So maybe it doesn't always roll downhill, maybe it rolls "down" south, having been pushed that direction. What direction would, say, a husky go when taken to the north pole (magnetic or spin-axis)?
For various ages & stages:
Fade - Robert Cormier
Monkey Wrench Gang; Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
Spook Country - William Gibson
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain - (I found it slow at first, but it's an excellent commentary on the gullibility of people in Medieval times - wink)
The Right Stuff; Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
Hackers - Steven Levy
What the Dormouse Said - John Markoff
(Try reading Electric Kool-Aid and Dormouse back-to-back to glimpse some of the cross-fertilization that occurred.)
Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac ( I liked On The Road, but found it, well, aimless.)
East of Eden - John Steinbeck (The one Steinbeck I enjoyed; I hated the rest, including The Grapes of Wrath in particular. )
I'd skip Catcher in the Rye. Not bad, just seemed like a waste of time.
Daybreak 2250 AD - Andre Norton ( I suspect other Norton works are good, but can't say. )
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
2001, 2010, 2061, 3001 - Arthur C. Clarke ( Read them all, in order. You can watch the film 2001 instead, as there's nothing more in the book, meaning-wise. Since everyone should watch 2001 anyhow, there you go. )
Cradle - Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee
Everything written by Carl Hiaasen, but maybe start with Sick Puppy or Striptease. They fictions are funny, but also excellent commentaries on our world (not just Florida).
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman; What Do You Care What Other People Think?; Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
Maybe not for everyone:
Daemon; Kill Decision - Daniel Suarez ( Both very good, I enjoyed them a little more than Gibson, but it's hard to beat Stephenson. )
Not long after developing nukes, some of the scientists and engineers formed Federation of American Scientists. A good question to ask of an engineer would be whether (s)he knows of it and how (s)he feels about its mission.
Difficult to imagine the powers that be caring much about application security if they're willing to outsource sysadmin duties. And yes, I know that's common. But that doesn't make it sensible from a risk management viewpoint.
The idea that we haven't found extraterrestrial civilizations because once they're sufficiently advanced for us to spot, they're sufficiently advanced to destroy themselves in some catastrophic explosion needs modification. Maybe it's just the accumulation of things like microscopic plastic bits, out-of-control planetary heating, mercury contamination, GMO accidents, viral epidemics, ozone destruction,... such that they disappear in a century after making it into space—long before they have time to make self-sufficient colonies on other planets.
Actually, it's what marketing types THINK would be consumer demand, since they haven't actually tried it in the US. I think we all know how reliable that is.
Or... have a contest. Maybe someone will design long narrow suspension bridges and you can turn on some fans and have a Tacoma Narrows incident right in the office.
Whatever you do for trays or supports, where the cables are visible from below, go with specific colors to match the decor. I still can't figure out why with all the colors available for little-to-no extra cost, people go for... gray.
Any chance of running them underneath the floor surface? Route channels in the floor, cover it with carpet?
So people are asking about the safety and stability of Porsches because a celebrity died. Mid-engined Porsches are now and have always been far safer than the rear-engined varieties. Rear-engined models suffer (earlier models much more than recent ones) from lift-throttle oversteer. If you enter a curve too fast and then back off the throttle (a normal response), because of the semi-trailing-arm geometry of the rear suspension the reduction in squat causes a reduction in the outside rear wheel's toe-in, which steers the back end of the car outwards, sometimes sending the car off the road backwards. The rear suspension design combined with the rear weight bias made the 911 and its ilk inherently dangerous for unaware drivers and at least twitchy for the rest. Even today, if you want a somewhat-forgiving predictably-handling Porsche, buy a mid-engined Boxster or Cayman. The real issue with the mid-engined GT was not the engine location but the race-car reflexes and very high horsepower. As others have said, OK for skilled and practiced drivers paying 100% attention, but not otherwise. I'm fine with people focusing attention on Porsche's bad designs, but the V10 GT wasn't particularly one of them.
