This is all a bit beyond my detailed understanding but when I read that our current knowledge of horizontal gene transfer between species is quite rudimentary it is concerning. It seems like a possible worst case situation where we wipe out all mosquitoes but how completely can it be discounted. Invasive species of the past are a prime example of humans moving before understanding the ramification.
https://www.upi.com/Science_Ne...
whoooshh.. "and, to convey their level of intelligence, made a face and a spastic hand motion"
The insult in your statement here does not require the presence of any particular type of person. The insult is the conflation of certain physical traits with intelligence.
In the Pacific Northwest we pay ~10 cents/kWh, of that distribution and overhead are around 7 cents/kwh and the the power cost is around 3 cents/kWH. Of the 3 cents/kWh a substantial portion is capital as opposed to fuel. So they spend very little on fuel. As just back up the rates would skyrocket.
Not sure what you mean by upstate Washington but eastern Washington has several substantial wind farm installations. While the winds are not as good as some other places, the transmission infrastructure is already built to service the dam sites so that getting the power to market is cheap. Private utilities that do not have access to cheap federal power have found wind (with the federal tax credit) to be a good investment, even before the state decided to mandate a minimum fraction of renewables. Again individual circumstances.
Another issue lost in this discussion is the total cost of the technology. A home solar installation is dependent upon the grid. Depending upon the location, the solar installation may or may no reduce grid costs. In Washington, most of the grid is built to handle January mornings and PV does not reduce system cost but does reduce energy sales. With the capital infrastructure and overhead making up 80% of the cost of utilities, PV is making grid power more expensive for everyone else.
Old people are not the problem. People with long term health issues that need to be managed are. That they want the best treatment is sort of a given. Most people I know in last year of life are dropping lots of drugs because long term health issues are no longer relevant.
Probably different in every area but here on the N. Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, USA, the land lines are way more reliable than cell phone, especially when the power checks out for more than a few hours. Also, 911 location is more solidly established and the LifeLink service, where you wear a button that will call help, requires a land line. I still have a land line for the first 2 reasons, if I were older that later one might be important but I'm hoping to check myself out before that point.
this is a great idea. Perhaps modified slightly by job category so programmers don't push up some really special talent in another field that doesn't pay on the same scale.
35 watts X 8760 hours a day X 224 million boxes equals 3000 MW equals three large thermal electric generation plant. Maybe a rounding error to you but because the load is continuous and there are so many it adds up.
Research clearly indicates that fake therapies can trigger the body to heal itself. In acupuncture studies, sham needling often has very high efficacy, some times higher than needling the proper points, and sometimes similar or higher efficacy than traditional medicine. It does this with far less side-effects. If it works better with less harm, it should be used - even if we don't understand it.
Medicine is a practice. There are many things modern medicine does not understand. Physicians often follow a treatment path without understanding the underlying mechanisms of the disease (e.g. autoimmune disorders) or treat to simply alleviate symptoms. Someday we may have the body figured out but that day is a not today.
The Placebo effect is probably one of the more powerful tools available.
From the NY Times: In the study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, German researchers divided 302 migraine sufferers into three groups. The patients were told that one group would receive acupuncture "similar to the acupuncture treatment used in China," and that the second would receive a type of acupuncture that did not follow the Chinese principles but "has been associated with positive outcomes in clinical studies."
The patients did not know which group they were assigned to. A third group was put on a waiting list and received treatment later.
Although the patients in the second group were unaware of it, they received a faked version of acupuncture.
The treatments went on for 12 weeks, and success was defined as having 50 percent fewer days with headaches in the weeks after the end of treatment.
By this measure, real acupuncture succeeded with 51 percent of the patients, and the sham procedure succeeded with 53 percent, a statistically insignificant difference. Only 15 percent of the waiting list group attained the 50 percent reduction in headache days.
The effectiveness of both the sham and the real acupuncture, the authors write, is about the same as treatment with drugs and has fewer side effects. The results, they conclude, "may be due to nonspecific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both."
This thread has lots of speculation about the people running xp but none hit the mark in my case. Two of three machines in current use here run XP, and there is a fourth machine running Windows 98. Generally, the operating system choice comes down to software.
