There are a few other short stories floating around
The best of these, in terms of direct relevance to The Hobbit and LotR, is "The Quest of Erebor" in Unfinished Tales. If there's ever a movie version of "The Hobbit" (I mean a real movie version, not the made-for-TV catastrophe), I hope this is the opening scene.
I do use KDE, and I've never been "presented with" 100 options (or even five options) for anything. I really can't fathom what GP is referring to. But your hypothetical example for firefox reminds me of my initial with SuSE after switching from Red Hat. The automatic update software would grab the latest SuSE-packaged versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, which for some reason Novell felt compelled to update several times a week. And every time it did this, it would overwrite the skin of my choice with Novell's ugly default skin. That really annoyed me until I uninstalled these two apps with YaST, and then installed the tarballs from the Mozilla site. This, of course, was not a KDE problem.
We do need to live more green, more clean, and more simple. But, the public won't buy off on that message if we keep tying it to the Holy Church of Global Warming Hysteria.
Using labels like that only sounds like you are promoting your own brand of hysteria. As for the latest anti-Gore hysteria (started by a "research institute" with a dubious reputation), it's been debunked; summary here.
It definitely takes more energy to accelerate. However, it really shouldn't be 10X higher fuel consumption.
Why not? Have you ever calculated how much fuel it takes to get a 3000-pound vehicle up to, say, 40 MPH? I have, and it's on the order of.0035 gallons for a Prius (this is only the cost of producing the kinetic energy, not the cost of running accessories, overcoming friction, or overcoming drag). One can accelerate to that speed in as little as 150 feet (this I've never measured, but seems feasible), or in as much as half a mile (or more depending on how patient you are). In the former case, you are getting 8 MPG for that brief time, actually less if you take those other factors into account. You would not get 140 MPG by stretching that acceleration over a half mile, though, simply because the other factors become much more prominent. In either case, though, the total fuel cost, to gain the kinetic energy alone, remains.0035 gallons (ignoring the variability of engine efficiency under different acceleration conditions).
When cruising at a constant 40 MPH -- on flat ground, with no wind -- you very well might get in the neighborhood of 70 to 80 MPG. I realize ancestor wasn't talking about a Prius, but something approaching this ratio probably applies to a wide range of cars. You've stated your belief, and it may or may not be true that fuel meters are not accurate for acceleration, but you haven't given any facts to support your belief. The possibility of a 10X ratio is real, however (and 10X is higher than what ancestor claimed).
I know it's bad form to reply to myself, but I just opened up the so-called study and went to the section on recyclables, to find even more-questionable paragraphs than the ones I quoted from the FA:
Current hybrids have components that are capable of being recycled in a higher proportion of their total social energy costs than non-hybrid models. Light-weight metals (rather than the sound-deadening metals now common in conventional vehicles) and plastics currently have higher desirability so more of the hybrid's non-electronic components can be bought and sold more readily in the scrappage and recycling industry.
With that comes a price, though. It is more energy intense to recycle high-tech electronics, battery(ies), related components, motors, controller(s) and small items such as special gauges and regenerative braking parts.
Whatever costs more to recycle than to scrap will be scrapped (short of government incentives to encourage the former). So be surprised if the recyclable component costs top the non-recyclable by any meaningful metric. Or that hybrids would have higher costs because more of the components/materials are recycled.
In all, while the industry as a whole the cost of recycling is about $119,000 per vehicle, hybrids cost more than $140,000 per vehicle to recycle. Again, the owners of the vehicles do not pay this amount. Recyclers pay and resell at a typical 11 percent profit margin over and above their total expenses.
Surprise! It turns out that a huge chunk of the high cost of hybrids is born by the customers of the recycling industry. Suckers!
How can a vehicle costing $30,000 generate $140,000 in recyclables?
Remember that we are discussing energy usage, not the cost of the vehicle. Over time, for instance, the vehicle will sell on average of five times in its lifetime, each time at a portion of its original cost but generally bringing the lifetime expenditure for the vehicle into the two to four times original cost range depending on desirability and demand.
I'm beginning to understand. If I buy a car for $25000 and sell it for $15000, and that person sells it for $10000, and the next guy sells it for $5000, that's $55000 that the car's consumers pay, collectively, just to take possession of it.
