It's certainly arguable that some scientists are behaving as political operatives, including scientists at the Climate Research Unit. They have behaved in a very unscientific manner - for years refusing to release the raw data behind studies, first by fighting FOIA Requests, then by claiming the original data was lost. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/
They have also cherry-picked data to produce the desired results. One study involved tree cores to produce a historical temperature record. They used data from 12 tree cores, and showed a strong warming trend. However, the 12 cores chosen were part of a larger set. Taking data from the entire set showed no warming trend. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
For Windows users, Paint.net is an awesome app. I think if more people knew about it, there would be a lot fewer pirate Photoshop installations out there.
I personally love my netbook. Small enough to take everywhere. Cheap enough that it's not a big deal if something happens to it. It's no speed demon, but it's fast enough for most of what I want to do with it. I wouldn't want one as my only PC, but for the price of a laptop that would do everything, I can get a desktop and the netbook.
And I say it as a guy who used to role-play in Middle Earth setting a lot, can translate most Adunaic names without a dictionary, and name the 20th King of Gondor if woken up in the middle of the night.
A bit portion of the cost overruns in building nuke plants comes from legal costs fighting the lawsuits from environmental groups. Lawsuits filed for the sole purpose of delaying and driving up construction costs until the project is abandoned. The lawsuits also result in construction delays, which create further costs.
Then the environmentalists say that we shouldn't built nuke plants because they cost too much.
I think the real power solution is going to be along the lines of legislation that requires all new structures to produce at least some of their own power. As time goes on, this requirement should get steeper. In 40 years, if 60% of the structures in the US were producing 20-30% of their own power, I think it would be be relief enough that we wouldn't need to panic and pour a few trillion into R&Ding and building and deploying 5 more reactors per state or whatever, breeder or not.
I don't see how that is going to work. Imagine any major city - the thousands and thousands of buildings. You obviously can't put wind towers on all of them. Wind patterns in urban areas are horrible for power generation anyway - that's why you build wind farms in open country. PV Solar? You'll eventually run out of the resources to make them. And that's even not even considering the fact that small-scale wind and solar produce fairly negligible amounts of power.
Are we going to build mini-nuke plants in every building? Or even mini-coal or natural gas? Those all scale up very well - the bigger ones are a lot more efficient than the small ones. Centralized power production means more efficient power production.
BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
I seem to recall, a good portion of the cost overruns were due to construction delays. The source of the delays? Lawsuits from environmental groups trying to stop the plants from being built.
I have already refused to pay for any more movie tickets because of this--I'll be damned if I'm paying $10 to sit through a bunch of TV commercials at the beginning of a movie (anyone remember when the beginning of a movie had a cartoon and a couple of trailers, and *NO* soda or car commercials?). Now the DMCA has turned me into a criminal just because I insist on controlling the $20 disc I legitimately *bought*.
I fortunately live in an area that has a theatre chain that doesn't hate its customers. I generally only see 4-5 movies a year in theatres, but I've learned to stick with the good ones. Last time I went outside my usual chain, I sat through 15 minutes of product commercials before the movie previews even started. I am already aware of the existence of Pepsi, thank you very much, and the only mention of cell phones I want is a warning that anyone talking on one during the movie will be beaten and tossed into the dumpster.
The Warren Theatres in Wichita, KS. Frankly, I can't imagine how the business model hasn't caught on better. Build a nicer theatre than the others in town, keep the place clean, don't annoy people with commercials before the previews, (Most people don't mind a few movie previews - we are here for a movie after all,) and charge fifty cents more per ticket. Going to see a movie is a small luxury that nearly anyone can afford, and most people are even willing to pay a small premium for a better experience.
They don't even play the MPAA's "Don't download movies" propaganda - Apparently *somebody* finally figured out that moviegoers pay for their entertainment. They did used to play a Looney Tunes cartoon before the movie started, but they quit doing that a few years ago. I realize I probably sound like a paid shill, but what would be the point of that? Anyone in south-central Kansas already knows about the biggest theater chain in the area. Maybe my only point is to provoke jealousy in the rest of the country.