One XP machine is used for 2 hours of accounting work (quickbooks) a month. It also keeps an operating instance of various software that was used for various projects in the past. The unit is too old (12 year old P4 box) to upgrade to Windows 7/8 and upgrading to a different operating system would break lots of installed software. Most of the software on this machine could be reinstalled but I would have to find the disks (yes disks in some cases), reinstall and remember any custom configurations. A lot of work for what might otherwise be a 30 minute job. Much easier to keep an operating instance for the odd occasion ( once every 3-4 years) requiring Microsoft Fortran. This machines XP will be updated to the last day and then disconnected from the web. The Windows 98 machine has a similar reason from existing.
The other XP machine will be upgraded to windows 7 soon. This is later than planned but the pieces are in place and the license came with the machine. It was my main machine until I purchased a new laptop with Windows 7 and transitioned to it. Now it's just a backup and when there is a break it will be upgraded. It will not be online or actively used until it is upgraded.
So that is the story of 2 instances. Hard to put us all in the same box.
There are 5 dams down stream of wanapum, 1 above the free flowing hanford reach and 4 dams below that. River "operations" involve a complicated coordination of all the dams and reservoirs to provide adequate flow for fish and year-round power generation. It is an interesting engineering problem - hacking a river. There is also a computer angle here in that several data centers are located in Grant County (which owns the generation rights) to take advantage of the cheap reliable power. Presumably those data centers are watching this closely. Power rates for everyone in the county will rise if they have less power to sell or if they have to buy power from outside the county.
The system is dependent upon storage for of moving water down stream the river is very interesting in that water flowing through one dam
Your spot on about being self-taught as an asset. In IT, the tools and in many cases the problems to be solved are changing many times over a span of 30 years. Showing that you can attain a functional understanding of tools and problems on your own is worth alot as it will be a skill you need. It might also demonstrate the willingness to work long hours to get the job down which is a double edge sword, good for managers, not so good for the general working conditions.
A friend has a self-propelled mower tethered by a rope to a pipe located in the middle of his yard. The mower propels forward and slowly spirals in as the rope wraps around the pipe. He drinks a beer and enjoys mowing his lawn too.
Simulation studies of residential buildings in Seattle and other northern US heating climates generally find 50% of lighting energy (and computer energy) is useful in offseting space heat (on an annual basis). For every kilowatt-hour saved in lighting, the heating energy increases by half a kilowatt-hour (or the heat equivalent if heating with gas/oil/??). Also, if the building has cooling (again in a northern US climate) there is a reduction in cooling that is equivalent to the around 10% of the lighting change. That is for every kilowatt-hour saved in lighting there is a further savings of 0.1 kilowatt-hour in cooling. In warmer climates the heating interaction gets smaller and the cooling interaction gets larger. In florida there would be a large benefit from decreased cooling and almost not impact from heating change.
To figure the economics you need to factor in the difference between your electric and heating fuel costs. This is often very significant.
Seasonally it varies as one would expect. The "waste" heat is nearly 100% useful in the winter and near 0% in the summer (northern climate).
All of this assumes we are talking about a small amount of electric use relative to the heat loss of the space and the space is a home or small office. If one is operating more than 1 computer in a small room, or 2 or 3 in a larger one, then the available heat is likely to be more than the space requires. Likewise if the computers are located in a warm climate. In any of these cases the winter utilization can approach zero and if your cooling equipment is running then it will even be negative (increase the cooling). Larger work settings with multizone heating/cooling systems are completely different and difficult to generalize, but basically the cooling reduction is very important.
A good rule of thumb might be, if your heater is operating during the day then the computer heat is useful. If your heater is not operating at all then the computer heat is somewhere between 0 and 50%.
Assuming 140,000btu/gallon and 42 gallons per barrel = 114 million barrels of oil a year] = 0.3 MILLION barrels/day.
The 9000 MWatts for 500 million CPUs assumes that on average a cpu consumes 36 watts and is on half of the time.