We are also discussing energy consumption, not costs. That $140,000 in recyclable energy costs will generate $160,000 to $220,000 in net revenue to recyclers. Additionally, the support industries to recyclers expend significant energy for the production and maintenance of necessary recycling equipment. Government agencies and those who remanufacture recycled material into other products similarly expend significant quantities of energy in support of the recycling of a single car.
Who'd have thought that a car costing $25000 to the original buyer (and $55000 in total purchase price, as we've seen) could contain enough value to generate so much revenue? Obviously, Toyota has the wrong business model. Instead of selling Priuses to consumers at a mere $25K per pop, they should just build the cars, and then immediately recycle them! I own some Toyota stock, and that would be a big boost to my portfolio.
Toyota currently has the most sophisticated methods of disposing of the nickel batteries found in Prius. But to do so today is likely to remain energy intense and unprofitable until the quantity of such batteries is high enough to encourage others to invest in the development of better recycling methods. CNW calculates that it costs $3 in energy to recycle a conventional lead acid battery and more than $93 for the Prius battery.
That's pretty misleading. A car's lead-acid battery weights about 1/10 the NiMH battery of a Prius. What's more, the Prius battery is probably replaced about 1/3 as often. So the recycling costs by weight are about the same for lead-acid and NiMH batteries. If the previous revenue figures have any validity then $93 is not going to be a deterrent to recycling the NiMH.
I think we've been had. This "study" seems to be just an early (and elaborate) April Fool's joke.
The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?
The ICE in a Prius will usually kick in at much lower than 30 MPH; unless you accelerate very gingerly, it will usually kick in somewhere around 12 MPH. Also, 0 to 30 MPH acceleration is "the largest percentage of gas" only when you aren't going much over 40 MPH, since energy is proportional to the square of velocity. And a physics major who tells you that it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving, without qualifying that he means "in a vacuum" (or at least, under low drag conditions), should change majors. Not that this invalidates anything else in the article, it's just that as an explanation of a hybrid's theory of operation, it isn't very good. You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius's EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.
That's also not a very good characterization of the problems with the old tests. The biggest problem is the city tests, which show many cycles of acceleration from a stop to just barely over 30 MPH. That might hold for urban driving, but these days, city driving in a major metropolitan area (such as Orange County, CA, where I live) includes a lot of acceleration from 0 to 45 or 55 MPH between traffic lights that are often spaced half a mile apart, or less. And accelerating to just 42 MPH uses twice the fuel that accelerating to 30 MPH does. But that doubling applies to all vehicles, not hybrids. Also, the sensitivity to rate of acceleration is not nearly as great as the sensitivity to top-end speed, so I suspect his "3.3 MPH per second" is of only minor relevance.
One thing noticeable about the new tests is that they are done for shorter periods, which does not allow for vehicle warmup. So the new test might be more accurate for those with short commutes (20 minutes or less). For those with long commutes, it might be less accurate. The Prius mileage is demonstrably sensitive to engine temperature, after all.
The point is, you could drive a Prius with a speed profile that follows the old EPA schedule, and you would come close to the old Prius EPA rating (maybe exceed it, even). But you also would have to follow that schedule to get the EPA mileage in any other car.
The actual drop in Prius MPG due to the new testing is more like 16%, from 55 MPG (combined city/hwy) to 46 MPG. Even if the author is singling out the drop in city MPG, which went from 60 MPG to 48 MPG, that is only a 20% drop, not the stated 25% drop. But true city driving (as defined in EPA tests) is a rare thing, at least in my experience. In highway driving, there was only a 12% drop.
The number of drivers will continue to increase, in direct proportion to the population increase, whether I keep my old car or sell it. The number of cars on the road at any point in time is not a function of what I did with my last car. If I hadn't put it on the market, the buyer would have bought from somebody else; maybe the lowest buyer on the totem pole would have rescued an old junker from the scrap pile since one less used car in better condition would have been off the market.
The guy who sells a 10-year old Chevy and buys a brand new Prius isn't causing an increase in the number of 10-year old Chevys on the road; he's causing an increase in the number of Priuses on the road, and probably a decrease in the number of 25-year old Oldsmobiles.
Let me put it another way. Call a total moratorium on new car sales for three years. After the moratorium expires, will the proportion of cars that are over 10 years old be higher, lower, or the same as it is now?
