You use scathing irony in your post, but there have been serious proposals* to a similar effect. I recall a scheme to increase cloud cover over the Pacific (since it's big and wide and dark, and clouds are white) with particulates - the one in question involved sulfur-burning, which raised some of the usual acid-rain concerns, though they concluded that most of it would come down into the oceans and have a negligible impact. Another involved shooting dust into the upper atmosphere with big naval guns, where it would generally stay up for years at a time. A simple one suggested some form of subsidy to have airlines burn their fuel extra-rich, which contributes to cloud formation, but I think in the current political climate that wouldn't get very far one way or another.
Other, less-dusty schemes involve raising the albedo at ground level - painting buildings white, as a simple example (with the local benefits of lessening the urban heat-island effect and cutting cooling costs and fuel use). I thought this one in particular was the most interesting and creative application of environmental science I've encountered, and I'm surprised it's not better pursued, as it ought to be extremely practical, generally painless, and all but entirely uncontroversial. (It's not nearly as politically exciting as the "omg excesses of capitalism stabbitystabdiediedie" angle, though. And it's not as "interesting" as solar panels. And there are fewer special interests seeking subsidies for it...)
* Proposals in the scientific for-your-consideration "this could do something, so we've written a paper on it" sense, not so much the actual "let's go and do this" sense.
You know, in the original 2001: A Space Oddessy, the monolith was at Jupiter. Sure, it was retconned in the movie (harder to film Saturnian rings) and in 2010 (where the move was instrumental to the plot*) and 2061 and 3001 (a terrible book, do not read). But it was Saturn to begin with.
*Actually, you could ignite Saturn into a star too; it'd just be harder, and wouldn't last as long.
But before they were colonized, Africa was still fraught with violence. Violence, war, and general disorder are hardly a uniquely European invention. African tribes have been fighting amongst each other for thousands of years. Their problems are the ancient problems of society and mankind.
Not that colonization helped or anything.
Read an article to this effect....
on
Cracking Go
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I read an article to this effect in an AI class. Apparently the Latest Thing in solving things like Go is to take a good random sampling of just a few thousand (or tens of thousands of) possibilities in the future, and try to see what sort of move looks better, rather than trying to be exhaustive about the entire thing. I thought this was Quite Interesting. Meanwhile, the exhaustive search is really the least interesting way you could possibly do it, and won't likely provide you with much insight on Go, or related matters. *yawn*
This is true. It's also not fair to dismiss wholesale the securitization of mortgages and other debt securities. Much of the problem arises from the fact that they are a new sort of financial instrument and are not spectacularly well understood, so an over-eager market was more than willing to pay too much for risk. You don't need to fudge things and defraud people in that sort of a market. I'm sure some people did, mind you, but to dismiss the entire affair as such would be to miss a useful lesson.
The sites could show one content to Googlebot and another to normal visitors. Or it could be tricky. Offer the same text/html content, but make part of the content User-Obvious / Bot-Invisible content (images or something thrown together with JavaScript) and downplay or hide the Bot-Obvious content with tricky style sheets or more JavaScript (or just put in a bunch of newlines so it's way down the page). Ultimately it becomes some sort of weird Turing test for Google to be able to detect this sort of stuff.
If you had municipal wifi in place you could use the network to enable the kids to learn without the need for expensive classrooms. So, are you honestly suggeting that if we blanket the city wifi we don't need to send them to school anymore? Or that we don't need to fix the leaky roof and the moldy carpets and replace the 10-year-old overhead projector that's permanently out of focus and stock the place with textbooks?
Perhaps I missed your real point, but if you really think kids will magically learn better with Internet access, you're nuts. Give a school a cheap computer lab or something, sure; blanket the city in wifi? WTF?
Mind you, I'm hardly thrilled with the notion of 'educational software' either. I've seen my share of it, and it's mostly orthogonal to real education.
That's silly. There are plenty of ways you can have a monopoly without government assistance - secret manufacturing process? anticompetitive practices? And natural monopolies of all sorts... how about geographic monopolies where you have a lot of infrastructure, and a new upstart/could/ put some more in, but they'd go out of business quickly enough since they didn't have the whole market? How about coal mining towns with the company store? How about DeBeers?
This is about radios in a variety of communication devices. Like cell phones. And cell phone towers. Especially cell phone towers. Not so much your Sony Walkman et al.
