You want to provide people a chance at home ownership, get rid of the bullshit local "building codes" that exist for no other reason than to keep contractors and hardware stores in business.
You seem to be a really paranoid person, do you actually really believe this in your conspiracy-theory mindset?
Okay, sure building codes can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but they are essential other times.It's the attitude like yours that encourages demolishing antique colonial-era houses to put up cookie-cutter rowhomes with vinyl siding. It's the attitude like yours that drives non-Americans to claim we have no culture.
Have you ever been to Santa Fe or Laos, in New Mexico? These cities are really cool because most houses are built of adobe. I'm not sure if city law requires this (it probably does), but it's really neat to walk around there and feel it. If someone dumped a few trailer homes in the middle if the adobe houses, it would ruin the character of the city. Do you think restrictions to preserve a city's character are there to keep the adobe hardware stores in business?
Another example is Savannah, Georgia. That city center is one of the most beautiful I've seen. It's one of the first planned cities in the USA, and there are lots of parks amidst all the ante-bellum character mansions. I don't know what kind of building codes exist there, but I do know that some hotel chains (I forget which) built hotels in the city center. These hotels were built very cheaply and stand our like a sore thumb against the rest of the city center. Again, do you think they should be able to build what they want, create eye-sores, destroy heritage and character, just to save a few bucks?
Okay, another example now comes from the neighborhood in Baltimore where my girlfriend and I just bought our house. This area is designated 'historic' by the city and state, and this is to preserve the historic character and charm of the neighborhood. (Our house is in the cheapest little corner of the entire neighborhood, most of the other houses there are huge mansions).
When you drive around this area, the houses are really pretty and quaint, and we want to preserve this character for the future.
This means any major construction projects or paintings have to meet the approval of the architectural board. if we didn't do this, the character would be lost. Already some cheap-ass home 'flippers' (ie, they buy a house, do the cheapest shoddy renovations they can, and sell it for double the price later) tried to get away with very cheap non-characteristic 'repairs'. Luckily, most of their attempts failed. Note that this is only the outside appearance of the house. You are free to do what you want inside.
If you want to put up a trailer home to save costs, then you shouldn't be living in this neighborhood but in the thousands of other places that such a home would be allowed.
You might not be able to comprehend this, but there's actually character and culture here in the states, some of which is architectural. And it's not a conspiracy to want to preserve the living history.
If the application money and time is not too much of a problem, then I would suggest applying for transfer, just to see what happens. If you get in, then you can consider your options further. If you don't get in, well at least you won't wonder about it for the rest of your life.
Once accepted, then consider the choices.
The school will play some minor effect, for example having MIT on your resume will get your future employers/grad school's attention slightly more.
However no worthwhile company or graduate school would put too much emphasis on the school alone. Employers and admissions groups are well aware that the best schools can easily graduate idiots, and smaller schools can easily graduate geniuses.
Really it depends on how well you do in your environment. If you work reasonably hard at a smaller school, you will stand out like a big fish in a little pond. And, if you do research work for some professors or groups (which I highly recommend), then at your chances are much higher that you can impress them enough for very personal letters of recommendation. From what I hear the letters of recommendation are typically the most important factor for future applicants to either companies or grad schools.
If you transfer to a big school, say MIT, then it's a different ballgame. You will certainly have a wider array of course offerings and research projects, and will have peers who will challenge you more. However you will also find it much more difficult to rise above the radar. The general body of student talent will be greater, and it's easier to fall under the noise floor, so to speak.
Beyond this it's hard to decide what to do without carefully looking at the details. I've seen situations that favor both sides. For example, I knew a guy that had a very good GPA in EE at a small school, and had the opportunity to transfer to a different place. His EE classes weren't very intensive, so his theory knowledge won't be as good. I was hoping he would transfer, because he had a good opportunity to do so. However, if his research went well enough, it might not matter too much.
On the flip side I've seen a few undergrads from schools with small physics departments do amazingly well. They would do research with a professor, do it really well, and then get into a top-tier school. Usually a professor at a small school will know many colleagues at the top-tier schools, and can easily pass a personal reference directly to them.
For companies instead of school, I know less of the hiring practice. School will probably play some factor, but they're more interested in knowing that you can get the job done than which school you went to. If you have good letters of recommendation to this end, you'll be fine.
Supposedly the LBT is be able to get around the blurring from the atmosphere by using adaptive optics- deforming the secondary mirrors to correct for distortions.
Hmmm, yet another post that assumes telescope resolution is the one parameter that determines which telescope is best. A quick analogy would be to claim which is better - a monitor resolution with 1024x768 at 24 bit color, or 3200x2400 resolution with 1 bit color. The answer, of course, is that it depends on your application.
Questions about this project:
Adaptive Optics (AO) usually need a reference star nearby, or an artificial star produced w/ laser. What limitations will this produce in the images?
How does this limit the area of the sky they can look at?
What is the wavelength 'bandwidth' of the telescope, accounting for atmospheric absorption as well as sensor design?
A good deal of astronomical science is done with spectra. What artifacts are introduced into the spectra through absorption and emission lines of the atmosphere?
What artifacts are introduced to the spectra through artificial star for the AO?
How long are the integrations that this telescope observe for? Hubble Deep Field was integrated for 150 orbits (10 days). Can this project integrate for a similar time, observing similar magnitude faint galaxies (sometimes individual photons), while maintaining a similar SNR?
What is the limit for observing faint objects with this groundbased scope? Ie, the noise floor of a ground-based scope is much higher due to scattered 'light pollution', and it would be harder to see fainter objects.
So basically, image resolution is only one of several important factors and limitations in doing astronomical science.
