I call bullshit on this. I've been arguing with crackpots for over 10 years about this. It doesn't take much knowledge of plasma physics to understand what this is for and what it can and can't do. People either seem to think it is for a) manipulating the weather, or b) beaming thoughts into your head (I kid you not). Ok, the last one is by definition for the tin foil hat brigade. The weather modification stuff just doesn't make sense. It is bouncing very low frequency radio off the ionosphere... those layers are way way up above the troposphere where the weather is for starters and if you beam energy using HAARP to somewhere else it will also pass right through the troposphere... and anyway just think how much energy it would require to alter the atmosphere by inductive heating by a grossly inefficient method using a transmitter that is also very inefficient. Bahh. Silver iodide or just spreading a crop disease is just so much easier.
If I was starting in programming now I would start or get deeply involved in a relatively small open source project. That way I can point to publicly released source code to demonstrate my design, coding style, ability to carry a project from concept through analysis to design, implementation and support with added knowledge of various utilities demonstrated and version control. It all depends how you pitch it. Understand that when you walk into an interview for a 'real' job you have a transparent window into your skills already available. Make use of it.
I read this automatically as being about Bill Gates at a Davros press conference. Immediate thought: Davros, inventor of the Daleks, and Bill Gates together. You just know it makes sense.
Ahhh yes. Takes me back it does. Still have my copy of "Introduction to Fortran Programming: Using the Watfor compiler". The language I first learned to program in. Fortunately, by some miracle, I did not sustain long term brain damage. After that I experienced SNOBOL, which was kind of an antidote (well SNOBOL made me feel I had to run away to a commune and talk to the trees).
Fortran. Many memories, may it rest in peace. It aint dead? Oh yes it is I say as I ram this wooden stake through its black evil heart!
I put the blame partly on managers in charge of the project that are too non-technical and distant from the nuts and bolts of what is going on.
Another factor is that the complexity of some of these projects is non-linear with respect to the 'size' (as say measured in the number of requirements). Government project managers should have a new mantra, something like "Small is achievable". The old 'divide-and-conquer' strategy, one of the first things you learn in programming. Break up the problem into achievable units and then use those to construct the solution. Sometimes the bleeding obvious is the first thing forgotten. Man, I'm just full of cliches today.
You know every time I hear something like this I am reminded of the psychological phenomenon of 'rationalisation'... whereby we make excuses for things we want to believe.
Sure there is bound to be local wisdom in these ideas, there is in every society when you look close enough. Nothing special there. But there is almost certainly ignorance, and we should remember that in hindsight one can concoct an almost infinite number of reasons to explain something independent of whether it is true. This is the reason Karl Popper thought History was unscientific.
The 1989 reference is a bit farfetched. I mean back then what kind of IDE would there be.. MS Programmer's Workbench? Shudder. Visual C++ wasn't even a glint in anyone's eye... Borland practically owned the PC C++ world back then. And Borland's stuff was good.
Roll ahead to 1996 when I tried VC++ 1.5,... a buggy piece of shit, still trying to catch up to Borland trying to match OWL with the pathetic MFC. Not just buggy but far removed from the C++ standard. Then by 97, there was VC++ 2, Not too bad. I left the MS compiler line at VC++ 4.2 by which time it was my preferred C++ compiler even for generic code, few bugs and good adherence to the standard. Haven't used it much since, but the few times I have liked it. But it really isn't unique anymore. I work in Java, for IDE I have a choice of IDEA, Netbeans or Eclipse sitting there on my PC (and IntelliJ I think)... all good IDE's. But my C++ work is on QNX so its done with vim. If I was doing C++ on a PC I'd use VS. Right tool for the job.
Not sure if you pose this as a straw man or not. But if NASA was closed down etc,,, it would make NO difference. I don't know why people persist with this delusional thinking. That is not the way the world works, if you close down NASA the money will not go to social programs, and even if it did they would almost certainly be poorly thought out and be effectively useless. One could argue that these claims of mine are just supposition, but if you look at the last 50 years you see that it is pretty much the typical outcome. BTW, remember at the end of the Cold War and all the talk of the Peace Dividend? So were the 90s a golden age? Was world poverty cured? Q.E.D.