By far the cheapest sources of H2 today are fossil fuels. Big gas/oil don't mind fuel cells because it still means sales of their product. But mostly they don't mind because it's a distraction from real alternative fuels. The real threats are renewables, and little of the energy from them will go into producing H2 in the foreseeable future, because those processes are currently so inefficient. Energy from renewables will be stored as biodiesel, butanol, or other liquid fuel for which there's an existing distribution system and existing vehicles that can use them or distributed as electricity. Battery electric vehicles are somewhat of a threat because the efficiency, even after converting the fossil fuel energy into electricity, distributing it, storing it in batteries, and converting it back into motion is much more efficient than refining it, distributing it, and burning it in a mobile ICE. Fuel cell cars with onboard reformers might be a real alternative, as there's already a distribution system for natural gas, and storing CNG isn't so bad. Storing LNG is even better, but a system for distributing and dispensing it en masse doesn't exist, whereas LNG only needs a dispensing system.
So... don't be distracted. Room temperature liquid fuels and electric battery storage are in the near future, but not much hydrogen.
Write it down. Just keep a list of what you do, what questions you have, info/advice you can offer others, then email it or speak it when the time is right. It's hard to remember things that don't seem very important, so log them and let the machine remember them for you.
Where yes, burning wood is carbon-neutral, putting soot into the air is one of the worst global warming offenders, and preventing soot is the quickest remedy. Eliminating most of the soot production would give the world a little more time to find alternatives to pumping out CO2. So clean up those stoves, clean up that construction equipment, and clean up those ships burning heavy oil.
US imports may have lessened due to fracking. But if investment in developing and implementing renewables in the last 30 years had been as intense as efforts to develop new drilling techniques, the US would be more energy independent AND there'd be less fracking. So "...there would be no..." is a patently false statement.
Quadratic, roughly, but don't forget about the linear and constant terms. At low speeds, much of the drag is caused by rolling resistance and internal friction (in ICE cars).
Except he didn't have the radar jammer, it wasn't ready in time. I suspect it would be a lot more difficult to enforce such rules against light emitting devices (a LIDAR jammer).
All this talk of roads... have people forgotten that the vehicle itself matters? What's safe for a high performance car isn't necessarily safe for an Excursion, much less a semi, both of which are pretty unstable long before they reach 100mph.
Notably, in most other parts of the country, passenger trains have to wait for slow freights. Give them passenger-only tracks like the Northeast Corridor and see how much better they do.
Absolutely. Bike lanes on regular roads are barely better than nothing. Build no-car paths on the opposite side of Armco. But suburban/rural moderate-to-lightly traveled roads around me are where most of the fatalities occur. Cyclists frequently survive being hit by SUVs and pickups moving less than 25mph, but less often for 50+mph.
That's it—not the absolute number of injuries/fatalities, but the rate. It's very high, at least around my area, considering the relatively small number of cyclist miles ridden on roads. And while city traffic scares me and Pruitt's "only broken my collar bone twice" is nothing to brag about if it was due to a vehicle collision, around here most of the worst injuries and deaths occur on moderate-to-lightly traveled suburban and rural roads. I probably never hear about most moderate injuries, but the cycling mailing list keeps up with fatalities and serious injuries. I stopped riding with the evening two-hour group road rides. Many drivers are openly hostile and there have been several attacks in the area, even on groups of a dozen riding together. Penalties actually given for drunk/drugged/distracted drivers killing cyclists and pedestrians are still usually light around the Middle Atlantic/Southeast US. If most of the incidents involved cars and cyclists colliding on busy roads, I'd think I could just avoid those situations and keep riding. But they don't. Between motorist hostility and driver distraction, I've had it. When I hit trees on my MTB that's my fault. Mountain biking is not necessarily "safe". But I'm not worried about SUV drivers on cell phones eating and reading the newspaper while steering with their knees.
Helmets? Publicize solid statistics on head injury reductions, then let natural selection purge the gene pool.
One of the problems with hydrogen so far as its combustibility goes is that it will burn in a very wide concentration ratio, something like 5% to 95% in air, IIRC. Most other fuels have at least somewhat narrower ranges.
Storing H in compressed metal hydride tanks works and might someday have reasonable mass/volume/energy ratios, but the real problem is that it's only an energy carrier, not a source, and mass production means of getting from an energy source to H2 haven't come anywhere close to being as efficient as, say, just burning CNG. Hobbyists might electrolyze water with power from PVs, and while that's fun and all, it isn't going to satisfy the masses. Transporting electricity from production to storage in your car, given the infrastructure we already have, is a lot easier than building a brand new infrastructure to distribute some form of hydrogen. So, yeah, Musk is just protecting his business model, but the reality is that H2 is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon, and batteries are already becoming ubiquitous.