This money might be better spent on terrestrial research right now.
Yeah, and all the research money Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Rutherford, Bohr, Watson+Crick, etc wasted on mere 'science' would have better been spent perfecting metal bearings for carriage cartwheels, right?
Look a story down at the hydrogen development... this could change the world on a much bigger scale than anything...effecting us right here ont eh ground right away. 2 billion can do so much good right here.
Umm, you might want to take a look at the projects funded by DOE. Many of them are in the realm of better energy resources, including hydrogen power, as well as fusion.
I dont like the dependence on gas and oil. 2 billion could go towards alot of infrastructure for hydrogen cars.
Apples and oranges, 2 billion for funding 'hydrogen car infrastructure' doesn't necessarily have to come from Hubble. Besides, if Hubble were cut, chances are that the money 'saved' would just be diverted to Iraq or otherwise be lost in a myriad of other government pork.
Anyway, you're pretty short-sighted. Like I said before, if the world were populated with people like you, than today we'd have highly-optimized horse-drawn carriages and cobbled roads, without the money-wasting inconveniences of digital electronics, for example.
Witness the downturn that the economy took just over the last few months as oil got a bit more expensive and energy production dropped.
So you're assuming that the economy took a downturn strictly due to pricing of heating oil, and no other significant factors?
Further, if you do believe the economy is so strongly coupled to heating oil prices, doesn't it make more economic sense to develop better technology so our economy isn't so unstable as to be disastrously affected merely by supply/pricing of heating oil?
Estimates indicate that Kyoto would reduce global temperatures by 0.25 degrees F by the year 2100
That's an entirely misleading statement. (BTW I looked up that issue of Science and of the two articles on global warming I see the figures you quoted, can you give a page#). Since you like Science, see Science296 p. 1971, for another view of Kyoto, specifically talking about consequences of delaying it's commencement. One major point of Kyoto is to reach stabilization of CO2 levels at around 450 ppm by 2100. It's not merely to reduce temperatures for temperature's sake. It's to stop disastrous effects (the article mentioned talkes about shutdown of thermohaline circulation in the oceans). Stabilization of CO2 levels at a reasonable point, instead of the increasing CO2 production trend, will more greatly affect climate not just in 2100 but beyond it as well.
Besides, your quote ignores technological developments Kyoto would ultimately spur. Eg more efficient engines and alternative non-carbon energy sources. Such developments have a decent chance of reducing carbon usage much beyond the Kyoto limits.
It's [Kyoto Treaty] rigid and onerous and gives the UN significant regulatory power over the industries (and economies) of nations that sign it.
Isn't that one of the primary purposes of the UN? Or is it only justifiable for the UN to have regulatory power over the industries (and economies) of some "bad" nations (eg Iraq and North Korea)?
Climate change *is* real. And it was going on waaaay before we got here, and it'll be going on waaaay after we're gone.
Sure, the kicker is in figuring out if humankind was the primary cause of the climate change or not. Merely finding correlations doesn't imply causation, but adequate scientific studies can help decrease the effective error bars of such hypotheses.
Consider, for example, theoretical studies of carbon dioxide emissions. The effect of the greenhouse effect on Earth is well known, without it IIRC water would barely be able to melt on earth. It is essential factor for our biosphere.
Now for the moment forget all about the environmentalists and petroleumists trying to claim or refute cause and effect by looking at graphs of climates vs emissions, etc.
Instead look at careful predictions of how the excessive volumes of CO2 produced through human development will impact the greenhouse effect. I actually don't know how well such studies have been done. But suppose climatologists adequately integrated the excess CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Also suppose they properly accounting for equilibrium effects (eg possible increased foliage) that might reduce volumeof CO2, as well as model the effects these equilibriation factors would produce.
If such a study could be done (perhaps it has, I don't know) and could show clearly within error bars that human's increased CO2 emissions should have increased the atmosphere temperature by X degrees. Would you believe such a study? How about if such a study now did plot against atmospheric temperatures for the past few decades and showed a correlation and correctly accounted for it's order of magnitude or better. You're saying such a correlation does not imply causation. But do you at least acknowledge that if such a study was done, it would be more 'fuel' for the global warming argument?
Now take it a step further. If the climatologists were able to demonstrate that projected CO2 emissions over the next 50 years would contribute to further global temperature changes or other effects that could be disastrous, would that be any cause to worry? Should we be smug in our historical knowledge that climate changed in the past, and hence this climate change shouldn't be important? Or should we take steps to reduce emissions if they can be adequately shown to be fairly disruptive of Earth's ecological balance?
Given those raw numbers, no scientist would say they could give you any rational data about the "system".
Absolutely, science is about induction and deduction. One tries to find a theory that matches observation, and then use that theory to predict future observations. All within the properly quoted error bars and uncertainty levels, of course. Your post relies only upon refuting correlation patterns between weather and CO2 emissions. But it entirely ignores the importance of numerically correlating weather patterns to predicted CO2 emissions. I have no idea to what extent such studies have been done or how closely they match the data. But if they do sufficiently match the data, that would give much harder evidence of global warming.
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So in light of other 'geopolitical battles', how do you feel about the US gubbmint funding NSF, and the many of the projects it contributes to (FermiLab for example)?
Re:Top Five reasons why the space program should b
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The grandparent said of NASA, with your reply:
2. Scientific Exploration: Learning more about the universe around us will teach us more about our own world, ourselves, and our origins.
The inherant scientific value is irrefutable, but there is little real world application to this.
That's right, and the inherent scientific value was irrefutable of the subjects studied by Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann, etc etc, and at the time there was little real world application to any of their studies either.