6 degrees is typical for the upper limit. The point about this round of simulations was that the researchers noticed that many of the teams working on this stuff were tuning their projects to produce results similar to each other... no-one wanted to stand out too much. A similar thing happened in the 19th century with the measurements of the speed of light... a lot of studies converged on a common value.. which was wrong. So these guys tuned the results to a range of values and ran them to see what an objective selection of 'tunings' would result in. They found that the upper limit was much higher than expected ie. 11C
I noticed a lot of people here saying 11C isn't that bad. Well 5C would be very bad indeed and I hope that 11C is just a weird set of results that is wrong. 5C would result in a mass extinction, don't kid yourself. Forget the ice caps melting that is the least of our problems. Instead realise that global agriculture will be totally ruined. Think famine, war, disease, drought,... like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And don't imagine this will be limited to the third world , everyone will be in this third world. We'd be lucky if all we lost was civilisation. So 11C is truly scary.
Now back to pretending I never heard about this study.
Exactly. BF42... a great game. But when I look on the shelves and see what to me look like just clones everywhere I think "why bother... I've had that experience already". Not fair on the developers of those other games but its just human nature. It seems to me, from my limited view, that EA makes just variants of a small set of game types, yeah they're well made and all but if I'm going to plonk down hard plastic for a game I don't want something like I already have. Do I intend to buy more EA? Well maybe, but not likely.
I posted a comment on this somewhere else, but it should have been here.
There are claims that a large (Chicxulub size) impact occurred in Northern Australia 251 million years ago at the same time as the Permian Extinction. Two things come to mind:
Both the KT event and the Permian involved potentially very large long lived volcanic regions (Deccan Traps, Siberia) and asteroid impacts (well the Permian one isn't proven yet)
On Mercury there is evidence of a large region of the crust being ruptured due to the impact of an asteroid on the exact opposite side of the planet due to the focused shock waves
So could the Permian extinction have been triggered by an impact but brought to fruition by the vulcanism?
PS. If I had mod points and I hadn't already posted I would have given you a +1 Informative
The Deccan Traps occurred coincidentally at about the same time as the Chicxulub impact. Now there is an interesting feature on the surface of Mercury where a large impact on one side of the planet triggered crustal rupture on the exact opposite point of the planet... since that is where the seismic waves were focused. I'm wondering, and I'm sure this has already occured to planetary scientists, if this might be the origin of the Deccan Traps. Recently some researchers suggested that 251 million years ago there was a large impact in what is now Northern Australia. The crater would be about the same size as Chicxulub.
So are we seeing another extinction caused by the double whammy of impact and vulcanism with the vulcanism causing even worse long term grie?
This is the story of Stephen Baxter's "Ring", though humans didn't build the Great Attractor they sneak through with the ships of the (forget the name of the super-advanced dudes who built the Ring), into the new universe. Hmm don't remember much from the story except the photino birds... whatever.
If you want to go further back then there is of course Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero". But that is just using relativity to ride an oscillating universe to a new beginning. Pretty cool though.
Might be even older versions of this but I'm not sure.
According to this the density of liquid CH4 at 1 atmosphere and boiling point ( -161.6C ) is 422.62 kg/m^3. Yeah the atmospheric pressure on Titan is supposed to be 3 or 4 times that but I don't think it will change the density of CH4 liquid or ice much. So water ice will sink like the rock it is on Titan. Ethane is slightly denser at 546.49 kg/m^3. But still water ice will sink.
So if those pebbles / rocks in the landing photo are water ice then they probably were eroded by wave and / or wind action (yeah its just a guess).
I find speculating on this stuff just endlessly entertaining.
I truly believe that those amoung us who still shout to "stop wasting money on space, we still have poverty here to cure/we are already messed up enough already on Earth/there is still stuff in our oceans we haven't seen yet" are the most misled and dangerous.
I consider myself pretty strongly green tinged but I have never understood the argument about how if we didn't go into space we could solve problems here. Huh? I beg your rhetorical pardon? What they really mean is that with less money going into space we can spend more money on weapons, or advertising or some shit. Remember the 'peace dividend' from the end of the cold war that would have been huge, much larger than the piddly space program. So I presume that ended all poverty in the US? Fact is if you want to cure poverty etc you need ideas more than you need money. Throwing money at problems with ill conceived solutions doesn't work whereas spending money on a space mission will yield knowledge that will last... how long I dunno, if we don't go into another dark age then centuries or millenia.
Amazing ... but what happened to the sea?
on
Titan Photos and Sounds
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Yep, wonderful photos. A tribute to all of those who laboured for god knows how long to pull this off. And Titan shows itself to be as interesting as people had hoped. Obvious evidence of rivers and seas (and presumably rain etc). No evidence of the liberation of liquid (methane?) as water is from permafrost on Mars... suggests true rain. BUT. In the composite mosaics you can sea this wonderful sea with river systems and deltas and islands... and craters. Zoom in (yeah well image zoom in Firefox) and you sea that the sea floor is covered in 'small' craters, obviously the sea has disappeared. And yet there seems to be less evidence (from my pitiful survey) of craters in the 'land' area. Does this mean that wind erosion and rivers still run, but not enough to fill the sea... and what happened to all the um... liquid ?