It may be difficult to tell, but I would ALWAYS choose a platform that had capable independent fans over one backed by an enormous corporation. Single entities abandon things seemingly on whims (OK, well actually, expectations of profit, sometimes by folks who can't predict there'll be wind accompanying a hurricane). But if there's a viable community of folks who aren't just fans, but are capable of providing some kind of momentum and support, then the platform will probably survive until something unequivocally better comes along (at which point you would probably want to switch anyhow).
Seems to me some of the pieces for a platform are already available... just need a critical mass of users. Mesh networks + Freenet... wouldn't that accomplish a lot of the goals?
If you want a degree, consider an MA in Economics instead of an MBA. Pick a solid school with plenty of flexibility in course selection. Take some classes that MBA students take—general Mgmt, Finance, Production Mgmt, etc.—and otherwise concentrate on behavioral and quantitative stuff (business psychology, forecasting, econometrics). You'll probably need to take some undergraduate prerequisite courses such as Micro, Macro, Money & Banking... but that's a good thing. What you'll end up with is a deeper understanding of how and why things work in the business world (and world in general) than MBAs at the same school get. You won't end up learning as many heuristics and observations concerning how to achieve business objectives. Those can be easily learned by reading articles (Harvard Business Review, etc.) on your own. What else might you miss? MBAs are generally in a mutual admiration society and may undervalue your education's relevance to the organization due to their lack of knowledge about it. If you're looking for money, it may not be your best bet, as you'll be promoted based on proven expertise rather than the assumed value of your credentials. If you're looking for a greater understanding, it probably is your best bet.
Yes, I'm swimming upstream here, but somebody needs to.
Slashdot Mirror
So maybe it doesn't always roll downhill, maybe it rolls "down" south, having been pushed that direction. What direction would, say, a husky go when taken to the north pole (magnetic or spin-axis)?
How long will it take for some nonhuman shark prey to evolve receptors for shark warning tweets?
For various ages & stages:
Fade - Robert Cormier
Monkey Wrench Gang; Desert Solitaire - Edward Abbey
Spook Country - William Gibson
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Mark Twain - (I found it slow at first, but it's an excellent commentary on the gullibility of people in Medieval times - wink)
The Right Stuff; Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test - Tom Wolfe
Hackers - Steven Levy
What the Dormouse Said - John Markoff
(Try reading Electric Kool-Aid and Dormouse back-to-back to glimpse some of the cross-fertilization that occurred.)
Dharma Bums - Jack Kerouac ( I liked On The Road, but found it, well, aimless.)
East of Eden - John Steinbeck (The one Steinbeck I enjoyed; I hated the rest, including The Grapes of Wrath in particular. )
I'd skip Catcher in the Rye. Not bad, just seemed like a waste of time.
Daybreak 2250 AD - Andre Norton ( I suspect other Norton works are good, but can't say. )
Catch-22 - Joseph Heller
Cryptonomicon - Neal Stephenson
2001, 2010, 2061, 3001 - Arthur C. Clarke ( Read them all, in order. You can watch the film 2001 instead, as there's nothing more in the book, meaning-wise. Since everyone should watch 2001 anyhow, there you go. )
Cradle - Arthur C. Clarke & Gentry Lee
Everything written by Carl Hiaasen, but maybe start with Sick Puppy or Striptease. They fictions are funny, but also excellent commentaries on our world (not just Florida).
Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman; What Do You Care What Other People Think?; Six Easy Pieces - Richard Feynman
Stranger in a Strange Land - Robert Heinlein
Maybe not for everyone:
Daemon; Kill Decision - Daniel Suarez ( Both very good, I enjoyed them a little more than Gibson, but it's hard to beat Stephenson. )
Not long after developing nukes, some of the scientists and engineers formed Federation of American Scientists. A good question to ask of an engineer would be whether (s)he knows of it and how (s)he feels about its mission.
Difficult to imagine the powers that be caring much about application security if they're willing to outsource sysadmin duties. And yes, I know that's common. But that doesn't make it sensible from a risk management viewpoint.