You seem to propose studying the technology of today instead of investing anything for the pure sciences, which would yield the technology of tomorrow. If people with your mindset had their way for the past few centuries, then as an example we'd have highly-optimized wooden cartwheels and metal bearings for our horse chariots, but would know nothing of combustion engines, much less automobiles and aircraft.
It's ironic because later in your post you strongly advocate technological innovation. But you fail to realize that by inhibiting the studies of the pure sciences in favor of applied technological advancements, you will hamper future technological opportunities.
Actually, someone else was kind enough to link to the previous discussion. What was my first comment on the thread which was modded up to 3, then all the way down to zero. And some of that down-modding were responses to the comment saying 'mod parent down' that entirely misunderstood the point i was trying to make.
Interesting troll... I've got a degree in atmospheric physics
Great, then please provide numbers to scientifically and quantitatively prove the effect of windfarms is negligible. Just because you flat out say so doesn't make it true. Justify it, show us your degree is worthwhile. Or are you the real troll here, pretending to know a discipline that you really don't?
By definition the jet has high shear, and a tiny bit of turbulence miles below is really just a grain of sand on the beach to it..
Give me numbers, or your atmospheric degree is worthless. You are perhaps the only person in this thread (that is if you're not a troll) justified in doing so. I'm not trolling, I'm begging you for numbers.
Sure there's an effect, it is just so small in a practical sense that it sums to near zero.
Have you ever learned order of magnitude estimations? Justify why it sums to 'near zero'.
forests absorb *way* more energy than a few thousand windmills ever could.
Numbers please.
Of course if you do a study where you fill all of Canada with windmills spaced every 100m you start to increase drag.. so what- it isn't a realistic scenario.
Of course that's not realistic. Can you please explain the effects quantitatively with a realistic number of windmills?
You've got a theoretical and small problem from wind power. You've got a actual and large problem from fossil fuels. Therefore keep the status quo! Brilliant.
That's great, I've never claimed to keep the fossil fuel status quo, but thanks for putting words in my mouth. Basically you claim to have a degree in atmospheric physics, yet you didn't provide one scientifically sound argument, just a bunch of handwaving. And you still say I'm spewing crap, even though you acknowledge that all of my points will actually have at least some effect. I've never claimed the effect is non-negligible, I've pointed out POSSIBLE effects. If your degree in atmospheric physics is worthwhile you should be able to provide order-of-magnitude quantitative estimates to easily show my arguments amount to a negligible global effect.
I've brought up arguments and not made bold statements on them. You bring up counterarguments, yet you think they are absolute proof against my arguments. WHO'S THE REAL TROLL HERE?
Anyway, I do hope you're not a troll and can show it's neglible. I think wind power is a great idea, I'm not fully convinced it's 100% perfectly green as many others outrightly claim it is.
1. I can't argue that coal pollution also has effects on the environment. Who's to say which is worse, I cannot. Certainly to someone living near the coal plant, inhaling the smoke is worse than for someone living far away in Greenland. Conversely, that Greenlandian would be more affected by possibly reduced gulf/jet streams than the person living by the coal plant in a temperate clime.
2. As I said in the original post, the wind is constantly 'pushing' against the force of the back-EMF of the turbine/generator. If the wind didn't apply any force against the blade then the power produced would violate 1st law of thermodynamics.
Windmills will extract MW's of power from the wind. Please quantify the energy absorption rate of a building, or an entire city. Wind blows around buildings, not so around turbines.
3. At least you made no effort to justify your attempted 'estimates' of 1000 trees per windmill in terms of frictional shear losses. Also guessing out of my ass I think you might be close here, maybe a little closer to 10000 trees per windmill, though.
4. I've responded elsewhere on that issue. Basically after each successive row of windmills, the resultant wind will rarefy somewhat. So for many windmills downwind, they will have at least some effect on the streamlines well above their height. How much I don't know.
I'll take this opportunity to point out the alternatives to wind energy and why whatever miniscule effect on climate windmills may have doesn't matter.
It's quite obvious from your examples and attempted explanation that you've entirely misunderstood the arguments of not only myself but also authors in the article.
You conclude that fossil fuels and nuclear energy have a positive net heat output while windpower has zero net heat output. Therefore windpower is better. I'll believe you if you quantatively model global climactic effects of harnessing the wind vs. the positive heat output of the other methods you mention.
You bluntly state windmill effects will be "miniscule". If that is so obvious prove it! For starters perhaps you could
read the original article and then get back to me.
Global climatology is a difficult study, there are millions of factors all intricately woven together. I've never claimed windpower is better or worse than any other power generation method, I've pointed out possible global climate effects that COULD occur from widespread windfarm deployment. Whether these are better or worse than other energy generation methods I leave to seasoned climatologists.
Anyway, as per your assertion, please quantitatively prove wind power is better than the other methods. People like to disprove me by basing their decision on one of many factors (in your case net heat output) while ignoring all other factors.
This point is often brought up, and I've responded to it in previous slashdot wind power discussions. Here's a quick explanation.
A windfarm consists of several rows of windmills. The wind that happens to travel freely above the first row of windmills will undergo some rarefaction in order to equilize the lower-altitude pressure drop caused by that first windmill itself. This will cause an overall pressure decrease or velocity decrease of the wind stream, dependent on the boundary conditions. Now you can integrate this effect over several such rows of windmills.
The result is that the windfarm will, at least to some degree, affect the flow of wind above the actual windmill height. Now to just what degree that would be and how intensely that will affect climate patterns I cannot answer.
And yet my question still remains the same: Now would these ecological changes be more or less beneficial than the ecological changes caused by the continued burning of more coal/oil? That I cannot answer.
but any unbiased study of the total global side effect of each kind of energy generation is going to show wind ranking far above nuclear.