Over the years I have actually argued with Creationists who insist that Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (SR & GR) are false. As usual with those morons (sorry but it is true) they never ever acknowledge any evidence or shift their positions on an issue when the evidence against them is immense and will trot out the same incorrect stuff even after it has been shown to be false. You see it is a matter of faith not reason, so arguing with them does no good. Don't feed the trolls.
I always considered it significant that the first versions of Rational Rose were the buggiest pieces of software I had ever seen. Obviously not practicing what they preach.
In fact in the novel of 2001 the Discovery goes to Saturn not Jupiter and in particular to Iapetus where as Clarke mentions there is an enormous visual discrepancy between the light side and the dark side... of course in 2001 there was an eye like object on one side with a ginormous monolith as the pupil.
Never read 2010 or 3001 (or whatever) so I don't know how this was resolved with Europa etc.
Apart from the other serious issues for the world from what would be going on while the Arctic is warming it would seem that all that thawing permafrost is going to make exploitation an 'interesting' exercise. What today may be hard as stone may next year turn into mud. Hmmm...
Also I imagine the weather would also have some 'interesting' extremes. Not saying it couldn't be done (or should be), but it wouldn't be like just going out and settling an area in the traditional way.
... that if some lowlife owns my box and turns it into a spam source, then the value of my PC is being maximised (it certainly isn't being underutilised).
Please define the criteria for 'maximised' then we can talk about it.
Personally, I don't mind that my linux partitions can't do everything (like run ActiveX... something I err really need) or that I deliberately turn off Flash. Is a server sitting in the corner being 'maximised' if it isn't playing MP3s and showing DVD movies?
Slashdot Mirror
I call bullshit on this. I've been arguing with crackpots for over 10 years about this. It doesn't take much knowledge of plasma physics to understand what this is for and what it can and can't do. People either seem to think it is for a) manipulating the weather, or b) beaming thoughts into your head (I kid you not). Ok, the last one is by definition for the tin foil hat brigade. The weather modification stuff just doesn't make sense. It is bouncing very low frequency radio off the ionosphere ... those layers are way way up above the troposphere where the weather is for starters and if you beam energy using HAARP to somewhere else it will also pass right through the troposphere ... and anyway just think how much energy it would require to alter the atmosphere by inductive heating by a grossly inefficient method using a transmitter that is also very inefficient. Bahh. Silver iodide or just spreading a crop disease is just so much easier.
If I was starting in programming now I would start or get deeply involved in a relatively small open source project. That way I can point to publicly released source code to demonstrate my design, coding style, ability to carry a project from concept through analysis to design, implementation and support with added knowledge of various utilities demonstrated and version control. It all depends how you pitch it. Understand that when you walk into an interview for a 'real' job you have a transparent window into your skills already available. Make use of it.
I read this automatically as being about Bill Gates at a Davros press conference. Immediate thought: Davros, inventor of the Daleks, and Bill Gates together. You just know it makes sense.
Hmmm. Must . get . out . more.
Ahhh yes. Takes me back it does. Still have my copy of "Introduction to Fortran Programming: Using the Watfor compiler". The language I first learned to program in. Fortunately, by some miracle, I did not sustain long term brain damage. After that I experienced SNOBOL, which was kind of an antidote (well SNOBOL made me feel I had to run away to a commune and talk to the trees).
Fortran. Many memories, may it rest in peace. It aint dead? Oh yes it is I say as I ram this wooden stake through its black evil heart!
I put the blame partly on managers in charge of the project that are too non-technical and distant from the nuts and bolts of what is going on.
Another factor is that the complexity of some of these projects is non-linear with respect to the 'size' (as say measured in the number of requirements). Government project managers should have a new mantra, something like "Small is achievable". The old 'divide-and-conquer' strategy, one of the first things you learn in programming. Break up the problem into achievable units and then use those to construct the solution. Sometimes the bleeding obvious is the first thing forgotten. Man, I'm just full of cliches today.
Even if it is 2000 years old then what? Does it mean it was Jesus? Not necessarily. If it was Jesus, does it mean he was divine? No.
The shroud is a mystery. Fine. But I don't think people think about what it actually proves even if it is from that time.
You know every time I hear something like this I am reminded of the psychological phenomenon of 'rationalisation' ... whereby we make excuses for things we want to believe.
Sure there is bound to be local wisdom in these ideas, there is in every society when you look close enough. Nothing special there. But there is almost certainly ignorance, and we should remember that in hindsight one can concoct an almost infinite number of reasons to explain something independent of whether it is true. This is the reason Karl Popper thought History was unscientific.