I'm about 40 pages past you. I agree that this is a book that could have benefited a lot from some careful editing. There's a lot of good ideas and good material, and the quality of writing is high, but there's just so much of it. In fact, I don't read nearly as much sci-fi as I used to, just because the writers have become obsessed with creating massive epics (often spanning multiple volumes) instead of the relatively quick-paced writing of, say, Asimov, Heinlein, or Niven in the 60s or 70s. Just compare the original Foundation series with the later supplemental volumes, especially the one by Benford, with its long diversion into apes...
How far into the second book are you? I'm about 70% through that book. It is a tough read, but the conference where different political options are discussed (section I'm reading now) is interesting. I have to admit, this has been an on-again, off-again read for me; I'll pick it up and read a few dozen pages, then let it lie for weeks before picking it up again. It would be easier without all the detailed descriptions of rock formations and plant life, but I have to admire how KSR for his understanding in these areas.
From the article: "Comcast has a responsibility to provide these customers with a superior experience and to address any excessive usage issues that may impact that experience," Comcast spokeswoman Shawn Feddeman said in a statement. "The few customers who are notified of excessive use typically consume exponentially more bandwidth than the average user."
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Ah, I thought by "adapt", you meant a psychological/physiological adjustment. Now I see your meaning.
I wish it were that flexible here. Not that I couldn't come in at 7, leave at 4 -- in theory. Unfortunately, my bosses are prone to call meetings at any hour between 8 and 5 (and occassionally going past 5). Also, there's not much recognition for coming in early, but if you leave early it's obvious to everybody...
An official company policy embracing flexible hours would certainly help. Then I'd go 8 to 5 in summer, 7 to 4 in winter, effectively living on year-round DST.
People adapt to the static offset (40 minutes in our case)
I'm not sure what you mean by "adapt". If I were 10 degrees west of a time zone's reference meridian (with no change in latitude, though in the Pacific zone I think that would put me somewhere near San Clemente Island), then I'd have about an extra 50 minutes of daylight. It wouldn't be dark when I get home from work in winter (except around solstice). I'd probably use the extra sunlight to go running, or some other outdoor activity. I don't like running after dark; I think it's hazardous. I've "adapted" by curtailing my activities on workdays during winter months (and gained weight as a result). But I see many people who "adapt" by running or bicycling at 5:30 PM or 6 PM, when they get home from work, in spite of the winter darkness. I have to keep an eye out for these well-adapted people on my drive home.
That's right. Meetings created after the patch should be fine. But in a large corporation, there are bound to be some meetings created before the patch and recurring over many months or even years, so the potential for resource conflicts is there no matter how soon the patch is available.
I suspect that 2007 won't the end of this story. The change made by Congress was not permanent, and they could either make it permanent, revert to the old dates, or extend DST even longer. When that is decided, I hope the lesson will have been learned and patching will be done earlier, and an automatic rescheduling utility should be released concurrently with the patch. In fact, the latter is the only sure-fire way to avoid problems; just getting it done early is not.
Yep, I'm familiar with the problems of higher latitudes, too, and I made it clear that what benefits me doesn't benefit everyone. I highlighted longitude as one variable that affects people's viewpoints (the further east you live in a given timezone, the more you benefit from DST), mainly because it seems to me that it's a little less obvious, or less frequently thought of, than latitude.
Some of us don't dislike DST per se; we just don't see the point of changing the clocks twice a year. I'd be perfectly happy with year-round DST (which was actually tried once back in '72 or '73, not sure which year). But I live about 3 degrees east of my time zone's reference meridian, and things get dark pretty early in winter. Having DST in the summer doesn't help that. So I'd love year-round DST, but for someone living 5 or 10 degrees west of the meridian it might not be so great, as they'd be driving to work in darkness.
I have a recurring meeting. It is at 11 AM Pacific Time every Tuesday, all year round.
Do I just set it up for 1900 UTC then? No, because when DST takes over, it will be off by one hour. Instead, I set it to 11 AM local time. MS Exchange performs the adjustment and schedules this meeting (and the conference room) for 1900 UTC for the winter months, shifting it to 1800 UTC when the software thinks DST takes effect. It doesn't calculate the times on the fly; it sets up the recurrences when the original scheduling is done. If the meeting was scheduled before Exchange is updated with the new DST, then, for each occurrence between March 11 and April 1, the meeting appears in my Outlook calendar *one hour later than it should*. This is because the updated software knows that 1900 UTC (the scheduled time) is actually noon local time.