Any links to those studies? Or do we not need them since you made a very bold generalization based on excess heat alone and ignored the 1e7 other factors that play climatology.
Sure nuclear power dumps excess heat in a localized place on the planet. Windfarms will (though to exactly what degree I don't know, might be negligible or might not, as this study hints) disrupt global thermal transport streams. The kinetic energy of the wind is not necessarily the same scale as the thermal energy of the heated molecules contained in it. If the wind is slowed down sufficiently, much greater amounts of heat distribution might be affected as they get distributed in other places on a more global scale.
So how does the heat distribution of wind energy extraction compare with the excess latent heat production of nuclear power plants? That I cannot answer exactly, but your claims are not as immediately obvious as you think they are.
Of course. The earth, prior to man's ascendance, has reached an equilibrium state (on a macroscopic scale, that is) where the incident energy (primarily through the sun) equals the output energy (blackbody radiation, etc).
Mankind now comes along and wants to extract some energy for his own use. Energy in will be the same. Energy out will be the same, but in different form. Eg, more heat energy deposited in point A instead of point B.
So, seriously, no matter what happens, they're going to complain.
It's all really about the status quo. Environmentalists don't want to change the environment significantly. People that want to drive honking SUV's and keep their leaky houses heated to 80 degrees all winter long don't want to change their ways either.
It's all about the status quo, man. The environmentalists will complain about people like you, people like you will complain about said environmentalists, etc. Nobody wants to change the status quo.
It's not just that. Arctic gets colder, summers are much colder in arctic and areas nearby. Canadian flora and fauna will be affected, for example. Similarly, areas such as Europe that are strongly dependent on thermal flows through gulf/jet streams will not receive as much heat. These areas will get colder.
Areas near the equator will get warmer by basically the same amount these other areas get colder. The overall result is that ecology around the equator and the arctics can change. By how much is the real question.
Now would these ecological changes be more or less beneficial than the ecological changes caused by the continued burning of more coal/oil? That I cannot answer.
I've brought up possible challenges to wind power many times on previous discussions on slashdot. I've been modded into oblivion each time, often labelled as an oil-lobby troll for indicating wind power may not be as 'green' as most people claim, for the very reasons cited in this article. Even though I never claimed it wasn't, I was just pointing out it MIGHT alter the climate, we just need to study it a bit, and such a study is certainly within reason to do. I wish I was able to access my previous posts (even from only a few months ago) just to say 'nya nya nya nya'...
Anyway, your point is brought up often, either mentioned as buildings or forests. Buildings channel wind energy, while windmills more-or-less absorb it. Buildings alter the flow of wind, have you ever noticed the wind tunnel effect near some buildings? Sure buildings will absorb some of the wind's kinetic energy, but that is through frictional shear and is relatively small.
Windmills, on the other hand, are 'moving' against the wind, thereby absorbing wind energy. The wind is constantly pushing the turbine, fighting the back-EMF of the generator, and the windmills thus do extract the kinetic energy of the wind.
The way this affects the planet's weather is to consider thermal transports, through the jet stream and gulf stream, for example. Slowing down these streams, by extracting the kinetic energy of the flows, will slow the transfer of heat being carried by these streams. Result - more heat gets 'dumped' closer to the equator, less heat makes it to the poles.
Effects of thermal streams is greatly important. Look at a World Map, and compare cities in Northeastern USA and Canada with European cities at the same latitude. The European cities are MUCH warmer, thanks to lots of air and ocean currents carrying them heat. Now if these currents are interrupted, that means less heat flowing to these places.
An analogy I came up with previously is the following. Imagine Springfield every day sends 10 trucks full of boiling water to Shelbyville. There's two energies at play here - the kinetic energy of the truck to deliver the boiling water, and the heat energy within the boiling water itself. The heat energy keeps Shelbyville warmer than it would be if the water never arrived. Now assume the trucks carry exactly enough fuel to just barely make it to Shelbyville on nice smooth roads. If we go and add friction to these roads (say dig some ditches on the way) the truck won't make it all the way, and the heat energy of the boiling water will be given off somewhere else. The results - Shelbyville gets colder, and the area between Springfield and Shelbyville gets warmer. Note that the heat energy can be much greater than the kinetic energy needed to stop the flow, so windfarms have the ability to affect much greater energy scales then they produce.
Okay, now I'm really glad scientists have modelled this wind-power study, because I've been proposing ecologists do it for years. Climate is a very tricky thing to calculate, because so many factors are intricately woven together. But the fact that this is finally being studied by people claiming to be independent professionals give me some relief.
"You come home and flip the switch, but the lights don't come on. Describe in as much detail as you can how you would go about fixing the problem."
If that's a MSFT interview question, then I'd answer in typical MSFT style:
It's not a bug, it's a feature. My home lighting system is dark on purpose. It was built specifically to foster understanding of and compassion for the blind and those with other vision problems.
So to demonstrate anything meaningful - show me the exit poll numbers side by side, and then let's see if there is any consistent and suspicious looking discrepancy not explained by the major cultural divides within Florida, or the extensive attention paid by Republicans to the I4 corridor area in their campaigning.
Okay, this site has a graph of exit polls among various states (scroll almost all the way to the bottom) compared to the overall results. They are grouped into the paper ballot states and the non paper ballot states. You can see the obvious differences between these two groups.
Now that said, I don't know where these numbers came from or how trustable this site is. But you asked for the numbers, so here they are.
one further comment - it's interesting to note that until the last few days, Bush rounded up most of his conservative base by scaring them into believing he was the better candidate to fight the war on terror.