This may be the case for NYC, but to be fair, NYC is hardly representative of the States at large. And NYC has ten times the population of Krakow. (Places like, oh, Washington DC have fewer excuses...) The domestic flight ID matter is a point, but it's also worth noting that the US is a lot bigger than Poland, so "domestic" flights aren't quiite the same thing. As for intercity rail, I've never tried Amtrak - their web page seems to say you'll need ID - but gaaak, who'd want to bother with Amtrak anyway? (Greyhound might be another comparison, and a cursory inspection seems to indicate they don't require it.)
Mind you, there's still plenty to go on about nationwide, but less than 3% of us are subject to the NYC level of, ah, crackdowns.
I suppose you could make some comparison with rural Poland as well, though. Eh.
Er, should I be the one to point out that those lower prices are because the jobs aren't American? You can either have lower prices because we're taking advantage of people around the world and polluting them and paying them less than a living wage, or you can have higher prices because we're paying Americans to do something, and that involves certain levels of environmental control and a living wage. A "living wage" is a lot, lot lower overseas than it is here. This is because Americans want all sorts of expensive niceties, like fancy cars and iPods and microwave dinners and college educations and cushy retirements and nice houses. What's more, they want all of those things in America, where things are a lot more expensive than they are overseas. And there are huge opportunity costs for employing Americans. If you go into shoe manufacturing, you're not going into medicine and biotech or pharmaceuticals or software engineering or business or any number of fields which are much, much more interesting and profitable (for yourself and for Humanity). If an Asian guy goes into shoe manufacturing, he is probably not giving up a career in biotech.
As for pollution... the most sure-fire way to get the Chinese et cetera to care about pollution is for them to become a rich country. Rich countries care about that sort of thing. It's one of those luxuries we can afford.
You, sir, are an excellent example of why being an expert on one thing (chiropracty... or whatever the noun form is) does not make one an expert on another.
Vibration. You assume the whole mass would oscillate/vibrate at some frequency. I'm extremely curious as to why you would believe that. Are you under the impression that typical molecules vibrate in funny patterns?
Physically, water molecules in the liquid form experience Brownian motion, true, random motion due to heat. It's chaotic, though, certainly not regular, doesn't really have a measurable frequency (an intensity, sure, in Temperature). Furthermore, supposing there was a regular vibration of some physical sort in water, and the energy of such vibration were somehow to remain in the water instead of dissipating like most vibrations do (try ringing a bell and then putting it down on a table, eh?) it would be readily disturbed and dwarfed when someone sloshed it around or drank it. It certainly could not be expected to persist in the body beyond the esophagus and, if it did somehow maintain this vibrational quality after that, it is sufficiently weakly-interacting that it oughtn't have any effect on the body. (There are plenty of little quantum states which one could maybe possibly call "vibration" if you were feeling poetic, but they're largely irrelevant at super-atomic scales, or else - like magnetism and electron spins - pretty trivial in effect compared to the effects of fields orders of magnitude more intense.)
If there's any sort of "vibration" left, it's a metaphysical pseudospiritual "vibration".
Which leads to my question to prompt discussion:
just how the hell do you become a software engineer without being a programmer first, unless you're
independently wealthy enough to work in Open Source for 5-10 years? Best bet: Do a few summer internships in college. And have a part-time job, if you can, as well.
Animal control officials are shadowing Fido, rumoured to be in a White Ford Bronco driving down I-95. Fido, the famous physics dog, is said to be a suspect in the surprising parrot case. What breed of dog is Fido? He wouldn't happen to be a lab, would he?
What really disturbs me though is that we've gone from a race of creators, creating goods with agriculture or manufacturing, to a world wide economy of McJobs that pay minimum wage and create NOTHING. I don't think subsistence agriculture is all that grand of an exercise in Creation. Likewise, the industrial factory job, 9-to-5 shift, doing the same thing over and over again, that would make up the bulk of an assembly line.... is more mind-numbing than "creative". The engineers behind these things may have been great Creators, but not the workers. As such, I'm hard-pressed to find something intrinsically wrong (for the workers) with the typical job moving from the one set to the other. Perhaps you can explain whether there's some sort of important quality or attribute in the individual that's exercised by working agriculture and factories and not by interaction with mankind?
Perhaps people could voluntarily take up gardening in their free time instead?
Papal infallibility is seldom invoked per se - only on a few very specific dogmas and such (the "ex cathedra" proclamations). I believe the general idea is that the Pope is supposed to be a holy and learned man, and together with the college of cardinals and such and the direction of the Holy Spirit, capable of providing direction for his Church.