What's more, the conference room is now available between 11 AM and noon on Tuesdays, for someone else to schedule a meeting. When IT corrects my meeting schedule for the time change (which they will, as they have advised everyone in the company not to try to do this manually), there's gonna be trouble...
Except that it isn't be pronounced as spelled (people say either "et cetera" or "ee tee cee"). Therefore, it wouldn't qualify as an acronym, if the derivation from the phrase were correct; so "bacronym" isn't appropriate, either.
I'm not familiar with any of the alternatives here, but "Every Thing Configurable" is one I have heard. Still, I think that is just a "reverse initialism" (is there a better phrase for this kind of revisionism?), and that it originally must have meant "et cetera".
The name for that is Kirchoff's Law of Thermal Radiation. A similar principal applies to antennas: an antenna's transmission and reception efficiency and lobe patterns are the same.
However, I'm sure that's not what applies here. When light from an LED passes through a medium, some energy is absorbed, but the energy input is in a very narrow spectrum, while the energy output owing to the heating of the medium is in a broad spectrum (and at low temperatures, insignificant as far as the visible spectrum is concerned). Not really useful for improving the light transmissivity.
Instead, think of a high-quality camera or telescope lens that has an antireflective coating. Some of the light hitting the interface between glass and air will reflect back into the glass. It will bounce around between the two sides of the glass and emerge again with a phase difference from the original light, causing interference. But if there is a coating on the glass, it hits the glass/coating interface, then the coating/air interface. Two separate reflections interfere, and if the coating thickness is right, cancel out. Note that, if absorption is insignificant, the transmitted energy is equal to the incident energy minus the reflected energy, so reducing the reflection in this way means more light gets through. Good lenses have multiple coatings of varying thicknesses so that a broad range of wavelengths gets the benefit.
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The best of these, in terms of direct relevance to The Hobbit and LotR, is "The Quest of Erebor" in Unfinished Tales. If there's ever a movie version of "The Hobbit" (I mean a real movie version, not the made-for-TV catastrophe), I hope this is the opening scene.
I do use KDE, and I've never been "presented with" 100 options (or even five options) for anything. I really can't fathom what GP is referring to. But your hypothetical example for firefox reminds me of my initial with SuSE after switching from Red Hat. The automatic update software would grab the latest SuSE-packaged versions of Firefox and Thunderbird, which for some reason Novell felt compelled to update several times a week. And every time it did this, it would overwrite the skin of my choice with Novell's ugly default skin. That really annoyed me until I uninstalled these two apps with YaST, and then installed the tarballs from the Mozilla site. This, of course, was not a KDE problem.
Or, "On Soviet border, Amazons close book on you!"
Sorry, couldn't help it.
Je ne sais quoi.
We do need to live more green, more clean, and more simple. But, the public won't buy off on that message if we keep tying it to the Holy Church of Global Warming Hysteria.
Using labels like that only sounds like you are promoting your own brand of hysteria. As for the latest anti-Gore hysteria (started by a "research institute" with a dubious reputation), it's been debunked; summary here.
Why not? Have you ever calculated how much fuel it takes to get a 3000-pound vehicle up to, say, 40 MPH? I have, and it's on the order of .0035 gallons for a Prius (this is only the cost of producing the kinetic energy, not the cost of running accessories, overcoming friction, or overcoming drag). One can accelerate to that speed in as little as 150 feet (this I've never measured, but seems feasible), or in as much as half a mile (or more depending on how patient you are). In the former case, you are getting 8 MPG for that brief time, actually less if you take those other factors into account. You would not get 140 MPG by stretching that acceleration over a half mile, though, simply because the other factors become much more prominent. In either case, though, the total fuel cost, to gain the kinetic energy alone, remains .0035 gallons (ignoring the variability of engine efficiency under different acceleration conditions).