The ironic part about that is where the terror attacks took place those areas voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. NYC (new york and new jersey), and the Pentagon (DC, Maryland, and northern Virginia).
I know this is redundant, offtopic, and passe, but of the people that voted, it's only slightly more than half voted for Bush. The problem isn't that we're stupid, it's that we've become so polarized and apart, and the re-election campaigns haven't helped. At this point in time I don't really blame Bush so much as his sleezy campaign manager Karl Rove for leading the election like a it was a full-blown war, leaving no village unburned along the way. The right-wing base has been rallied so vigorously, against the left, that despite Bush's slight mandate the country is pretty much battle scarred in partisan rivalry.
The people that used to like Bush before now basically LOVE him. Most Bush supporters treat him like a golden idol, even the handful of Bush voters I know of here in blue Baltimore. And in the Kerry camp it's the opposite, with either complete dislike or sometimes hatred of Bush. Myself, I can't even watch him on TV without at least some small feeling of nausea.
So while not all of us Americans are 'stupid' as you said, we are headed towards destruction with the full-blown partisan warfare that has already been initiated with the efforts to galvanize the Republican base. If we're lucky Bush might attempt a bipartisan agenda this term, if nothing else than for legacy reasons. But given his record I'm not too optimistic.
Sorry for the offtopic rant, I just need to blow off some post-election steam.
Considering that most of the republican poll challengers in Ohio specifically chose precints that are highly democratic and/or poorer or black neighborhoods, it's been suggested that 75% to 80% of the provisionals are for Kerry.
I hope the media at least counts all the provisionals, like they did for Gore even after Gore conceded the recount of 2000.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be a really paranoid person, do you actually really believe this in your conspiracy-theory mindset? Okay, sure building codes can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but they are essential other times.It's the attitude like yours that encourages demolishing antique colonial-era houses to put up cookie-cutter rowhomes with vinyl siding. It's the attitude like yours that drives non-Americans to claim we have no culture.
Have you ever been to Santa Fe or Laos, in New Mexico? These cities are really cool because most houses are built of adobe. I'm not sure if city law requires this (it probably does), but it's really neat to walk around there and feel it. If someone dumped a few trailer homes in the middle if the adobe houses, it would ruin the character of the city. Do you think restrictions to preserve a city's character are there to keep the adobe hardware stores in business?
Another example is Savannah, Georgia. That city center is one of the most beautiful I've seen. It's one of the first planned cities in the USA, and there are lots of parks amidst all the ante-bellum character mansions. I don't know what kind of building codes exist there, but I do know that some hotel chains (I forget which) built hotels in the city center. These hotels were built very cheaply and stand our like a sore thumb against the rest of the city center. Again, do you think they should be able to build what they want, create eye-sores, destroy heritage and character, just to save a few bucks?
Okay, another example now comes from the neighborhood in Baltimore where my girlfriend and I just bought our house. This area is designated 'historic' by the city and state, and this is to preserve the historic character and charm of the neighborhood. (Our house is in the cheapest little corner of the entire neighborhood, most of the other houses there are huge mansions).
When you drive around this area, the houses are really pretty and quaint, and we want to preserve this character for the future. This means any major construction projects or paintings have to meet the approval of the architectural board. if we didn't do this, the character would be lost. Already some cheap-ass home 'flippers' (ie, they buy a house, do the cheapest shoddy renovations they can, and sell it for double the price later) tried to get away with very cheap non-characteristic 'repairs'. Luckily, most of their attempts failed. Note that this is only the outside appearance of the house. You are free to do what you want inside.
If you want to put up a trailer home to save costs, then you shouldn't be living in this neighborhood but in the thousands of other places that such a home would be allowed.
You might not be able to comprehend this, but there's actually character and culture here in the states, some of which is architectural. And it's not a conspiracy to want to preserve the living history.
Once accepted, then consider the choices. The school will play some minor effect, for example having MIT on your resume will get your future employers/grad school's attention slightly more. However no worthwhile company or graduate school would put too much emphasis on the school alone. Employers and admissions groups are well aware that the best schools can easily graduate idiots, and smaller schools can easily graduate geniuses.
Really it depends on how well you do in your environment. If you work reasonably hard at a smaller school, you will stand out like a big fish in a little pond. And, if you do research work for some professors or groups (which I highly recommend), then at your chances are much higher that you can impress them enough for very personal letters of recommendation. From what I hear the letters of recommendation are typically the most important factor for future applicants to either companies or grad schools.
If you transfer to a big school, say MIT, then it's a different ballgame. You will certainly have a wider array of course offerings and research projects, and will have peers who will challenge you more. However you will also find it much more difficult to rise above the radar. The general body of student talent will be greater, and it's easier to fall under the noise floor, so to speak.
Beyond this it's hard to decide what to do without carefully looking at the details. I've seen situations that favor both sides. For example, I knew a guy that had a very good GPA in EE at a small school, and had the opportunity to transfer to a different place. His EE classes weren't very intensive, so his theory knowledge won't be as good. I was hoping he would transfer, because he had a good opportunity to do so. However, if his research went well enough, it might not matter too much.
On the flip side I've seen a few undergrads from schools with small physics departments do amazingly well. They would do research with a professor, do it really well, and then get into a top-tier school. Usually a professor at a small school will know many colleagues at the top-tier schools, and can easily pass a personal reference directly to them.
For companies instead of school, I know less of the hiring practice. School will probably play some factor, but they're more interested in knowing that you can get the job done than which school you went to. If you have good letters of recommendation to this end, you'll be fine.