Electricity is odd in that we use it so many ways with none of them being totally dominant. A sort of death of a thousand cuts. Consumer goods are notorious for the lack of consideration of the energy consumption they will have. Often manufacturing decisions are made that save pennies on a few parts but result in a great deal of energy consumption. Standby power and significant power consumption when switched off is another area where tiny numbers become significant when the number of devices is considered.
"For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it." - Herman Melville - Moby Dick
a third set of numbers for this conversion.
9000 MWatts = 78 million megawatt-hours = 2.69E14 Btu.
Assuming 40% conversion efficiency (very good)
= 6.72E14 Btu of oil
assuming 140,000btu/gallon and 42 gallons per barrel
= 114 million barrels of oil a year]
= 0.3 billion barrels/day
The 9000 MWatts for 500 million CPUs assumes that on average a cpu consumes 36 watts and is on half of the time.
Electricity is odd in that we use it so many ways with none of them being totally dominant. A sort of death of a thousand cuts.
Consumer goods are notorious for the lack of consideration of the energy consumption they will have. Often manufacturing decisions are made that save pennies on a few parts but result in a great deal of energy consumption.
Standby power and significant power consumption when switched off is another area where tiny numbers become significant when the number of devices is considered. This is common in printers, TV's, and most devices using plug-in transformers.
"For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it."
- Herman Melville - Moby Dick
While energy savings are significant they are unlikely in most situations to pay for a new LCD monitor. My 17" CRT uses 75watts. Assuming: the monitor is on at full power 24/7, that an LCD uses 35 watts, 10 cent/kWh electricity, a cooling energy savings of 50% of the monitor reduction, and no heating benefits yields an electric savings of $52/year. Turning the monitor off while not at work would reduce this to $20/year.
here is a link to a new article that provides some more detail on this event.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_stor y.asp?category=1700&slug=Cellular%20Hacker
Slashdot Mirror
This is all a bit beyond my detailed understanding but when I read that our current knowledge of horizontal gene transfer between species is quite rudimentary it is concerning. It seems like a possible worst case situation where we wipe out all mosquitoes but how completely can it be discounted. Invasive species of the past are a prime example of humans moving before understanding the ramification. https://www.upi.com/Science_Ne...
whoooshh .. "and, to convey their level of intelligence, made a face and a spastic hand motion"
The insult in your statement here does not require the presence of any particular type of person. The insult is the conflation of certain physical traits with intelligence.
thanks for the laugh (and on topic post)
thanks for the laugh
In the Pacific Northwest we pay ~10 cents /kWh, of that distribution and overhead are around 7 cents/kwh and the the power cost is around 3 cents/kWH. Of the 3 cents/kWh a substantial portion is capital as opposed to fuel. So they spend very little on fuel. As just back up the rates would skyrocket.
Not sure what you mean by upstate Washington but eastern Washington has several substantial wind farm installations. While the winds are not as good as some other places, the transmission infrastructure is already built to service the dam sites so that getting the power to market is cheap. Private utilities that do not have access to cheap federal power have found wind (with the federal tax credit) to be a good investment, even before the state decided to mandate a minimum fraction of renewables. Again individual circumstances. Another issue lost in this discussion is the total cost of the technology. A home solar installation is dependent upon the grid. Depending upon the location, the solar installation may or may no reduce grid costs. In Washington, most of the grid is built to handle January mornings and PV does not reduce system cost but does reduce energy sales. With the capital infrastructure and overhead making up 80% of the cost of utilities, PV is making grid power more expensive for everyone else.
Old people are not the problem. People with long term health issues that need to be managed are. That they want the best treatment is sort of a given. Most people I know in last year of life are dropping lots of drugs because long term health issues are no longer relevant.
Probably different in every area but here on the N. Olympic Peninsula in Washington State, USA, the land lines are way more reliable than cell phone, especially when the power checks out for more than a few hours. Also, 911 location is more solidly established and the LifeLink service, where you wear a button that will call help, requires a land line. I still have a land line for the first 2 reasons, if I were older that later one might be important but I'm hoping to check myself out before that point.
this is a great idea. Perhaps modified slightly by job category so programmers don't push up some really special talent in another field that doesn't pay on the same scale.