When cruising at a constant 40 MPH -- on flat ground, with no wind -- you very well might get in the neighborhood of 70 to 80 MPG. I realize ancestor wasn't talking about a Prius, but something approaching this ratio probably applies to a wide range of cars. You've stated your belief, and it may or may not be true that fuel meters are not accurate for acceleration, but you haven't given any facts to support your belief. The possibility of a 10X ratio is real, however (and 10X is higher than what ancestor claimed).
Current hybrids have components that are capable of being recycled in a higher proportion of their total social energy costs than non-hybrid models. Light-weight metals (rather than the sound-deadening metals now common in conventional vehicles) and plastics currently have higher desirability so more of the hybrid's non-electronic components can be bought and sold more readily in the scrappage and recycling industry.
With that comes a price, though. It is more energy intense to recycle high-tech electronics, battery(ies), related components, motors, controller(s) and small items such as special gauges and regenerative braking parts.
Whatever costs more to recycle than to scrap will be scrapped (short of government incentives to encourage the former). So be surprised if the recyclable component costs top the non-recyclable by any meaningful metric. Or that hybrids would have higher costs because more of the components/materials are recycled.
In all, while the industry as a whole the cost of recycling is about $119,000 per vehicle, hybrids cost more than $140,000 per vehicle to recycle. Again, the owners of the vehicles do not pay this amount. Recyclers pay and resell at a typical 11 percent profit margin over and above their total expenses.
Surprise! It turns out that a huge chunk of the high cost of hybrids is born by the customers of the recycling industry. Suckers!
How can a vehicle costing $30,000 generate $140,000 in recyclables?
Remember that we are discussing energy usage, not the cost of the vehicle. Over time, for instance, the vehicle will sell on average of five times in its lifetime, each time at a portion of its original cost but generally bringing the lifetime expenditure for the vehicle into the two to four times original cost range depending on desirability and demand.
I'm beginning to understand. If I buy a car for $25000 and sell it for $15000, and that person sells it for $10000, and the next guy sells it for $5000, that's $55000 that the car's consumers pay, collectively, just to take possession of it.
We are also discussing energy consumption, not costs. That $140,000 in recyclable energy costs will generate $160,000 to $220,000 in net revenue to recyclers. Additionally, the support industries to recyclers expend significant energy for the production and maintenance of necessary recycling equipment. Government agencies and those who remanufacture recycled material into other products similarly expend significant quantities of energy in support of the recycling of a single car.
Who'd have thought that a car costing $25000 to the original buyer (and $55000 in total purchase price, as we've seen) could contain enough value to generate so much revenue? Obviously, Toyota has the wrong business model. Instead of selling Priuses to consumers at a mere $25K per pop, they should just build the cars, and then immediately recycle them! I own some Toyota stock, and that would be a big boost to my portfolio.
Toyota currently has the most sophisticated methods of disposing of the nickel batteries found in Prius. But to do so today is likely to remain energy intense and unprofitable until the quantity of such batteries is high enough to encourage others to invest in the development of better recycling methods. CNW calculates that it costs $3 in energy to recycle a conventional lead acid battery and more than $93 for the Prius battery.
That's pretty misleading. A car's lead-acid battery weights about 1/10 the NiMH battery of a Prius. What's more, the Prius battery is probably replaced about 1/3 as often. So the recycling costs by weight are about the same for lead-acid and NiMH batteries. If the previous revenue figures have any validity then $93 is not going to be a deterrent to recycling the NiMH.
I think we've been had. This "study" seems to be just an early (and elaborate) April Fool's joke.
The Prius is powered by not one, but two engines: a standard 76 horsepower, 1.5-liter gas engine found in most cars today and a battery- powered engine that deals out 67 horsepower and a whooping 295ft/lbs of torque, below 2000 revolutions per minute. Essentially, the Toyota Synergy Drive system, as it is so called, propels the car from a dead stop to up to 30mph. This is where the largest percent of gas is consumed. As any physics major can tell you, it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving. The battery is recharged through the braking system, as well as when the gasoline engine takes over anywhere north of 30mph. It seems like a great energy efficient and environmentally sound car, right?
The ICE in a Prius will usually kick in at much lower than 30 MPH; unless you accelerate very gingerly, it will usually kick in somewhere around 12 MPH. Also, 0 to 30 MPH acceleration is "the largest percentage of gas" only when you aren't going much over 40 MPH, since energy is proportional to the square of velocity. And a physics major who tells you that it takes more energy to get an object moving than to keep it moving, without qualifying that he means "in a vacuum" (or at least, under low drag conditions), should change majors. Not that this invalidates anything else in the article, it's just that as an explanation of a hybrid's theory of operation, it isn't very good.
