Estonians don't like Russians very much. They got squished between Hitler and Stalin during WWII, and ended up part of the Soviet Union for 50 years, during which their language was suppressed, hundreds of thousands of Russians were brought in, and ran the place with their typical environmental consciousness and regard for the local ways (none at all, in other words). So mistaking Estonians for Russians isn't likely to be particularly popular with Estonians.
In any case, Estonia writes with Latin characters and the language is more like Finnish than anything else, apparently.
People choose to live a long way from their workplaces and drive between work and home in whopping great SUVs, and choose to have massive tropical gardens in desert locations. If they want to make such environmentally damaging lifestyle choices, they should pay the costs.
Yes, it would be unfair to impose such taxes overnight; people should be given time to adjust by phasing them in over a period of year.
No mathematician, just a humble software engineering academic playing at being a mathematician because there's no better ones around.
What I was doing sounds somewhat different to what you're doing. Mathematica gave me a very simple closed form for a summation I was attempting to do, and it does so in a oompletely opaque manner; I couldn't be confident publishing such a result until I'd proved it myself, in the absence of any understanding of how Mathematica found it (and Mathematica can be remarkably opaque in that situation).
If I've understood you correctly you're using Mathematica (or some other computer algebra system) to perform a known, easy to verify algorithm more times than a human would find practical. I wouldn't have any trouble with publishing results with such an exercise.
I believe Thomas Jefferson said it best, "The price of freedom is eternal vigilance."
Precisely. And the point I'm trying to make is that eternal vigilance is not unique to Americans. The mechanisms by which that vigilance is exercised in different parts of the world is often quite different, but the effects, certainly throughout the developed world, are often not as different as some Americans seem to think.
You've every right to be proud of your constitution and the values it represents, and how those values have been reinterpreted over time.
The point I'm making is that a) the constitution and the court system is very far from perfect, and b) other nations have their own means of protecting the rights of their citizens, which are also not perfect but work a heck of a lot better than Americans sometimes give credit for, and has sometimes worked better than the US system does.
Citizens of the United States, even otherwise sensible ones, have this obsession with "but we have a Constitution that protects blah blah blah..."
Your constitution was a remarkable document, granted, but its role as the absolute guarantor of everything under the sun is exaggerated. It didn't protect you from McCarthyism, it didn't protect you (and the rest of the world) from Gitmo, it didn't stop Lenny Bruce from being arrested repeatedly, it didn't stop Lady Chatterley's Lover from remaining unpublished in the United States for decades, and so on. In practice, all it means much of the time is that when community attitudes finally change, it's more often judges rather than politicians who give effect to the change.
That's all very well, but there's one very important thing that's going to be easier to do on Mars than on the asteroids - growing crops.
The energetics of growing crops with artificial light are just horrendous; there's only one crop where that's done with any regularity because of its exceptionally high value.
Mathematica can be a very cool tool, but also an incredibly frustrating one, because there are many occasions where you can't use its results.
Why? Because when it does its symbolic algebra thing, it largely acts as a black box. You've got no idea how it got its answers. So you can't rely on it.
So, if you're using it to figure out any symbolic algebra out that's part of research that you're later going to publish, at best it's useful for finding things which you then have to show by hand anyway.
There was a Canadian documentary called The Denial Machine which explains the origin of the "climate change" phraseology instead of "global warming". Essentially, Republican-aligned industry groups did a lot of focus groups and discovered that "climate change" sounded less scary than global warming, hence right-wing politicians around the English-speaking world started using that phrase instead.
The energy industry has been trying pretty much exactly the same techniques that the tobacco industry used to delay the implementation of anti-smoking laws for decades.
Let's just say we end up taking the "oh, it's just a natural cycle" bit seriously and as a consequence do nothing about greenhouse emissions (in practice, if it wasn't global warming we'd still have to act because of ocean acidification, but that's another story...). By the time I'm an old man, India and China are in perpetual drought, as is my own country Australia, coasts around the world are beginning to retreat, and the Greenland ice shelf is starting to look wobbly. As Stern put it, global warming turns out to be as bad as the two world wars and the Great Depression rolled into one.