35 watts X 8760 hours a day X 224 million boxes equals 3000 MW equals three large thermal electric generation plant. Maybe a rounding error to you but because the load is continuous and there are so many it adds up.
Research clearly indicates that fake therapies can trigger the body to heal itself. In acupuncture studies, sham needling often has very high efficacy, some times higher than needling the proper points, and sometimes similar or higher efficacy than traditional medicine. It does this with far less side-effects. If it works better with less harm, it should be used - even if we don't understand it.
Medicine is a practice. There are many things modern medicine does not understand. Physicians often follow a treatment path without understanding the underlying mechanisms of the disease (e.g. autoimmune disorders) or treat to simply alleviate symptoms. Someday we may have the body figured out but that day is a not today.
The Placebo effect is probably one of the more powerful tools available.
From the NY Times:
In the study, published in the May 4 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association, German researchers divided 302 migraine sufferers into three groups. The patients were told that one group would receive acupuncture "similar to the acupuncture treatment used in China," and that the second would receive a type of acupuncture that did not follow the Chinese principles but "has been associated with positive outcomes in clinical studies."
The patients did not know which group they were assigned to. A third group was put on a waiting list and received treatment later.
Although the patients in the second group were unaware of it, they received a faked version of acupuncture.
The treatments went on for 12 weeks, and success was defined as having 50 percent fewer days with headaches in the weeks after the end of treatment.
By this measure, real acupuncture succeeded with 51 percent of the patients, and the sham procedure succeeded with 53 percent, a statistically insignificant difference. Only 15 percent of the waiting list group attained the 50 percent reduction in headache days.
The effectiveness of both the sham and the real acupuncture, the authors write, is about the same as treatment with drugs and has fewer side effects. The results, they conclude, "may be due to nonspecific physiological effects of needling, to a powerful placebo effect, or to a combination of both."
This thread has lots of speculation about the people running xp but none hit the mark in my case. Two of three machines in current use here run XP, and there is a fourth machine running Windows 98. Generally, the operating system choice comes down to software.
One XP machine is used for 2 hours of accounting work (quickbooks) a month. It also keeps an operating instance of various software that was used for various projects in the past. The unit is too old (12 year old P4 box) to upgrade to Windows 7/8 and upgrading to a different operating system would break lots of installed software. Most of the software on this machine could be reinstalled but I would have to find the disks (yes disks in some cases), reinstall and remember any custom configurations. A lot of work for what might otherwise be a 30 minute job. Much easier to keep an operating instance for the odd occasion ( once every 3-4 years) requiring Microsoft Fortran. This machines XP will be updated to the last day and then disconnected from the web. The Windows 98 machine has a similar reason from existing.
The other XP machine will be upgraded to windows 7 soon. This is later than planned but the pieces are in place and the license came with the machine. It was my main machine until I purchased a new laptop with Windows 7 and transitioned to it. Now it's just a backup and when there is a break it will be upgraded. It will not be online or actively used until it is upgraded.
So that is the story of 2 instances. Hard to put us all in the same box.
There are 5 dams down stream of wanapum, 1 above the free flowing hanford reach and 4 dams below that. River "operations" involve a complicated coordination of all the dams and reservoirs to provide adequate flow for fish and year-round power generation. It is an interesting engineering problem - hacking a river. There is also a computer angle here in that several data centers are located in Grant County (which owns the generation rights) to take advantage of the cheap reliable power. Presumably those data centers are watching this closely. Power rates for everyone in the county will rise if they have less power to sell or if they have to buy power from outside the county. The system is dependent upon storage for of moving water down stream the river is very interesting in that water flowing through one dam
Your spot on about being self-taught as an asset. In IT, the tools and in many cases the problems to be solved are changing many times over a span of 30 years. Showing that you can attain a functional understanding of tools and problems on your own is worth alot as it will be a skill you need. It might also demonstrate the willingness to work long hours to get the job down which is a double edge sword, good for managers, not so good for the general working conditions.