You would be right if you went by the old government EPA estimates, which netted the Prius an incredible 60 miles per gallon in the city and 51 miles per gallon on the highway. Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were, which consisted of highway speeds limited to 55mph and acceleration of only 3.3 mph per second. The new tests which affect all 2008 models give a much more realistic rating with highway speeds of 80mph and acceleration of 8mph per second. This has dropped the Prius's EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.
That's also not a very good characterization of the problems with the old tests. The biggest problem is the city tests, which show many cycles of acceleration from a stop to just barely over 30 MPH. That might hold for urban driving, but these days, city driving in a major metropolitan area (such as Orange County, CA, where I live) includes a lot of acceleration from 0 to 45 or 55 MPH between traffic lights that are often spaced half a mile apart, or less. And accelerating to just 42 MPH uses twice the fuel that accelerating to 30 MPH does. But that doubling applies to all vehicles, not hybrids. Also, the sensitivity to rate of acceleration is not nearly as great as the sensitivity to top-end speed, so I suspect his "3.3 MPH per second" is of only minor relevance.
One thing noticeable about the new tests is that they are done for shorter periods, which does not allow for vehicle warmup. So the new test might be more accurate for those with short commutes (20 minutes or less). For those with long commutes, it might be less accurate. The Prius mileage is demonstrably sensitive to engine temperature, after all.
The point is, you could drive a Prius with a speed profile that follows the old EPA schedule, and you would come close to the old Prius EPA rating (maybe exceed it, even). But you also would have to follow that schedule to get the EPA mileage in any other car.
The actual drop in Prius MPG due to the new testing is more like 16%, from 55 MPG (combined city/hwy) to 46 MPG. Even if the author is singling out the drop in city MPG, which went from 60 MPG to 48 MPG, that is only a 20% drop, not the stated 25% drop. But true city driving (as defined in EPA tests) is a rare thing, at least in my experience. In highway driving, there was only a 12% drop.
The guy who sells a 10-year old Chevy and buys a brand new Prius isn't causing an increase in the number of 10-year old Chevys on the road; he's causing an increase in the number of Priuses on the road, and probably a decrease in the number of 25-year old Oldsmobiles.
Let me put it another way. Call a total moratorium on new car sales for three years. After the moratorium expires, will the proportion of cars that are over 10 years old be higher, lower, or the same as it is now?
I'm about 40 pages past you. I agree that this is a book that could have benefited a lot from some careful editing. There's a lot of good ideas and good material, and the quality of writing is high, but there's just so much of it. In fact, I don't read nearly as much sci-fi as I used to, just because the writers have become obsessed with creating massive epics (often spanning multiple volumes) instead of the relatively quick-paced writing of, say, Asimov, Heinlein, or Niven in the 60s or 70s. Just compare the original Foundation series with the later supplemental volumes, especially the one by Benford, with its long diversion into apes...
How far into the second book are you? I'm about 70% through that book. It is a tough read, but the conference where different political options are discussed (section I'm reading now) is interesting. I have to admit, this has been an on-again, off-again read for me; I'll pick it up and read a few dozen pages, then let it lie for weeks before picking it up again. It would be easier without all the detailed descriptions of rock formations and plant life, but I have to admire how KSR for his understanding in these areas.
At the same time, it opens up another path for somebody who wants to frame somebody else for the crime.
Probably not, since they are in the UK.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Ah, I thought by "adapt", you meant a psychological/physiological adjustment. Now I see your meaning.
I wish it were that flexible here. Not that I couldn't come in at 7, leave at 4 -- in theory. Unfortunately, my bosses are prone to call meetings at any hour between 8 and 5 (and occassionally going past 5). Also, there's not much recognition for coming in early, but if you leave early it's obvious to everybody...
An official company policy embracing flexible hours would certainly help. Then I'd go 8 to 5 in summer, 7 to 4 in winter, effectively living on year-round DST.