The idea that we haven't found extraterrestrial civilizations because once they're sufficiently advanced for us to spot, they're sufficiently advanced to destroy themselves in some catastrophic explosion needs modification. Maybe it's just the accumulation of things like microscopic plastic bits, out-of-control planetary heating, mercury contamination, GMO accidents, viral epidemics, ozone destruction, ... such that they disappear in a century after making it into space—long before they have time to make self-sufficient colonies on other planets.
Actually, it's what marketing types THINK would be consumer demand, since they haven't actually tried it in the US. I think we all know how reliable that is.
Or... have a contest. Maybe someone will design long narrow suspension bridges and you can turn on some fans and have a Tacoma Narrows incident right in the office.
Whatever you do for trays or supports, where the cables are visible from below, go with specific colors to match the decor. I still can't figure out why with all the colors available for little-to-no extra cost, people go for... gray.
Any chance of running them underneath the floor surface? Route channels in the floor, cover it with carpet?
So people are asking about the safety and stability of Porsches because a celebrity died. Mid-engined Porsches are now and have always been far safer than the rear-engined varieties. Rear-engined models suffer (earlier models much more than recent ones) from lift-throttle oversteer. If you enter a curve too fast and then back off the throttle (a normal response), because of the semi-trailing-arm geometry of the rear suspension the reduction in squat causes a reduction in the outside rear wheel's toe-in, which steers the back end of the car outwards, sometimes sending the car off the road backwards. The rear suspension design combined with the rear weight bias made the 911 and its ilk inherently dangerous for unaware drivers and at least twitchy for the rest. Even today, if you want a somewhat-forgiving predictably-handling Porsche, buy a mid-engined Boxster or Cayman. The real issue with the mid-engined GT was not the engine location but the race-car reflexes and very high horsepower. As others have said, OK for skilled and practiced drivers paying 100% attention, but not otherwise. I'm fine with people focusing attention on Porsche's bad designs, but the V10 GT wasn't particularly one of them.
I meant CNG only needs a dispensing system.
By far the cheapest sources of H2 today are fossil fuels. Big gas/oil don't mind fuel cells because it still means sales of their product. But mostly they don't mind because it's a distraction from real alternative fuels. The real threats are renewables, and little of the energy from them will go into producing H2 in the foreseeable future, because those processes are currently so inefficient. Energy from renewables will be stored as biodiesel, butanol, or other liquid fuel for which there's an existing distribution system and existing vehicles that can use them or distributed as electricity. Battery electric vehicles are somewhat of a threat because the efficiency, even after converting the fossil fuel energy into electricity, distributing it, storing it in batteries, and converting it back into motion is much more efficient than refining it, distributing it, and burning it in a mobile ICE. Fuel cell cars with onboard reformers might be a real alternative, as there's already a distribution system for natural gas, and storing CNG isn't so bad. Storing LNG is even better, but a system for distributing and dispensing it en masse doesn't exist, whereas LNG only needs a dispensing system.
So... don't be distracted. Room temperature liquid fuels and electric battery storage are in the near future, but not much hydrogen.
That's what had me wondering WTF. I would not have guessed that current settings could affect previously archived information.
Just try to keep the exponent to a single digit.
Write it down. Just keep a list of what you do, what questions you have, info/advice you can offer others, then email it or speak it when the time is right. It's hard to remember things that don't seem very important, so log them and let the machine remember them for you.
Where yes, burning wood is carbon-neutral, putting soot into the air is one of the worst global warming offenders, and preventing soot is the quickest remedy. Eliminating most of the soot production would give the world a little more time to find alternatives to pumping out CO2. So clean up those stoves, clean up that construction equipment, and clean up those ships burning heavy oil.
US imports may have lessened due to fracking. But if investment in developing and implementing renewables in the last 30 years had been as intense as efforts to develop new drilling techniques, the US would be more energy independent AND there'd be less fracking. So "...there would be no..." is a patently false statement.
Quadratic, roughly, but don't forget about the linear and constant terms. At low speeds, much of the drag is caused by rolling resistance and internal friction (in ICE cars).
Except he didn't have the radar jammer, it wasn't ready in time. I suspect it would be a lot more difficult to enforce such rules against light emitting devices (a LIDAR jammer).