The Papal authority has (debated) Biblical backing, in the little part where Jesus says something to the effect of "Behold, I give you the keys to the Kingdom of God... whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven" and such. The regular Protestant approach to that is that the passage applies only to Peter specifically, but the Roman Catholic church considers the Pope as the successor to Peter.
For some reason, this post reminded me a lot of the movie Gattaca. Remember? Everyone was either a twelve-fingered pianist, an astronaut, or a migrant janitor. A few old cops were grandfathered into the system, but that's the exception, not the rule!
I always thought that was a little silly, myself.
Re:solar powered hovering wireless routers
on
Solar Powered Wi-Fi
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· Score: 1
What we really need are solar powered wireless wifi routers that can autonomously position and hover themselves at a fixed location. Now that'd be cool, and useful.
I recall an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal some months ago about how some telecom/television/something companies were looking into high-altitude blimps as an alternative to satellites. They'd be equipped with the usual satellite stuff, have a little fuel on board to adjust for drifting (there isn't too much way up there), and when it's time to upgrade or replace them, you can fly another one up to take its place.
But that's not solar, and certainly not regular 802.11-etc wifi. I mean, guess they could add a few panels, but they probably need to be concerned about weight et cetera.
In 2000, author Richard Rhodes and nuclear engineer Denis Beller calculated that using current solar power technologies to construct a global solar-energy system would consume at least 20 percent of the world's known iron resources, take a century to build and cover a half-million square miles.
That wasn't a "hack" of existing SCADA systems; no one exploited weaknesses in a software system to gain unauthorized access and cause bad things to happen. They just gave the Soviet spies defective-by-design software to steal, the Soviets ran it, and things went... defective.
A neat special case of social engineering, sure, but not "hacking".
It shouldn't be the least bit surprising to anyone that we import our electronics from overseas. It's also not surprising or even necessarily bad that we have a trade deficit. We're the rich country, and we're spending money on buying stuff. And it's not like global trade is a zero-sum game; we remain pretty darned capable of generating wealth ourselves, and indeed can do so far more effectively than manufacturing a bunch of cheap electronic parts.
Yay, so the markets are hiccuping because people didn't understand the risk associated with the debt securities they were buying. let's get scared about the trade deficit by posting scary-looking numbers when most people don't understand any of the concepts behind them, oooooooooooooooooh. scary!:P
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Other, less-dusty schemes involve raising the albedo at ground level - painting buildings white, as a simple example (with the local benefits of lessening the urban heat-island effect and cutting cooling costs and fuel use). I thought this one in particular was the most interesting and creative application of environmental science I've encountered, and I'm surprised it's not better pursued, as it ought to be extremely practical, generally painless, and all but entirely uncontroversial. (It's not nearly as politically exciting as the "omg excesses of capitalism stabbitystabdiediedie" angle, though. And it's not as "interesting" as solar panels. And there are fewer special interests seeking subsidies for it...)
* Proposals in the scientific for-your-consideration "this could do something, so we've written a paper on it" sense, not so much the actual "let's go and do this" sense.
*Actually, you could ignite Saturn into a star too; it'd just be harder, and wouldn't last as long.
Not that colonization helped or anything.
I read an article to this effect in an AI class. Apparently the Latest Thing in solving things like Go is to take a good random sampling of just a few thousand (or tens of thousands of) possibilities in the future, and try to see what sort of move looks better, rather than trying to be exhaustive about the entire thing. I thought this was Quite Interesting. Meanwhile, the exhaustive search is really the least interesting way you could possibly do it, and won't likely provide you with much insight on Go, or related matters. *yawn*
This is true. It's also not fair to dismiss wholesale the securitization of mortgages and other debt securities. Much of the problem arises from the fact that they are a new sort of financial instrument and are not spectacularly well understood, so an over-eager market was more than willing to pay too much for risk. You don't need to fudge things and defraud people in that sort of a market. I'm sure some people did, mind you, but to dismiss the entire affair as such would be to miss a useful lesson.
Perhaps I missed your real point, but if you really think kids will magically learn better with Internet access, you're nuts. Give a school a cheap computer lab or something, sure; blanket the city in wifi? WTF?
Mind you, I'm hardly thrilled with the notion of 'educational software' either. I've seen my share of it, and it's mostly orthogonal to real education.