The 1989 reference is a bit farfetched. I mean back then what kind of IDE would there be .. MS Programmer's Workbench? Shudder. Visual C++ wasn't even a glint in anyone's eye ... Borland practically owned the PC C++ world back then. And Borland's stuff was good.
Roll ahead to 1996 when I tried VC++ 1.5, ... a buggy piece of shit, still trying to catch up to Borland trying to match OWL with the pathetic MFC. Not just buggy but far removed from the C++ standard. Then by 97, there was VC++ 2, Not too bad. I left the MS compiler line at VC++ 4.2 by which time it was my preferred C++ compiler even for generic code, few bugs and good adherence to the standard. Haven't used it much since, but the few times I have liked it. But it really isn't unique anymore. I work in Java, for IDE I have a choice of IDEA, Netbeans or Eclipse sitting there on my PC (and IntelliJ I think) ... all good IDE's. But my C++ work is on QNX so its done with vim. If I was doing C++ on a PC I'd use VS. Right tool for the job.
Not sure if you pose this as a straw man or not. But if NASA was closed down etc ,,, it would make NO difference. I don't know why people persist with this delusional thinking. That is not the way the world works, if you close down NASA the money will not go to social programs, and even if it did they would almost certainly be poorly thought out and be effectively useless. One could argue that these claims of mine are just supposition, but if you look at the last 50 years you see that it is pretty much the typical outcome. BTW, remember at the end of the Cold War and all the talk of the Peace Dividend? So were the 90s a golden age? Was world poverty cured? Q.E.D.
That's why water is not ready for mission-critical drinking
Hence the need for Microsoft's new .WET architecture to solve these problems.
forcing it's employees to only drink Jack Daniel's Tennessee Whiskey since 1984
Truly, this explains so much.
there[sic] estimates are little lower, 6 celsius
6 degrees is typical for the upper limit. The point about this round of simulations was that the researchers noticed that many of the teams working on this stuff were tuning their projects to produce results similar to each other ... no-one wanted to stand out too much. A similar thing happened in the 19th century with the measurements of the speed of light ... a lot of studies converged on a common value .. which was wrong. So these guys tuned the results to a range of values and ran them to see what an objective selection of 'tunings' would result in. They found that the upper limit was much higher than expected ie. 11C
I noticed a lot of people here saying 11C isn't that bad. Well 5C would be very bad indeed and I hope that 11C is just a weird set of results that is wrong. 5C would result in a mass extinction, don't kid yourself. Forget the ice caps melting that is the least of our problems. Instead realise that global agriculture will be totally ruined. Think famine, war, disease, drought, ... like the four horsemen of the apocalypse. And don't imagine this will be limited to the third world , everyone will be in this third world. We'd be lucky if all we lost was civilisation. So 11C is truly scary.
Now back to pretending I never heard about this study.
Exactly. BF42 ... a great game. But when I look on the shelves and see what to me look like just clones everywhere I think "why bother ... I've had that experience already". Not fair on the developers of those other games but its just human nature. It seems to me, from my limited view, that EA makes just variants of a small set of game types, yeah they're well made and all but if I'm going to plonk down hard plastic for a game I don't want something like I already have. Do I intend to buy more EA? Well maybe, but not likely.
I posted a comment on this somewhere else, but it should have been here.
There are claims that a large (Chicxulub size) impact occurred in Northern Australia 251 million years ago at the same time as the Permian Extinction. Two things come to mind:
Both the KT event and the Permian involved potentially very large long lived volcanic regions (Deccan Traps, Siberia) and asteroid impacts (well the Permian one isn't proven yet)
On Mercury there is evidence of a large region of the crust being ruptured due to the impact of an asteroid on the exact opposite side of the planet due to the focused shock waves
So could the Permian extinction have been triggered by an impact but brought to fruition by the vulcanism?
PS. If I had mod points and I hadn't already posted I would have given you a +1 Informative
The Deccan Traps occurred coincidentally at about the same time as the Chicxulub impact. Now there is an interesting feature on the surface of Mercury where a large impact on one side of the planet triggered crustal rupture on the exact opposite point of the planet ... since that is where the seismic waves were focused. I'm wondering, and I'm sure this has already occured to planetary scientists, if this might be the origin of the Deccan Traps. Recently some researchers suggested that 251 million years ago there was a large impact in what is now Northern Australia. The crater would be about the same size as Chicxulub.
So are we seeing another extinction caused by the double whammy of impact and vulcanism with the vulcanism causing even worse long term grie?