I'm not sure what you mean by "adapt". If I were 10 degrees west of a time zone's reference meridian (with no change in latitude, though in the Pacific zone I think that would put me somewhere near San Clemente Island), then I'd have about an extra 50 minutes of daylight. It wouldn't be dark when I get home from work in winter (except around solstice). I'd probably use the extra sunlight to go running, or some other outdoor activity. I don't like running after dark; I think it's hazardous. I've "adapted" by curtailing my activities on workdays during winter months (and gained weight as a result). But I see many people who "adapt" by running or bicycling at 5:30 PM or 6 PM, when they get home from work, in spite of the winter darkness. I have to keep an eye out for these well-adapted people on my drive home.
That's right. Meetings created after the patch should be fine. But in a large corporation, there are bound to be some meetings created before the patch and recurring over many months or even years, so the potential for resource conflicts is there no matter how soon the patch is available.
I suspect that 2007 won't the end of this story. The change made by Congress was not permanent, and they could either make it permanent, revert to the old dates, or extend DST even longer. When that is decided, I hope the lesson will have been learned and patching will be done earlier, and an automatic rescheduling utility should be released concurrently with the patch. In fact, the latter is the only sure-fire way to avoid problems; just getting it done early is not.
Yep, I'm familiar with the problems of higher latitudes, too, and I made it clear that what benefits me doesn't benefit everyone. I highlighted longitude as one variable that affects people's viewpoints (the further east you live in a given timezone, the more you benefit from DST), mainly because it seems to me that it's a little less obvious, or less frequently thought of, than latitude.
Some of us don't dislike DST per se; we just don't see the point of changing the clocks twice a year. I'd be perfectly happy with year-round DST (which was actually tried once back in '72 or '73, not sure which year). But I live about 3 degrees east of my time zone's reference meridian, and things get dark pretty early in winter. Having DST in the summer doesn't help that. So I'd love year-round DST, but for someone living 5 or 10 degrees west of the meridian it might not be so great, as they'd be driving to work in darkness.
Like arriving at work two hours late?
UTC doesn't solve it.
I have a recurring meeting. It is at 11 AM Pacific Time every Tuesday, all year round.
Do I just set it up for 1900 UTC then? No, because when DST takes over, it will be off by one hour. Instead, I set it to 11 AM local time. MS Exchange performs the adjustment and schedules this meeting (and the conference room) for 1900 UTC for the winter months, shifting it to 1800 UTC when the software thinks DST takes effect. It doesn't calculate the times on the fly; it sets up the recurrences when the original scheduling is done. If the meeting was scheduled before Exchange is updated with the new DST, then, for each occurrence between March 11 and April 1, the meeting appears in my Outlook calendar *one hour later than it should*. This is because the updated software knows that 1900 UTC (the scheduled time) is actually noon local time.
What's more, the conference room is now available between 11 AM and noon on Tuesdays, for someone else to schedule a meeting. When IT corrects my meeting schedule for the time change (which they will, as they have advised everyone in the company not to try to do this manually), there's gonna be trouble...
Except that it isn't be pronounced as spelled (people say either "et cetera" or "ee tee cee"). Therefore, it wouldn't qualify as an acronym, if the derivation from the phrase were correct; so "bacronym" isn't appropriate, either.
I'm not familiar with any of the alternatives here, but "Every Thing Configurable" is one I have heard. Still, I think that is just a "reverse initialism" (is there a better phrase for this kind of revisionism?), and that it originally must have meant "et cetera".
However, I'm sure that's not what applies here. When light from an LED passes through a medium, some energy is absorbed, but the energy input is in a very narrow spectrum, while the energy output owing to the heating of the medium is in a broad spectrum (and at low temperatures, insignificant as far as the visible spectrum is concerned). Not really useful for improving the light transmissivity.
Instead, think of a high-quality camera or telescope lens that has an antireflective coating. Some of the light hitting the interface between glass and air will reflect back into the glass. It will bounce around between the two sides of the glass and emerge again with a phase difference from the original light, causing interference. But if there is a coating on the glass, it hits the glass/coating interface, then the coating/air interface. Two separate reflections interfere, and if the coating thickness is right, cancel out. Note that, if absorption is insignificant, the transmitted energy is equal to the incident energy minus the reflected energy, so reducing the reflection in this way means more light gets through. Good lenses have multiple coatings of varying thicknesses so that a broad range of wavelengths gets the benefit.