Why does the phrase, "you could troll them with blimps" seem so inherently funny to me? After thinking about it for awhile, internet trolls in blimps would make the perfect arch-enemy for XKCD's cape-wearing, hot-air-balloon-borne, Cory Doctoro, but even on it's own, "you could troll them with blimps" seems so beautifully absurd.
Given your attitude I expect you to return any social security payments you receive and decline any medicare coverage.
If that offer includes returning all social security and medicare taxes I've paid, then where do I sign? I'd even be willing to forgo getting interest on it in exchange for the chance to opt-out. I'd prefer to have my money in a retirement plan that doesn't look like Bernard Madoff's business structure.
Plus, the last time I was there, they had a decommissioned SR-71 Blackbird (wikimedia image) hanging from the ceiling just inside the front door, with the tip of the nose just out of reach as you walk in.
They're not going to get rid of it anytime soon. The current entrance lobby was built specifically for the SR-71. The space craft restoration exhibits are still there, including the restored Liberty Bell Mercury capsule. (It had been on a national tour for the first year or so after restoration, but as far as I know, it's now staying in the Cosmosphere).
Their exhibit crew really is top notch - I love their exhibits on the cold war space-race. I was initially confused when I heard that a space museum was getting a piece of the Berlin Wall, but they did a masterful job with the display and you can't help but feel the cold war tension when walking through.
The Air Force museum in Dayton Ohio is bigger and better than the Smithsonian Air & Space museum. At the Smithsonian, the exhibits hang from the ceiling out of reach. At The AF museum, you can touch the airplane that bombed Nagasaki, stick your head in a Gemini capsule that orbited Earth, climb into the bomb bay of a B-29, hand turn a Nazi jet engine prototype, view the Red Baron's medals, kick the tiers of fighter jets, etc.
If you're anywhere near the middle of the country, check out the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS. Skip the IMAX and Planetarium shows - you can see those anywhere. Check out the museum. Great exhibits on all stages of the space program, from the Nazi's V2 rocket program, through Sputnik and the space race, (seen from both sides - they have the largest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside of the former USSR,) to the Shuttle and the International Space Station. They have a retired SR-71, a full-size mockup of an Apollo landing site, and the actual Liberty Bell Mercury capsule, plus a very detailed exhibit about how it was recovered from the bottom of the ocean.
One of these days, I'm going to go through it by myself so I can take as much time as I want without my family getting bored.
They might actually improve smog. I seem to recall that smog is partly caused by poorly tuned engines, and partly by impurities in fuel, primarily in diesel fuel. Synthetically produced biofuel wouldn't have the same impurities.
The biofuels discussed in the article need concentrated CO2. To run the process on an industrial scale, you need industrial quantities of CO2. That is not something you just pull out of the sky. You get it as a byproduct of some other industrial process (like power generation).
Those "other industrial processes" would likely be pumping said CO2 into the atmosphere. Just think of the sky as the famous middleman that is always being cut out.
Don't be so dismissive of bio-fuels. Remember that the purpose of bio-fuel is to replace fossil fuels, and the CO2 that goes with burning them. That advantage holds true here as well. Yes, the carbon is released when the bio-fuels are burned. But (CO2 from industrial process into atmosphere plus CO2 from fossil fuel into atmosphere) > (CO2 from industrial process made into bio-fuel, then burned and released into atmosphere) You aren't just moving around carbon production, you're also producing a lot less of it. To take your CO2 shell game analogy, before, the shell game had a ball under 2 shells, now it's just under 1.
If you read the article, page 2 also mentions using the ethanol to replace fossil fuels in the production of plastics, which would be carbon-negative.
That's why XWing and it's sequels were called "Space Sims". You really had to know how to work your craft. Part of what made Tie Fighter so great was they way they worked you into more complex craft. Start you out in the Tie Fighter so you can learn the basics. Move up to the Tie Bomber to learn dealing with different missile loadouts. Graduate to the Tie Advanced and you get shields. Fly the Gunboat and you learn about the Ion Cannon and disabling ships. Eventually you get the Tie Defender - the ultimate in dogfighting, and the Missile Boat which is fast and carries a load of warheads, but is fairly fragile. Somewhere, beam weapons get added into the mix. But you learn little bits at a time, gradually ending up at the "Do everything" ships once you have mastered the easier stuff.