That's silly. There are plenty of ways you can have a monopoly without government assistance - secret manufacturing process? anticompetitive practices? And natural monopolies of all sorts... how about geographic monopolies where you have a lot of infrastructure, and a new upstart /could/ put some more in, but they'd go out of business quickly enough since they didn't have the whole market? How about coal mining towns with the company store? How about DeBeers?
This is about radios in a variety of communication devices. Like cell phones. And cell phone towers. Especially cell phone towers. Not so much your Sony Walkman et al.
Mind you, there's still plenty to go on about nationwide, but less than 3% of us are subject to the NYC level of, ah, crackdowns.
I suppose you could make some comparison with rural Poland as well, though. Eh.
Yes. Point.
A "living wage" is a lot, lot lower overseas than it is here. This is because Americans want all sorts of expensive niceties, like fancy cars and iPods and microwave dinners and college educations and cushy retirements and nice houses. What's more, they want all of those things in America, where things are a lot more expensive than they are overseas. And there are huge opportunity costs for employing Americans. If you go into shoe manufacturing, you're not going into medicine and biotech or pharmaceuticals or software engineering or business or any number of fields which are much, much more interesting and profitable (for yourself and for Humanity). If an Asian guy goes into shoe manufacturing, he is probably not giving up a career in biotech.
As for pollution... the most sure-fire way to get the Chinese et cetera to care about pollution is for them to become a rich country. Rich countries care about that sort of thing. It's one of those luxuries we can afford.
Vibration. You assume the whole mass would oscillate/vibrate at some frequency. I'm extremely curious as to why you would believe that. Are you under the impression that typical molecules vibrate in funny patterns?
Physically, water molecules in the liquid form experience Brownian motion, true, random motion due to heat. It's chaotic, though, certainly not regular, doesn't really have a measurable frequency (an intensity, sure, in Temperature). Furthermore, supposing there was a regular vibration of some physical sort in water, and the energy of such vibration were somehow to remain in the water instead of dissipating like most vibrations do (try ringing a bell and then putting it down on a table, eh?) it would be readily disturbed and dwarfed when someone sloshed it around or drank it. It certainly could not be expected to persist in the body beyond the esophagus and, if it did somehow maintain this vibrational quality after that, it is sufficiently weakly-interacting that it oughtn't have any effect on the body. (There are plenty of little quantum states which one could maybe possibly call "vibration" if you were feeling poetic, but they're largely irrelevant at super-atomic scales, or else - like magnetism and electron spins - pretty trivial in effect compared to the effects of fields orders of magnitude more intense.)
If there's any sort of "vibration" left, it's a metaphysical pseudospiritual "vibration".
Best bet: Do a few summer internships in college. And have a part-time job, if you can, as well.
What breed of dog is Fido? He wouldn't happen to be a lab, would he?
Perhaps people could voluntarily take up gardening in their free time instead?
That's what this page is for.
The Papal authority has (debated) Biblical backing, in the little part where Jesus says something to the effect of "Behold, I give you the keys to the Kingdom of God... whatever you bind on Earth shall be bound in Heaven" and such. The regular Protestant approach to that is that the passage applies only to Peter specifically, but the Roman Catholic church considers the Pope as the successor to Peter.
I always thought that was a little silly, myself.
What we really need are solar powered wireless wifi routers that can autonomously position and hover themselves at a fixed location. Now that'd be cool, and useful.
I recall an article that appeared in The Wall Street Journal some months ago about how some telecom/television/something companies were looking into high-altitude blimps as an alternative to satellites. They'd be equipped with the usual satellite stuff, have a little fuel on board to adjust for drifting (there isn't too much way up there), and when it's time to upgrade or replace them, you can fly another one up to take its place.But that's not solar, and certainly not regular 802.11-etc wifi. I mean, guess they could add a few panels, but they probably need to be concerned about weight et cetera.
-- Brother, Can You Spare 22 Terawatts?
Solar technologies are getting better, but they aren't getting that much better.
Really, they're substitutes anyway, so a high price for one leads to a higher price for the other...
A neat special case of social engineering, sure, but not "hacking".
Yay, so the markets are hiccuping because people didn't understand the risk associated with the debt securities they were buying. let's get scared about the trade deficit by posting scary-looking numbers when most people don't understand any of the concepts behind them, oooooooooooooooooh. scary! :P
Yeah, it's not pretty.