That's what shits me about the denialists. The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion is against them, but there's still a chance that they're right. But it's all about risk. The USA spends an enormous fraction of its economy (more than anyone except probably North Korea) on its army as insurance against military threats. Why not insure against other security threats too?
And, frankly, the idea that cutting greenhouse emissions is going to doom the US economy is rubbish. The energy sector represents only a small fraction of the economy.
Even if true (which I very much doubt) coal and oil is only a minor source of air pollution. Things like pesticides are far more significant. Here in CA, the San Joaquin Valley is one of the most polluted areas in the state, partly because of the large amount of agriculture.
Maybe agriculture is locally significant in terms of air pollution, but, globally, there's no contest.
This EU press release is not a scientific study, but it accurately interprets this massive EU research study. And, yes, it does say 300,000 premature deaths from air pollution per year across the EU, and overwhelmingly that is from the burning of fossil fuels. And not all of those deaths are old people (a fair and often neglected point). A US study on the topic suggested the average loss of life from a premature death from air pollution is roughly 10-15 years. On top of that, there's also the massive problem of air pollution contributing to kiddies getting asthma.
As for your points about California's local geography and the potential effects of wind turbines and the like, that's a reasonable point about the local situation in one of the more densely populated and most car-saturated places on earth. But that's why you do environmental impact statements before any development, including wind turbines.
While CO2 is the biggest single pollution problem that we face (and the asshats on this thread who think they know better than thousands of scientists who devote themselves to studying the problem would be comical if they weren't so dangerous), other pollutants have indeed been sadly neglected. One of my favourite statistics (it's useful on arguments about the merits or otherwise of nuclear power) is that the deaths from air pollution, by many estimates, exceed the number of deaths from traffic accidents.
However, the same things that will reduce CO2 emissions (taking fossil-fuel powered cars and coal-fired power stations out of service) will also tackle some of the biggest sources of these other pollutants. In fact, it's my guess that the savings in health costs would, on their own, go a long way to offsetting (if you'll pardon the pun) the costs of tackling CO2 emissions.
What you're talking about is called N-version programming. It's no guarantee of reliability, unfortunately. Often, the "bug" is related to mistakes in the program specification, not the implementation of that specification. Therefore, the same bug gets faithfully and correctly implemented twice.
A few years ago, I created something at least to stub level for all the Turing award winners who didn't already have articles. So, yes, at the time some of them got articles because they'd gotten the award. But I expect they've been improved considerably since then.
Statistical analysis
on
SCO Vs. Groklaw
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
There's a large amount of work that's been done on statistical author identification. I wonder whether somebody who knows how it works could analyse the Groklaw archives to determine whether the same person wrote all the posts (though you might need to process the text first to remove quotations).
I'm not a regular reader of Groklaw - it's become abundantly clear that SCO is unlikely to win and the case is just going through extended death throes - but on the occasions I've done so PJ's writing style seemed pretty consistent.
This microturbine research pops up on Slashdot every year or so.
The thermal efficiency is the real killer - according to this post, the expected thermal efficency is somewhere between 3 and 8%.
That's problematic for two reasons - one, a plant made of thousands of these would use way more fuel than one using a conventional piston engine and one generator, and, two, for small-scale apps it means you end up with a massive pile of waste heat to dispose of. As somebody put it - if you want 10 watts of power, that means 100 watts of waste heat to dispose of. Go put your fingers on a 100-watt lightbulb to get an idea of how much heat we're talking about...
This would be OK if the average Indonesian actually saw some benefit from the money gained from the licensing. Instead, the money will just be siphoned off by corrupt officials. Indonesia is one of the most corrupt places on Earth.
Instead of the usual situation where virus samples go to Big Pharma, who make patented vaccine, and get rich saving the developed world and wealthy people in the developing world, while Indonesian proles get neither vaccine nor money, we'll have the situation where virus samples go to one part of Big Pharma, who will (hopefully) make vaccine, and get rich saving the developed world and rich people in the developing world, and send royalties back to already rich Indonesians. Again, Indonesian proles will get neither vaccine nor money.