I think the major reason that Space Sims, and even Flight Sims, have mostly died off is that game makers want to be able to do cross platform releases. You end up with "space shooters" like Rogue Squadron mentioned above. They can be fun, but there's nowhere near the depth.
Tie Fighter... X-Wing was good, and you were playing the good side. But Tie Fighter... the story was better, the game mechanics and graphics were better and you got to fly all sort of new ships. And it was balanced just right... for a game, anyway. And there were large battles going around you. The game was the ultimate space combat "sim" for me.
I wasted far too much of my high-school/college years playing Tie Fighter. (It was a fairly old game even then, but being a DOS game, it was easy to get running on any PC handy, including in classrooms with video projectors.) Tie Fighter really was the high point of the series. XWing vs Tie Fighter was alright, but it was too heavily geared toward multiplayer in an age before broadband. The single-player mode was a thrown-together afterthought. And XWing Alliance was fun at first, but the game mechanics just weren't there. I think part of the problem was trying to use the turret guns. It was necessary on a lot of the "Family Business" missions. And too many of the missions seemed to focus on trying to intercept missiles or protect small, fragile ships. One of the things I loved about Tie Fighter was flying my tiny craft along some huge enemy ship, just skimming the surface, taking out gun batteries. Alliance seemed like too much micro-managing.
But for an even greater sense of "small part in a big war", I humbly direct you to Decent: Freespace and Freespace 2. It's a shame Volition went under - I'd really love another chapter in that story.
Slashdot Mirror
He means he resets passwords and changes backup tapes.
(I kid, I kid...)
This...
IS...
SPARTAAA!!
It's certainly arguable that some scientists are behaving as political operatives, including scientists at the Climate Research Unit. They have behaved in a very unscientific manner - for years refusing to release the raw data behind studies, first by fighting FOIA Requests, then by claiming the original data was lost. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/08/13/cru_missing/
They have also cherry-picked data to produce the desired results. One study involved tree cores to produce a historical temperature record. They used data from 12 tree cores, and showed a strong warming trend. However, the 12 cores chosen were part of a larger set. Taking data from the entire set showed no warming trend. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/
For Windows users, Paint.net is an awesome app. I think if more people knew about it, there would be a lot fewer pirate Photoshop installations out there.
I personally love my netbook. Small enough to take everywhere. Cheap enough that it's not a big deal if something happens to it. It's no speed demon, but it's fast enough for most of what I want to do with it. I wouldn't want one as my only PC, but for the price of a laptop that would do everything, I can get a desktop and the netbook.
And I say it as a guy who used to role-play in Middle Earth setting a lot, can translate most Adunaic names without a dictionary, and name the 20th King of Gondor if woken up in the middle of the night.
Not, I think we can safely assume, by a woman.
(I kid, I kid)
A bit portion of the cost overruns in building nuke plants comes from legal costs fighting the lawsuits from environmental groups. Lawsuits filed for the sole purpose of delaying and driving up construction costs until the project is abandoned. The lawsuits also result in construction delays, which create further costs.
Then the environmentalists say that we shouldn't built nuke plants because they cost too much.
Maybe we could build generators attached to giant, human-sized hamster wheels and make environmentalists run in them.
I think the real power solution is going to be along the lines of legislation that requires all new structures to produce at least some of their own power. As time goes on, this requirement should get steeper. In 40 years, if 60% of the structures in the US were producing 20-30% of their own power, I think it would be be relief enough that we wouldn't need to panic and pour a few trillion into R&Ding and building and deploying 5 more reactors per state or whatever, breeder or not.
I don't see how that is going to work. Imagine any major city - the thousands and thousands of buildings. You obviously can't put wind towers on all of them. Wind patterns in urban areas are horrible for power generation anyway - that's why you build wind farms in open country. PV Solar? You'll eventually run out of the resources to make them. And that's even not even considering the fact that small-scale wind and solar produce fairly negligible amounts of power.
Are we going to build mini-nuke plants in every building? Or even mini-coal or natural gas? Those all scale up very well - the bigger ones are a lot more efficient than the small ones. Centralized power production means more efficient power production.