Hmmm, yet another post that assumes telescope resolution is the one parameter that determines which telescope is best. A quick analogy would be to claim which is better - a monitor resolution with 1024x768 at 24 bit color, or 3200x2400 resolution with 1 bit color. The answer, of course, is that it depends on your application.
Questions about this project:
- Adaptive Optics (AO) usually need a reference star nearby, or an artificial star produced w/ laser. What limitations will this produce in the images?
- How does this limit the area of the sky they can look at?
- What is the wavelength 'bandwidth' of the telescope, accounting for atmospheric absorption as well as sensor design?
- A good deal of astronomical science is done with spectra. What artifacts are introduced into the spectra through absorption and emission lines of the atmosphere?
- What artifacts are introduced to the spectra through artificial star for the AO?
- How long are the integrations that this telescope observe for? Hubble Deep Field was integrated for 150 orbits (10 days). Can this project integrate for a similar time, observing similar magnitude faint galaxies (sometimes individual photons), while maintaining a similar SNR?
- What is the limit for observing faint objects with this groundbased scope? Ie, the noise floor of a ground-based scope is much higher due to scattered 'light pollution', and it would be harder to see fainter objects.
So basically, image resolution is only one of several important factors and limitations in doing astronomical science.Yeah, and all the research money Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Rutherford, Bohr, Watson+Crick, etc wasted on mere 'science' would have better been spent perfecting metal bearings for carriage cartwheels, right?
Look a story down at the hydrogen development... this could change the world on a much bigger scale than anything...effecting us right here ont eh ground right away. 2 billion can do so much good right here.
Umm, you might want to take a look at the projects funded by DOE. Many of them are in the realm of better energy resources, including hydrogen power, as well as fusion.
I dont like the dependence on gas and oil. 2 billion could go towards alot of infrastructure for hydrogen cars.
Apples and oranges, 2 billion for funding 'hydrogen car infrastructure' doesn't necessarily have to come from Hubble. Besides, if Hubble were cut, chances are that the money 'saved' would just be diverted to Iraq or otherwise be lost in a myriad of other government pork.
Anyway, you're pretty short-sighted. Like I said before, if the world were populated with people like you, than today we'd have highly-optimized horse-drawn carriages and cobbled roads, without the money-wasting inconveniences of digital electronics, for example.
So you're assuming that the economy took a downturn strictly due to pricing of heating oil, and no other significant factors?
Further, if you do believe the economy is so strongly coupled to heating oil prices, doesn't it make more economic sense to develop better technology so our economy isn't so unstable as to be disastrously affected merely by supply/pricing of heating oil?
Estimates indicate that Kyoto would reduce global temperatures by 0.25 degrees F by the year 2100
That's an entirely misleading statement. (BTW I looked up that issue of Science and of the two articles on global warming I see the figures you quoted, can you give a page#). Since you like Science, see Science 296 p. 1971, for another view of Kyoto, specifically talking about consequences of delaying it's commencement. One major point of Kyoto is to reach stabilization of CO2 levels at around 450 ppm by 2100. It's not merely to reduce temperatures for temperature's sake. It's to stop disastrous effects (the article mentioned talkes about shutdown of thermohaline circulation in the oceans). Stabilization of CO2 levels at a reasonable point, instead of the increasing CO2 production trend, will more greatly affect climate not just in 2100 but beyond it as well.
Besides, your quote ignores technological developments Kyoto would ultimately spur. Eg more efficient engines and alternative non-carbon energy sources. Such developments have a decent chance of reducing carbon usage much beyond the Kyoto limits.
It's [Kyoto Treaty] rigid and onerous and gives the UN significant regulatory power over the industries (and economies) of nations that sign it.
Isn't that one of the primary purposes of the UN? Or is it only justifiable for the UN to have regulatory power over the industries (and economies) of some "bad" nations (eg Iraq and North Korea)?
Sure, the kicker is in figuring out if humankind was the primary cause of the climate change or not. Merely finding correlations doesn't imply causation, but adequate scientific studies can help decrease the effective error bars of such hypotheses.
Consider, for example, theoretical studies of carbon dioxide emissions. The effect of the greenhouse effect on Earth is well known, without it IIRC water would barely be able to melt on earth. It is essential factor for our biosphere. Now for the moment forget all about the environmentalists and petroleumists trying to claim or refute cause and effect by looking at graphs of climates vs emissions, etc.
Instead look at careful predictions of how the excessive volumes of CO2 produced through human development will impact the greenhouse effect. I actually don't know how well such studies have been done. But suppose climatologists adequately integrated the excess CO2 emitted into the atmosphere. Also suppose they properly accounting for equilibrium effects (eg possible increased foliage) that might reduce volumeof CO2, as well as model the effects these equilibriation factors would produce.
If such a study could be done (perhaps it has, I don't know) and could show clearly within error bars that human's increased CO2 emissions should have increased the atmosphere temperature by X degrees. Would you believe such a study? How about if such a study now did plot against atmospheric temperatures for the past few decades and showed a correlation and correctly accounted for it's order of magnitude or better. You're saying such a correlation does not imply causation. But do you at least acknowledge that if such a study was done, it would be more 'fuel' for the global warming argument?
Now take it a step further. If the climatologists were able to demonstrate that projected CO2 emissions over the next 50 years would contribute to further global temperature changes or other effects that could be disastrous, would that be any cause to worry? Should we be smug in our historical knowledge that climate changed in the past, and hence this climate change shouldn't be important? Or should we take steps to reduce emissions if they can be adequately shown to be fairly disruptive of Earth's ecological balance?
Given those raw numbers, no scientist would say they could give you any rational data about the "system".