This is just a cynical money grab by the Indonesian elite, and, worse, by restricting who gets access to virus samples they just might be delaying the development of a vaccine that will save millions of lives.
I don't think you appreciate just what a gargantuan amount of land would be required to produce sufficient ethanol to meet energy demands.
Let's assume the technical problems of switchgrass-to-ethanol are solved, and we can actually get the 10,000 litres/ha yield (which is actually a net yield of something more like 7,500 if you take into account EROI). The USA uses roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day - that's 3,200 million litres per day (just for simplicity, we'll assume a litre of ethanol is equivalent to a litre of crude). So you need 320,000 hectares - 800,000 acres - just for one day's crude demand. To produce a year's demand, you'd need 292 million acres of switchgrass. That is a equivalent to a square 675 miles to a side, and nearly four times the area on which corn is currently grown.
With regards to stream-bed hydro, my point is simply that the energy extracted from it - worldwide - will be lost in the noise. It is such an irrelevancy to global energy demand as to not be worth more than a moment's consideration for anybody other than the vanishingly small number of people who can benefit from it.
While there may be plenty of individual environmentalists who are comfortable with nuclear power (indeed, I would count myself as such a person), every single one of the major environmental organizations have opposition to nuclear power as a policy and as an active campaign. As a semi-random sample, we have:
The Green Party of the USA - indeed, pretty much every party thus titled around the world.
To give an international perspective for you, in Australia, the premier environmental NGO is the Australian Conservation Foundation, who are strongly opposed
Maybe there are internal debates about the topic currently going on in these organizations, but if so it hasn't resulted in any actual changes in policy yet.
Philip Adams is no scientist
on
Water From Wind
·
· Score: 1
Philip Adams is a very good broadcaster and essayist - his radio show Late Night Live is some of the more enlightening (if rather highbrow) political and social discussion you'll find anywhere.
However, he's no scientist or engineer. I wouldn't back him to pick the difference between science and snake oil, and I'm afraid this smells like snake oil.
There's 25 billion ounces of gold in the sea, but nobody's getting rich extracting it.
Ditto solar. The resource may be available, but it's not economical to make use of it right now except in special circumstances. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any great evidence that the cost is going to come down particularly quickly either.
The smart people setting up solar farms will rapidly go broke.
A home made waterwheel, biodiesel and burning trees for energy? Gimme a break...
Have you ever done the sums on just how much land would be required to replace oil usage with biodiesel? What would happen to the US's forests if you started large-scale burning of trees for energy? And that in-stream hydro? With a grand total of 24 watts of output? Yes, you could light at least two flourescent lamps with that - but you'd struggle to run a laptop computer...
My conclusion is that either most deep Greens can't do basic arithmetic, or expect unrealistic and totally unnecessary (you can generate more than enough carbon-free energy to support a modern lifestyle, it will just require the two methods that they don't like - nuclear and/or fossil fuels with geosequestration) alterations to Western lifestyles.
See, down in the bottom right, where it says "Entire Document"? That's a PDF of the whole article. Yes, they are making it obscure, but it's there and it's free.
The point is that the security guards, even if they've got a damn pot plantation growing in the grounds, are not getting spent fuel past the gate, because without the specialised, truck-sized transport casks you can't move them without them killing you before you get very far. Yes, they are that radioactive. You go anywhere near a spent fuel rod without lots of shielding, you die. It doesn't matter whether you're a terrorist, corrupt security guard, or just some schmuck who didn't read the safety manual and went diving in the cooling pond. You're still dead.
You can also buy anti-static devices with (potentially lethal) quantities of Po-210 embedded in them. But the Po-210 is embedded in metal foil, and is quite difficult to extract.
Slashdot Mirror
In any case, Estonia writes with Latin characters and the language is more like Finnish than anything else, apparently.
Yes, it would be unfair to impose such taxes overnight; people should be given time to adjust by phasing them in over a period of year.