This is the story of Stephen Baxter's "Ring", though humans didn't build the Great Attractor they sneak through with the ships of the (forget the name of the super-advanced dudes who built the Ring), into the new universe. Hmm don't remember much from the story except the photino birds ... whatever.
If you want to go further back then there is of course Poul Anderson's "Tau Zero". But that is just using relativity to ride an oscillating universe to a new beginning. Pretty cool though.
Might be even older versions of this but I'm not sure.
According to this the density of liquid CH4 at 1 atmosphere and boiling point ( -161.6C ) is 422.62 kg/m^3. Yeah the atmospheric pressure on Titan is supposed to be 3 or 4 times that but I don't think it will change the density of CH4 liquid or ice much. So water ice will sink like the rock it is on Titan. Ethane is slightly denser at 546.49 kg/m^3. But still water ice will sink.
So if those pebbles / rocks in the landing photo are water ice then they probably were eroded by wave and / or wind action (yeah its just a guess).
I find speculating on this stuff just endlessly entertaining.
Remember that Huygens was to sink beneath the waves rapidly
As far as I remember it was always stated that it was designed to float in the hypothetical seas / marshes / tar pits / whatever.
I truly believe that those amoung us who still shout to "stop wasting money on space, we still have poverty here to cure/we are already messed up enough already on Earth/there is still stuff in our oceans we haven't seen yet" are the most misled and dangerous.
I consider myself pretty strongly green tinged but I have never understood the argument about how if we didn't go into space we could solve problems here. Huh? I beg your rhetorical pardon? What they really mean is that with less money going into space we can spend more money on weapons, or advertising or some shit. Remember the 'peace dividend' from the end of the cold war that would have been huge, much larger than the piddly space program. So I presume that ended all poverty in the US? Fact is if you want to cure poverty etc you need ideas more than you need money. Throwing money at problems with ill conceived solutions doesn't work whereas spending money on a space mission will yield knowledge that will last ... how long I dunno, if we don't go into another dark age then centuries or millenia.
Yep, wonderful photos. A tribute to all of those who laboured for god knows how long to pull this off. And Titan shows itself to be as interesting as people had hoped. Obvious evidence of rivers and seas (and presumably rain etc). No evidence of the liberation of liquid (methane?) as water is from permafrost on Mars ... suggests true rain. BUT. In the composite mosaics you can sea this wonderful sea with river systems and deltas and islands ... and craters. Zoom in (yeah well image zoom in Firefox) and you sea that the sea floor is covered in 'small' craters, obviously the sea has disappeared. And yet there seems to be less evidence (from my pitiful survey) of craters in the 'land' area. Does this mean that wind erosion and rivers still run, but not enough to fill the sea ... and what happened to all the um ... liquid ?
Lots of questions. Can't wait.
from your sig: WARNING: THIS IMAGE WILL CRASH FIREFOX/MOZILLA
Works fine on 1.0 for linux. Both 'scaled' and 'full' display properly. Suggest you update it (at least for firefox version number)
Over the years I have actually argued with Creationists who insist that Quantum Mechanics and Relativity (SR & GR) are false. As usual with those morons (sorry but it is true) they never ever acknowledge any evidence or shift their positions on an issue when the evidence against them is immense and will trot out the same incorrect stuff even after it has been shown to be false. You see it is a matter of faith not reason, so arguing with them does no good. Don't feed the trolls.
I always considered it significant that the first versions of Rational Rose were the buggiest pieces of software I had ever seen. Obviously not practicing what they preach.
In fact in the novel of 2001 the Discovery goes to Saturn not Jupiter and in particular to Iapetus where as Clarke mentions there is an enormous visual discrepancy between the light side and the dark side ... of course in 2001 there was an eye like object on one side with a ginormous monolith as the pupil.
Never read 2010 or 3001 (or whatever) so I don't know how this was resolved with Europa etc.
Apart from the other serious issues for the world from what would be going on while the Arctic is warming it would seem that all that thawing permafrost is going to make exploitation an 'interesting' exercise. What today may be hard as stone may next year turn into mud. Hmmm ...
Also I imagine the weather would also have some 'interesting' extremes. Not saying it couldn't be done (or should be), but it wouldn't be like just going out and settling an area in the traditional way.
... that if some lowlife owns my box and turns it into a spam source, then the value of my PC is being maximised (it certainly isn't being underutilised).
Please define the criteria for 'maximised' then we can talk about it.
Personally, I don't mind that my linux partitions can't do everything (like run ActiveX ... something I err really need) or that I deliberately turn off Flash. Is a server sitting in the corner being 'maximised' if it isn't playing MP3s and showing DVD movies?