Absolutely, science is about induction and deduction. One tries to find a theory that matches observation, and then use that theory to predict future observations. All within the properly quoted error bars and uncertainty levels, of course. Your post relies only upon refuting correlation patterns between weather and CO2 emissions. But it entirely ignores the importance of numerically correlating weather patterns to predicted CO2 emissions. I have no idea to what extent such studies have been done or how closely they match the data. But if they do sufficiently match the data, that would give much harder evidence of global warming.
So in light of other 'geopolitical battles', how do you feel about the US gubbmint funding NSF, and the many of the projects it contributes to (FermiLab for example)?
2. Scientific Exploration: Learning more about the universe around us will teach us more about our own world, ourselves, and our origins.
The inherant scientific value is irrefutable, but there is little real world application to this.
That's right, and the inherent scientific value was irrefutable of the subjects studied by Galileo, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Marconi, Einstein, Bohr, Feynmann, etc etc, and at the time there was little real world application to any of their studies either.
You seem to propose studying the technology of today instead of investing anything for the pure sciences, which would yield the technology of tomorrow. If people with your mindset had their way for the past few centuries, then as an example we'd have highly-optimized wooden cartwheels and metal bearings for our horse chariots, but would know nothing of combustion engines, much less automobiles and aircraft.
It's ironic because later in your post you strongly advocate technological innovation. But you fail to realize that by inhibiting the studies of the pure sciences in favor of applied technological advancements, you will hamper future technological opportunities.
I didn't make any assertions, just demonstrated arguments that windpower MAY not be as clean as dreamy-eyed idealists want to believe.
If you want to make any claims, which the guy did to whom I responded, then you have to back it up. S(h)e didn't, I called him/her on it.
Anyway,
Great, then please provide numbers to scientifically and quantitatively prove the effect of windfarms is negligible. Just because you flat out say so doesn't make it true. Justify it, show us your degree is worthwhile. Or are you the real troll here, pretending to know a discipline that you really don't?
By definition the jet has high shear, and a tiny bit of turbulence miles below is really just a grain of sand on the beach to it.. Give me numbers, or your atmospheric degree is worthless. You are perhaps the only person in this thread (that is if you're not a troll) justified in doing so. I'm not trolling, I'm begging you for numbers.
Sure there's an effect, it is just so small in a practical sense that it sums to near zero.
Have you ever learned order of magnitude estimations? Justify why it sums to 'near zero'.
forests absorb *way* more energy than a few thousand windmills ever could.
Numbers please.
Of course if you do a study where you fill all of Canada with windmills spaced every 100m you start to increase drag.. so what- it isn't a realistic scenario.
Of course that's not realistic. Can you please explain the effects quantitatively with a realistic number of windmills?
You've got a theoretical and small problem from wind power. You've got a actual and large problem from fossil fuels. Therefore keep the status quo! Brilliant.
That's great, I've never claimed to keep the fossil fuel status quo, but thanks for putting words in my mouth. Basically you claim to have a degree in atmospheric physics, yet you didn't provide one scientifically sound argument, just a bunch of handwaving. And you still say I'm spewing crap, even though you acknowledge that all of my points will actually have at least some effect. I've never claimed the effect is non-negligible, I've pointed out POSSIBLE effects. If your degree in atmospheric physics is worthwhile you should be able to provide order-of-magnitude quantitative estimates to easily show my arguments amount to a negligible global effect.
I've brought up arguments and not made bold statements on them. You bring up counterarguments, yet you think they are absolute proof against my arguments. WHO'S THE REAL TROLL HERE?
Anyway, I do hope you're not a troll and can show it's neglible. I think wind power is a great idea, I'm not fully convinced it's 100% perfectly green as many others outrightly claim it is.
1. I can't argue that coal pollution also has effects on the environment. Who's to say which is worse, I cannot. Certainly to someone living near the coal plant, inhaling the smoke is worse than for someone living far away in Greenland. Conversely, that Greenlandian would be more affected by possibly reduced gulf/jet streams than the person living by the coal plant in a temperate clime.
2. As I said in the original post, the wind is constantly 'pushing' against the force of the back-EMF of the turbine/generator. If the wind didn't apply any force against the blade then the power produced would violate 1st law of thermodynamics.
Windmills will extract MW's of power from the wind. Please quantify the energy absorption rate of a building, or an entire city. Wind blows around buildings, not so around turbines.
3. At least you made no effort to justify your attempted 'estimates' of 1000 trees per windmill in terms of frictional shear losses. Also guessing out of my ass I think you might be close here, maybe a little closer to 10000 trees per windmill, though.
4. I've responded elsewhere on that issue. Basically after each successive row of windmills, the resultant wind will rarefy somewhat. So for many windmills downwind, they will have at least some effect on the streamlines well above their height. How much I don't know.
It's quite obvious from your examples and attempted explanation that you've entirely misunderstood the arguments of not only myself but also authors in the article.
You conclude that fossil fuels and nuclear energy have a positive net heat output while windpower has zero net heat output. Therefore windpower is better. I'll believe you if you quantatively model global climactic effects of harnessing the wind vs. the positive heat output of the other methods you mention.
You bluntly state windmill effects will be "miniscule". If that is so obvious prove it! For starters perhaps you could read the original article and then get back to me.
Global climatology is a difficult study, there are millions of factors all intricately woven together. I've never claimed windpower is better or worse than any other power generation method, I've pointed out possible global climate effects that COULD occur from widespread windfarm deployment. Whether these are better or worse than other energy generation methods I leave to seasoned climatologists.
Anyway, as per your assertion, please quantitatively prove wind power is better than the other methods. People like to disprove me by basing their decision on one of many factors (in your case net heat output) while ignoring all other factors.