What I was doing sounds somewhat different to what you're doing. Mathematica gave me a very simple closed form for a summation I was attempting to do, and it does so in a oompletely opaque manner; I couldn't be confident publishing such a result until I'd proved it myself, in the absence of any understanding of how Mathematica found it (and Mathematica can be remarkably opaque in that situation).
If I've understood you correctly you're using Mathematica (or some other computer algebra system) to perform a known, easy to verify algorithm more times than a human would find practical. I wouldn't have any trouble with publishing results with such an exercise.
Precisely. And the point I'm trying to make is that eternal vigilance is not unique to Americans. The mechanisms by which that vigilance is exercised in different parts of the world is often quite different, but the effects, certainly throughout the developed world, are often not as different as some Americans seem to think.
The point I'm making is that a) the constitution and the court system is very far from perfect, and b) other nations have their own means of protecting the rights of their citizens, which are also not perfect but work a heck of a lot better than Americans sometimes give credit for, and has sometimes worked better than the US system does.
Your constitution was a remarkable document, granted, but its role as the absolute guarantor of everything under the sun is exaggerated. It didn't protect you from McCarthyism, it didn't protect you (and the rest of the world) from Gitmo, it didn't stop Lenny Bruce from being arrested repeatedly, it didn't stop Lady Chatterley's Lover from remaining unpublished in the United States for decades, and so on. In practice, all it means much of the time is that when community attitudes finally change, it's more often judges rather than politicians who give effect to the change.
The energetics of growing crops with artificial light are just horrendous; there's only one crop where that's done with any regularity because of its exceptionally high value.
Why? Because when it does its symbolic algebra thing, it largely acts as a black box. You've got no idea how it got its answers. So you can't rely on it.
So, if you're using it to figure out any symbolic algebra out that's part of research that you're later going to publish, at best it's useful for finding things which you then have to show by hand anyway.
The energy industry has been trying pretty much exactly the same techniques that the tobacco industry used to delay the implementation of anti-smoking laws for decades.
That's what shits me about the denialists. The overwhelming weight of scientific opinion is against them, but there's still a chance that they're right. But it's all about risk. The USA spends an enormous fraction of its economy (more than anyone except probably North Korea) on its army as insurance against military threats. Why not insure against other security threats too?
And, frankly, the idea that cutting greenhouse emissions is going to doom the US economy is rubbish. The energy sector represents only a small fraction of the economy.
Maybe agriculture is locally significant in terms of air pollution, but, globally, there's no contest.
This EU press release is not a scientific study, but it accurately interprets this massive EU research study. And, yes, it does say 300,000 premature deaths from air pollution per year across the EU, and overwhelmingly that is from the burning of fossil fuels. And not all of those deaths are old people (a fair and often neglected point). A US study on the topic suggested the average loss of life from a premature death from air pollution is roughly 10-15 years. On top of that, there's also the massive problem of air pollution contributing to kiddies getting asthma.
As for your points about California's local geography and the potential effects of wind turbines and the like, that's a reasonable point about the local situation in one of the more densely populated and most car-saturated places on earth. But that's why you do environmental impact statements before any development, including wind turbines.
However, the same things that will reduce CO2 emissions (taking fossil-fuel powered cars and coal-fired power stations out of service) will also tackle some of the biggest sources of these other pollutants. In fact, it's my guess that the savings in health costs would, on their own, go a long way to offsetting (if you'll pardon the pun) the costs of tackling CO2 emissions.
If the Eurofighter's radar can't detect the F-22, multiple Eurofighters won't be any great advantage compared to one.
What you're talking about is called N-version programming. It's no guarantee of reliability, unfortunately. Often, the "bug" is related to mistakes in the program specification, not the implementation of that specification. Therefore, the same bug gets faithfully and correctly implemented twice.
A few years ago, I created something at least to stub level for all the Turing award winners who didn't already have articles. So, yes, at the time some of them got articles because they'd gotten the award. But I expect they've been improved considerably since then.