BTW, there is no inherent reason to suppose that huge cost overruns are an inevitable part of nuclear power plant construction. The common occurrence in the 1970s was an artifact of several conditions of the time: high inflation and thus punishing interest rates, the immature regulatory environment (safety changes were needed at the time, but this has been stable now for over 25 years), and immature (one might say poor) plant design. The first few plants might still be prone to overruns, but it is reasonable to expect this to disappear with practical construction experience.
I seem to recall, a good portion of the cost overruns were due to construction delays. The source of the delays? Lawsuits from environmental groups trying to stop the plants from being built.
I have already refused to pay for any more movie tickets because of this--I'll be damned if I'm paying $10 to sit through a bunch of TV commercials at the beginning of a movie (anyone remember when the beginning of a movie had a cartoon and a couple of trailers, and *NO* soda or car commercials?). Now the DMCA has turned me into a criminal just because I insist on controlling the $20 disc I legitimately *bought*.
I fortunately live in an area that has a theatre chain that doesn't hate its customers. I generally only see 4-5 movies a year in theatres, but I've learned to stick with the good ones. Last time I went outside my usual chain, I sat through 15 minutes of product commercials before the movie previews even started. I am already aware of the existence of Pepsi, thank you very much, and the only mention of cell phones I want is a warning that anyone talking on one during the movie will be beaten and tossed into the dumpster.
The Warren Theatres in Wichita, KS. Frankly, I can't imagine how the business model hasn't caught on better. Build a nicer theatre than the others in town, keep the place clean, don't annoy people with commercials before the previews, (Most people don't mind a few movie previews - we are here for a movie after all,) and charge fifty cents more per ticket. Going to see a movie is a small luxury that nearly anyone can afford, and most people are even willing to pay a small premium for a better experience.
They don't even play the MPAA's "Don't download movies" propaganda - Apparently *somebody* finally figured out that moviegoers pay for their entertainment. They did used to play a Looney Tunes cartoon before the movie started, but they quit doing that a few years ago. I realize I probably sound like a paid shill, but what would be the point of that? Anyone in south-central Kansas already knows about the biggest theater chain in the area. Maybe my only point is to provoke jealousy in the rest of the country.
Why does the phrase, "you could troll them with blimps" seem so inherently funny to me? After thinking about it for awhile, internet trolls in blimps would make the perfect arch-enemy for XKCD's cape-wearing, hot-air-balloon-borne, Cory Doctoro, but even on it's own, "you could troll them with blimps" seems so beautifully absurd.
Given your attitude I expect you to return any social security payments you receive and decline any medicare coverage.
If that offer includes returning all social security and medicare taxes I've paid, then where do I sign? I'd even be willing to forgo getting interest on it in exchange for the chance to opt-out. I'd prefer to have my money in a retirement plan that doesn't look like Bernard Madoff's business structure.
Plus, the last time I was there, they had a decommissioned SR-71 Blackbird (wikimedia image) hanging from the ceiling just inside the front door, with the tip of the nose just out of reach as you walk in.
They're not going to get rid of it anytime soon. The current entrance lobby was built specifically for the SR-71. The space craft restoration exhibits are still there, including the restored Liberty Bell Mercury capsule. (It had been on a national tour for the first year or so after restoration, but as far as I know, it's now staying in the Cosmosphere).
Their exhibit crew really is top notch - I love their exhibits on the cold war space-race. I was initially confused when I heard that a space museum was getting a piece of the Berlin Wall, but they did a masterful job with the display and you can't help but feel the cold war tension when walking through.
The Air Force museum in Dayton Ohio is bigger and better than the Smithsonian Air & Space museum. At the Smithsonian, the exhibits hang from the ceiling out of reach. At The AF museum, you can touch the airplane that bombed Nagasaki, stick your head in a Gemini capsule that orbited Earth, climb into the bomb bay of a B-29, hand turn a Nazi jet engine prototype, view the Red Baron's medals, kick the tiers of fighter jets, etc.