All this talk of roads... have people forgotten that the vehicle itself matters? What's safe for a high performance car isn't necessarily safe for an Excursion, much less a semi, both of which are pretty unstable long before they reach 100mph.
Notably, in most other parts of the country, passenger trains have to wait for slow freights. Give them passenger-only tracks like the Northeast Corridor and see how much better they do.
Absolutely. Bike lanes on regular roads are barely better than nothing. Build no-car paths on the opposite side of Armco. But suburban/rural moderate-to-lightly traveled roads around me are where most of the fatalities occur. Cyclists frequently survive being hit by SUVs and pickups moving less than 25mph, but less often for 50+mph.
That's it—not the absolute number of injuries/fatalities, but the rate. It's very high, at least around my area, considering the relatively small number of cyclist miles ridden on roads. And while city traffic scares me and Pruitt's "only broken my collar bone twice" is nothing to brag about if it was due to a vehicle collision, around here most of the worst injuries and deaths occur on moderate-to-lightly traveled suburban and rural roads. I probably never hear about most moderate injuries, but the cycling mailing list keeps up with fatalities and serious injuries. I stopped riding with the evening two-hour group road rides. Many drivers are openly hostile and there have been several attacks in the area, even on groups of a dozen riding together. Penalties actually given for drunk/drugged/distracted drivers killing cyclists and pedestrians are still usually light around the Middle Atlantic/Southeast US. If most of the incidents involved cars and cyclists colliding on busy roads, I'd think I could just avoid those situations and keep riding. But they don't. Between motorist hostility and driver distraction, I've had it. When I hit trees on my MTB that's my fault. Mountain biking is not necessarily "safe". But I'm not worried about SUV drivers on cell phones eating and reading the newspaper while steering with their knees.
Helmets? Publicize solid statistics on head injury reductions, then let natural selection purge the gene pool.
One of the problems with hydrogen so far as its combustibility goes is that it will burn in a very wide concentration ratio, something like 5% to 95% in air, IIRC. Most other fuels have at least somewhat narrower ranges.
Storing H in compressed metal hydride tanks works and might someday have reasonable mass/volume/energy ratios, but the real problem is that it's only an energy carrier, not a source, and mass production means of getting from an energy source to H2 haven't come anywhere close to being as efficient as, say, just burning CNG. Hobbyists might electrolyze water with power from PVs, and while that's fun and all, it isn't going to satisfy the masses. Transporting electricity from production to storage in your car, given the infrastructure we already have, is a lot easier than building a brand new infrastructure to distribute some form of hydrogen. So, yeah, Musk is just protecting his business model, but the reality is that H2 is unlikely to go anywhere anytime soon, and batteries are already becoming ubiquitous.
It may be difficult to tell, but I would ALWAYS choose a platform that had capable independent fans over one backed by an enormous corporation. Single entities abandon things seemingly on whims (OK, well actually, expectations of profit, sometimes by folks who can't predict there'll be wind accompanying a hurricane). But if there's a viable community of folks who aren't just fans, but are capable of providing some kind of momentum and support, then the platform will probably survive until something unequivocally better comes along (at which point you would probably want to switch anyhow).
Seems to me some of the pieces for a platform are already available... just need a critical mass of users. Mesh networks + Freenet... wouldn't that accomplish a lot of the goals?
If you want a degree, consider an MA in Economics instead of an MBA. Pick a solid school with plenty of flexibility in course selection. Take some classes that MBA students take—general Mgmt, Finance, Production Mgmt, etc.—and otherwise concentrate on behavioral and quantitative stuff (business psychology, forecasting, econometrics). You'll probably need to take some undergraduate prerequisite courses such as Micro, Macro, Money & Banking... but that's a good thing. What you'll end up with is a deeper understanding of how and why things work in the business world (and world in general) than MBAs at the same school get. You won't end up learning as many heuristics and observations concerning how to achieve business objectives. Those can be easily learned by reading articles (Harvard Business Review, etc.) on your own. What else might you miss? MBAs are generally in a mutual admiration society and may undervalue your education's relevance to the organization due to their lack of knowledge about it. If you're looking for money, it may not be your best bet, as you'll be promoted based on proven expertise rather than the assumed value of your credentials. If you're looking for a greater understanding, it probably is your best bet.
Yes, I'm swimming upstream here, but somebody needs to.