I'm not a regular reader of Groklaw - it's become abundantly clear that SCO is unlikely to win and the case is just going through extended death throes - but on the occasions I've done so PJ's writing style seemed pretty consistent.
I'm not defending Big Pharma. I'm just noting that the Indonesian elite are just as venal and exploitative.
The thermal efficiency is the real killer - according to this post, the expected thermal efficency is somewhere between 3 and 8%.
That's problematic for two reasons - one, a plant made of thousands of these would use way more fuel than one using a conventional piston engine and one generator, and, two, for small-scale apps it means you end up with a massive pile of waste heat to dispose of. As somebody put it - if you want 10 watts of power, that means 100 watts of waste heat to dispose of. Go put your fingers on a 100-watt lightbulb to get an idea of how much heat we're talking about...
Instead of the usual situation where virus samples go to Big Pharma, who make patented vaccine, and get rich saving the developed world and wealthy people in the developing world, while Indonesian proles get neither vaccine nor money, we'll have the situation where virus samples go to one part of Big Pharma, who will (hopefully) make vaccine, and get rich saving the developed world and rich people in the developing world, and send royalties back to already rich Indonesians. Again, Indonesian proles will get neither vaccine nor money.
This is just a cynical money grab by the Indonesian elite, and, worse, by restricting who gets access to virus samples they just might be delaying the development of a vaccine that will save millions of lives.
Let's assume the technical problems of switchgrass-to-ethanol are solved, and we can actually get the 10,000 litres/ha yield (which is actually a net yield of something more like 7,500 if you take into account EROI). The USA uses roughly 20 million barrels of oil a day - that's 3,200 million litres per day (just for simplicity, we'll assume a litre of ethanol is equivalent to a litre of crude). So you need 320,000 hectares - 800,000 acres - just for one day's crude demand. To produce a year's demand, you'd need 292 million acres of switchgrass. That is a equivalent to a square 675 miles to a side, and nearly four times the area on which corn is currently grown.
With regards to stream-bed hydro, my point is simply that the energy extracted from it - worldwide - will be lost in the noise. It is such an irrelevancy to global energy demand as to not be worth more than a moment's consideration for anybody other than the vanishingly small number of people who can benefit from it.
While there may be plenty of individual environmentalists who are comfortable with nuclear power (indeed, I would count myself as such a person), every single one of the major environmental organizations have opposition to nuclear power as a policy and as an active campaign. As a semi-random sample, we have:
Maybe there are internal debates about the topic currently going on in these organizations, but if so it hasn't resulted in any actual changes in policy yet.
However, he's no scientist or engineer. I wouldn't back him to pick the difference between science and snake oil, and I'm afraid this smells like snake oil.
Ditto solar. The resource may be available, but it's not economical to make use of it right now except in special circumstances. Furthermore, there doesn't seem to be any great evidence that the cost is going to come down particularly quickly either.
The smart people setting up solar farms will rapidly go broke.
Have you ever done the sums on just how much land would be required to replace oil usage with biodiesel? What would happen to the US's forests if you started large-scale burning of trees for energy? And that in-stream hydro? With a grand total of 24 watts of output? Yes, you could light at least two flourescent lamps with that - but you'd struggle to run a laptop computer...
My conclusion is that either most deep Greens can't do basic arithmetic, or expect unrealistic and totally unnecessary (you can generate more than enough carbon-free energy to support a modern lifestyle, it will just require the two methods that they don't like - nuclear and/or fossil fuels with geosequestration) alterations to Western lifestyles.
The point is that the security guards, even if they've got a damn pot plantation growing in the grounds, are not getting spent fuel past the gate, because without the specialised, truck-sized transport casks you can't move them without them killing you before you get very far. Yes, they are that radioactive. You go anywhere near a spent fuel rod without lots of shielding, you die. It doesn't matter whether you're a terrorist, corrupt security guard, or just some schmuck who didn't read the safety manual and went diving in the cooling pond. You're still dead.
You can also buy anti-static devices with (potentially lethal) quantities of Po-210 embedded in them. But the Po-210 is embedded in metal foil, and is quite difficult to extract.