A windfarm consists of several rows of windmills. The wind that happens to travel freely above the first row of windmills will undergo some rarefaction in order to equilize the lower-altitude pressure drop caused by that first windmill itself. This will cause an overall pressure decrease or velocity decrease of the wind stream, dependent on the boundary conditions. Now you can integrate this effect over several such rows of windmills.
The result is that the windfarm will, at least to some degree, affect the flow of wind above the actual windmill height. Now to just what degree that would be and how intensely that will affect climate patterns I cannot answer.
And yet my question still remains the same:
Now would these ecological changes be more or less beneficial than the ecological changes caused by the continued burning of more coal/oil? That I cannot answer.
Any links to those studies? Or do we not need them since you made a very bold generalization based on excess heat alone and ignored the 1e7 other factors that play climatology.
Sure nuclear power dumps excess heat in a localized place on the planet. Windfarms will (though to exactly what degree I don't know, might be negligible or might not, as this study hints) disrupt global thermal transport streams. The kinetic energy of the wind is not necessarily the same scale as the thermal energy of the heated molecules contained in it. If the wind is slowed down sufficiently, much greater amounts of heat distribution might be affected as they get distributed in other places on a more global scale.
So how does the heat distribution of wind energy extraction compare with the excess latent heat production of nuclear power plants? That I cannot answer exactly, but your claims are not as immediately obvious as you think they are.
So, seriously, no matter what happens, they're going to complain.
It's all really about the status quo. Environmentalists don't want to change the environment significantly. People that want to drive honking SUV's and keep their leaky houses heated to 80 degrees all winter long don't want to change their ways either.
It's all about the status quo, man. The environmentalists will complain about people like you, people like you will complain about said environmentalists, etc. Nobody wants to change the status quo.
Areas near the equator will get warmer by basically the same amount these other areas get colder. The overall result is that ecology around the equator and the arctics can change. By how much is the real question.
Now would these ecological changes be more or less beneficial than the ecological changes caused by the continued burning of more coal/oil? That I cannot answer.
Anyway, your point is brought up often, either mentioned as buildings or forests. Buildings channel wind energy, while windmills more-or-less absorb it. Buildings alter the flow of wind, have you ever noticed the wind tunnel effect near some buildings? Sure buildings will absorb some of the wind's kinetic energy, but that is through frictional shear and is relatively small.
Windmills, on the other hand, are 'moving' against the wind, thereby absorbing wind energy. The wind is constantly pushing the turbine, fighting the back-EMF of the generator, and the windmills thus do extract the kinetic energy of the wind.
The way this affects the planet's weather is to consider thermal transports, through the jet stream and gulf stream, for example. Slowing down these streams, by extracting the kinetic energy of the flows, will slow the transfer of heat being carried by these streams. Result - more heat gets 'dumped' closer to the equator, less heat makes it to the poles.
Effects of thermal streams is greatly important. Look at a World Map, and compare cities in Northeastern USA and Canada with European cities at the same latitude. The European cities are MUCH warmer, thanks to lots of air and ocean currents carrying them heat. Now if these currents are interrupted, that means less heat flowing to these places.
An analogy I came up with previously is the following. Imagine Springfield every day sends 10 trucks full of boiling water to Shelbyville. There's two energies at play here - the kinetic energy of the truck to deliver the boiling water, and the heat energy within the boiling water itself. The heat energy keeps Shelbyville warmer than it would be if the water never arrived. Now assume the trucks carry exactly enough fuel to just barely make it to Shelbyville on nice smooth roads. If we go and add friction to these roads (say dig some ditches on the way) the truck won't make it all the way, and the heat energy of the boiling water will be given off somewhere else. The results - Shelbyville gets colder, and the area between Springfield and Shelbyville gets warmer. Note that the heat energy can be much greater than the kinetic energy needed to stop the flow, so windfarms have the ability to affect much greater energy scales then they produce.
Okay, now I'm really glad scientists have modelled this wind-power study, because I've been proposing ecologists do it for years. Climate is a very tricky thing to calculate, because so many factors are intricately woven together. But the fact that this is finally being studied by people claiming to be independent professionals give me some relief.
If that's a MSFT interview question, then I'd answer in typical MSFT style:
Okay, this site has a graph of exit polls among various states (scroll almost all the way to the bottom) compared to the overall results. They are grouped into the paper ballot states and the non paper ballot states. You can see the obvious differences between these two groups.
Now that said, I don't know where these numbers came from or how trustable this site is. But you asked for the numbers, so here they are.
The ironic part about that is where the terror attacks took place those areas voted overwhelmingly for Kerry. NYC (new york and new jersey), and the Pentagon (DC, Maryland, and northern Virginia).
The people that used to like Bush before now basically LOVE him. Most Bush supporters treat him like a golden idol, even the handful of Bush voters I know of here in blue Baltimore. And in the Kerry camp it's the opposite, with either complete dislike or sometimes hatred of Bush. Myself, I can't even watch him on TV without at least some small feeling of nausea.
So while not all of us Americans are 'stupid' as you said, we are headed towards destruction with the full-blown partisan warfare that has already been initiated with the efforts to galvanize the Republican base. If we're lucky Bush might attempt a bipartisan agenda this term, if nothing else than for legacy reasons. But given his record I'm not too optimistic.
Sorry for the offtopic rant, I just need to blow off some post-election steam.
Do you know about Air America?
Considering that most of the republican poll challengers in Ohio specifically chose precints that are highly democratic and/or poorer or black neighborhoods, it's been suggested that 75% to 80% of the provisionals are for Kerry.
I hope the media at least counts all the provisionals, like they did for Gore even after Gore conceded the recount of 2000.