If you're anywhere near the middle of the country, check out the Kansas Cosmosphere in Hutchinson, KS. Skip the IMAX and Planetarium shows - you can see those anywhere. Check out the museum. Great exhibits on all stages of the space program, from the Nazi's V2 rocket program, through Sputnik and the space race, (seen from both sides - they have the largest collection of Soviet space artifacts outside of the former USSR,) to the Shuttle and the International Space Station. They have a retired SR-71, a full-size mockup of an Apollo landing site, and the actual Liberty Bell Mercury capsule, plus a very detailed exhibit about how it was recovered from the bottom of the ocean.
One of these days, I'm going to go through it by myself so I can take as much time as I want without my family getting bored.
Eventually we'd end up with IP Voltron
The Mafia is more responsible with how it spends its money.
I think my next RPG character will be named Metalitz.
They might actually improve smog. I seem to recall that smog is partly caused by poorly tuned engines, and partly by impurities in fuel, primarily in diesel fuel. Synthetically produced biofuel wouldn't have the same impurities.
The biofuels discussed in the article need concentrated CO2.
To run the process on an industrial scale, you need industrial quantities of CO2.
That is not something you just pull out of the sky.
You get it as a byproduct of some other industrial process (like power generation).
Those "other industrial processes" would likely be pumping said CO2 into the atmosphere. Just think of the sky as the famous middleman that is always being cut out.
Don't be so dismissive of bio-fuels. Remember that the purpose of bio-fuel is to replace fossil fuels, and the CO2 that goes with burning them. That advantage holds true here as well. Yes, the carbon is released when the bio-fuels are burned. But (CO2 from industrial process into atmosphere plus CO2 from fossil fuel into atmosphere) > (CO2 from industrial process made into bio-fuel, then burned and released into atmosphere) You aren't just moving around carbon production, you're also producing a lot less of it. To take your CO2 shell game analogy, before, the shell game had a ball under 2 shells, now it's just under 1.
If you read the article, page 2 also mentions using the ethanol to replace fossil fuels in the production of plastics, which would be carbon-negative.
You had feet?
There was originally 5. With Michael's death, they're down to 3. (Shortly after the plastic surgery binge started, Tito was stripped for parts.)
That's why XWing and it's sequels were called "Space Sims". You really had to know how to work your craft. Part of what made Tie Fighter so great was they way they worked you into more complex craft. Start you out in the Tie Fighter so you can learn the basics. Move up to the Tie Bomber to learn dealing with different missile loadouts. Graduate to the Tie Advanced and you get shields. Fly the Gunboat and you learn about the Ion Cannon and disabling ships. Eventually you get the Tie Defender - the ultimate in dogfighting, and the Missile Boat which is fast and carries a load of warheads, but is fairly fragile. Somewhere, beam weapons get added into the mix. But you learn little bits at a time, gradually ending up at the "Do everything" ships once you have mastered the easier stuff.
I think the major reason that Space Sims, and even Flight Sims, have mostly died off is that game makers want to be able to do cross platform releases. You end up with "space shooters" like Rogue Squadron mentioned above. They can be fun, but there's nowhere near the depth.
Tie Fighter... X-Wing was good, and you were playing the good side. But Tie Fighter... the story was better, the game mechanics and graphics were better and you got to fly all sort of new ships. And it was balanced just right... for a game, anyway. And there were large battles going around you. The game was the ultimate space combat "sim" for me.
I wasted far too much of my high-school/college years playing Tie Fighter. (It was a fairly old game even then, but being a DOS game, it was easy to get running on any PC handy, including in classrooms with video projectors.) Tie Fighter really was the high point of the series. XWing vs Tie Fighter was alright, but it was too heavily geared toward multiplayer in an age before broadband. The single-player mode was a thrown-together afterthought. And XWing Alliance was fun at first, but the game mechanics just weren't there. I think part of the problem was trying to use the turret guns. It was necessary on a lot of the "Family Business" missions. And too many of the missions seemed to focus on trying to intercept missiles or protect small, fragile ships. One of the things I loved about Tie Fighter was flying my tiny craft along some huge enemy ship, just skimming the surface, taking out gun batteries. Alliance seemed like too much micro-managing.
But for an even greater sense of "small part in a big war", I humbly direct you to Decent: Freespace and Freespace 2. It's a shame Volition went under - I'd really love another chapter in that story.