ladden ugly download sites. Ugh.
One thing I noticed was they have a non-traditionally large amount of text compared to recent games. The tutorial is probably the equivalent of a traditional sci fi short story. Nice. Enjoying it. The tutorial is well made and non-traditionally its complete and actually works, at least so far. Most commercial games seem to have a release goal to make the tutorial suck.
The voice acting is excellent. No obvious big names, they don't have the Rock or Lenord Nimoy. The gameplay is hacked up freespace, near as I can see. Since freespace was excellent, that means its very good. The graphics are fine. Nobody plays a game for more than 5 minutes because of the graphics anyway. I think it was optimized for a lower resolution than 1600x1200, but it still looks OK at my normal rez.
Back when color film was first created, it was a new aspect of the image that film makers had to learn how to use. In fact, in the early days the studios would employ Color Supervisors, who would work with the director to make sure that the colors of the frame were not only pleasing aesthetically, but could be used to enhance the story emotionally. Of course as time goes on we don't need Color Supervisors anymore; film makers have a grasp of how to use color.
For a /. compatible demonstration of this effect, compare some pastel psychedelic star trek original series sets to the somewhat more modern TNG sets, especially on planet. TNG looks almost realistic, TOS has some sets that WRT color look like something right out of the old willie wonka movie.
My god guys, that is abstract. Let me explain how people in the real world buy a TV using myself as an example.
So last october ye olde magnavox 25-year old CRT in the living room started giving weird colors, seems the red gun is going out, and also its having some convergence problems, and occasionally some HV probs. The TV is dead! The TV is dead! Oh no the TV is dead! (or terminal, anyway) Off we go to Best Buy with a budget, and we spent what we budgeted. I was completely uninterested in the bells and whistles, all I wanted was a really big monitor with VGA and/or HDMI input from my mythtv box (most people would use a cablebox, eh, same difference) so I got a somewhat featureless TV that is larger than a feature-ful TV at the same price.
I did not bother trying to debate Keynesian economics with a wife going thru reality TV withdrawl. And frankly I also missed the women in bikinis suntanning on Survivor.
Port 110 is trivially tested by hand... port 80 also.
Conclusion sounds good, written logic is horrible.
found that the moon's proportion was effectively the same as Earth's
This contradicts the so-called Giant Impact Hypothesis, which posits that Earth collided with a hypothetical, Mars-sized planet called Theia early in its existence, and the resulting smash-up produced a disc of magma orbiting our planet that later coalesced to form the moon.
Does not explain why that doesn't work. The summary makes it sound very likely that something "smooshed off" the earth and became the moon, because both have the same ratios. Also does a poor job of explaining the more likely alternative explanation, by not discussing it at all. Fail.
I think part of the fail is assuming:
different from elsewhere in the solar system
That means we've sampled everything in the entire solar system both now and infinitely in the past? ha ha I think not.
are capable of wearing disguises
Have them wear hoodies, what could possibly go wrong?
I don't see any indication that spinal cord or brain injuries or birth defects will be gone in fifty years.
Lack of medical care for all but the 1% means they'll be dead, not disabled.
There was a day when middle class people had houseservants, maids, etc. That sounds kinda laughable today. In the future thats how they'll look back on pensions, social security, medical care for all but the 1%...