A friend has a self-propelled mower tethered by a rope to a pipe located in the middle of his yard. The mower propels forward and slowly spirals in as the rope wraps around the pipe. He drinks a beer and enjoys mowing his lawn too.
Simulation studies of residential buildings in Seattle and other northern US heating climates generally find 50% of lighting energy (and computer energy) is useful in offseting space heat (on an annual basis). For every kilowatt-hour saved in lighting, the heating energy increases by half a kilowatt-hour (or the heat equivalent if heating with gas/oil/??). Also, if the building has cooling (again in a northern US climate) there is a reduction in cooling that is equivalent to the around 10% of the lighting change. That is for every kilowatt-hour saved in lighting there is a further savings of 0.1 kilowatt-hour in cooling. In warmer climates the heating interaction gets smaller and the cooling interaction gets larger. In florida there would be a large benefit from decreased cooling and almost not impact from heating change. To figure the economics you need to factor in the difference between your electric and heating fuel costs. This is often very significant. Seasonally it varies as one would expect. The "waste" heat is nearly 100% useful in the winter and near 0% in the summer (northern climate). All of this assumes we are talking about a small amount of electric use relative to the heat loss of the space and the space is a home or small office. If one is operating more than 1 computer in a small room, or 2 or 3 in a larger one, then the available heat is likely to be more than the space requires. Likewise if the computers are located in a warm climate. In any of these cases the winter utilization can approach zero and if your cooling equipment is running then it will even be negative (increase the cooling). Larger work settings with multizone heating/cooling systems are completely different and difficult to generalize, but basically the cooling reduction is very important. A good rule of thumb might be, if your heater is operating during the day then the computer heat is useful. If your heater is not operating at all then the computer heat is somewhere between 0 and 50%.
Sorry about the formatting and the typo in the last post. It is supposed to be more like this.
a third set of numbers for this conversion.
9000 MWatts = 78 million megawatt-hours = 2.69E14 Btu.
Assuming 40% conversion efficiency (very good) = 6.72E14 Btu of oil
Assuming 140,000btu/gallon and 42 gallons per barrel = 114 million barrels of oil a year] = 0.3 MILLION barrels/day.
The 9000 MWatts for 500 million CPUs assumes that on average a cpu consumes 36 watts and is on half of the time.
Electricity is odd in that we use it so many ways with none of them being totally dominant. A sort of death of a thousand cuts. Consumer goods are notorious for the lack of consideration of the energy consumption they will have. Often manufacturing decisions are made that save pennies on a few parts but result in a great deal of energy consumption. Standby power and significant power consumption when switched off is another area where tiny numbers become significant when the number of devices is considered.
"For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it."
- Herman Melville - Moby Dick
a third set of numbers for this conversion. 9000 MWatts = 78 million megawatt-hours = 2.69E14 Btu. Assuming 40% conversion efficiency (very good) = 6.72E14 Btu of oil assuming 140,000btu/gallon and 42 gallons per barrel = 114 million barrels of oil a year] = 0.3 billion barrels/day The 9000 MWatts for 500 million CPUs assumes that on average a cpu consumes 36 watts and is on half of the time. Electricity is odd in that we use it so many ways with none of them being totally dominant. A sort of death of a thousand cuts. Consumer goods are notorious for the lack of consideration of the energy consumption they will have. Often manufacturing decisions are made that save pennies on a few parts but result in a great deal of energy consumption. Standby power and significant power consumption when switched off is another area where tiny numbers become significant when the number of devices is considered. This is common in printers, TV's, and most devices using plug-in transformers. "For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it." - Herman Melville - Moby Dick
While energy savings are significant they are unlikely in most situations to pay for a new LCD monitor. My 17" CRT uses 75watts. Assuming: the monitor is on at full power 24/7, that an LCD uses 35 watts, 10 cent/kWh electricity, a cooling energy savings of 50% of the monitor reduction, and no heating benefits yields an electric savings of $52/year. Turning the monitor off while not at work would reduce this to $20/year.
here is a link to a new article that provides some more detail on this event. http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/aptech_stor y.asp?category=1700&slug=Cellular%20Hacker