I did the calculation with rapeseed. All the current cropland in America couldn't come close to providing its transport fuel needs. Heck, Australia can't, and it exports a far greater proportion of its agricultural production than the US does.
I've got no problem with biodiesel per se; I have a problem with greenies who say "biodiesel is the answer" when some very basic calculation suggests that biodiesel from conventional crops can only supply a very small part of our energy needs. So, in the greater scheme of things, it is of marginal relevance.
In the greenhouse debate, there's far too much attention paid to transport fuel use and too little to the static energy sector. The main game is going to be shutting down today's coal-fired power plants; what we replace them with is the big question.
Re:Is biodiesel the answer?
on
Filling Up On Algae
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· Score: 5, Informative
Further to your unsustainability comments, some simple back of the envelope calculations show that conventional crops can't make more than a small contribution to our transport fuel needs. I know, I did some for biodiesel and ethanol. Note that the net energy return from crops other than sugar for ethanol is so marginal to make it very doubtful that you'll end up with more usable fuel than you put in.
Thermal depolymerization and this algae farming *might* be practical, but conventional crops to ethanol is a waste of time (or, at least, is not worth subsidising on environmental grounds).
As I understand it, catalytic converters don't deal with soot. Particulate filtering does.
However, you are right in terms of your observations of present diesel vehicle emissions. Until relatively recently, diesel particulate emissions were pretty much unregulated. That's changing rapidly. New diesels are a hell of a lot cleaner than the old ones.
If the choice is between burning biodiesel or burning petroleum-derived diesel; the biodiesel is much cleaner. In any case, there's all manner of funky new anti-pollution gear for diesels coming on line soon; one of the more important types are particulate filters.
But, in any case, you sound like a global warming denialist, so having a rational discussion on pollution with you is pretty much impossible anyway...
I've heard the Soviet pipeline software story before, and, frankly, I'm dubious. As told, there's no way the CIA could have known exactly how the software was going to be configured, and without that knowledge there's no way they could tell exactly what was going to happen when it went haywire. What if the explosion was in a densely populated area? Could you imagine the political consequences? The Soviets would have been able to say "sure, we steal technology, but the Yankee capitalist pigs slaughter thousands of innocent people.", and they would have been right. Reagan would have been impeached - even assuming the Soviets didn't decide to start rolling their tanks westward in response. I just can't see how the CIA would have taken the risk.
What do you call getting who knows how many church leaders to plug the film, then? Best marketing campaign since The Blair Witch Project, and about as profitable...
As far as that movie goes, I always kind of liked the review some anonymous IMDB'er provided:
A poorly understood epic story portraying the taut homoerotic tension between two men, played skillfully by Jackie Gleason and the great Burt Reynolds. Their desire plays out in mesmerizing chase scenes, which slowly and cleverly reveal their true feelings to the camera. As the tension builds it becomes clear that neither man will realise the dream of the other, and all passion must be sublimated. Aching and sublime on every level.
While with my blatant heterocentrism I missed these deeper meanings, Smokey and the Bandit *is* a hell of an entertaining piece of brainless entertainment...
By the way, did the freewheeling libertarian south depicted in Bandit ever really exist (to some extent, I'm not quite so silly to believe that bootlegging in high-powered automobiles was routine behaviour...), and if so, what the hell happpened to it?
I only studied linear programming at the undergraduate level, but as I understood it simplex implementations have been around for a very long time and have been tweaked to within an inch of their life.
Briefly and approximately, are you working an improved simplex implementation, or some new application for linear programming?
Re:Get with the (space) program, fellas.
on
New NASA Budget Woes
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· Score: 2, Funny
Call it the "Ronald Reagan Memorial Telescope" and it'd get funded for sure. The Republicans name everything else after the guy...
A sequel trilogy, continuing on from the end of ROTJ, just doesn't sound like movie material. It might possibly make a good TV series, but what's left is the complex, dense, and essentially adult world of "we're free! What do we do now?" problems. Setting up a functioning government that avoids the problems of the Old Republic while not creating too many new ones, mopping up any remnant imperials and other bad guys who step into the chaos, and so forth. All the kind of stuff that the civilians at the Pentagon forgot when they invaded Iraq, basically...
But, for better or worse, all of those are quite different types of tales to the six movies, and they're particularly ill-suited to being told as a blockbuster kids movie.
Please note: I never claimed that Simons was Australian. I did claim that the company which owned the patents was Australian, which is perfectly correct.
As to Simons' supposed genius, it's my understanding that not everybody in the genetics world accepts his accounts of things, to say the least.
Have the Buck Rogers types in the US Air Force had a look at the budget deficit recently?Flinging 10 billion at energy research would do far more to enhance America's security than this boondoggle, which is solving a non-existent problem, ever could.
There's another one that's far, far broader, and the people enforcing it are far, far greedier. There's an Australian company which owns the patent for any use of non-coding DNA, and are shaking down medical research labs doing pure science for royalties.
I think that there should be a blanket patent exemption for pure research, though I'm not quite sure how one should define the exemption.
Since the NYT went online, it's become the de facto US outpost of the global web media (in the same way that The Guardian is in the UK). Consequently, its op-ed columnists had a global audience that is not only numerically large, it contains a disproportionately large number of highly educated, well-off, and influential people.
Long term, cutting that off (because only a very small fraction will bother to subscribe) is in my view going to cost the paper more in reputation that it'll gain in short-term revenue.
I like the euphemism noted in the Wikipedia article on the topic, External Pulsed Plasma Propulsion. Cute:)
As far as the merits of the idea go, statistically each launch would give a few people cancer. You're not going to sell people on that idea unless there's an absolutely compelling need (the Big One is about to hit us, for instance).
It's about accomplishing a geopolitical outcome. Even putting aside the moral considerations for a moment, strategic bombing is a remarkably crude tool for doing that.
Sure, America could have turned Iraq into a radioactive wasteland, but it would have cratered its economy as OPEC declared an oil embargo on the West in retaliation...
1. Organise peer review - it's not like it organises itself. You have to find and select peers without conflicting interests, but with adequate subject knowledge. You have to chase them for deadlines and give them help as needed.
I'll grant you this one, possibly.
2. Edit. In real life, scientists and academics are often not very good at writing cogently. Someone needs to help make it readable.
Peer review also reviews readability as weell as accuracy. A poorly-written paper can get knocked back (particularly if the content isn't that exciting) just as easily as a paper with poor content. My boss would have my balls on toast if I submitted a paper that was not clearly written.
3. Copy Edit. And someone needs to fix the grammar and spelling.
Again, in my experience it's the peer reviewers that do this. If something is that badly written, it gets rejected anyway.
4. Technical Edit. Someone needs to check all the mathematical formulae, diagrams, drug names, etc. to make sure nothing's wrong.
Again, it's the peer reviewers, not paid editors, who do that, as much as they can. Most of the time, only researchers active in the same area are capable of doing the checking. Maybe it's different in the world of medical journals, which you seem to be talking about.
5. Statistics. In many fields, the publisher will use a statistician to confirm that there are no statistical errors in the paper.
Not in my field.
6. Original writing. Most academic journals, and all the major ones include a considerable amount of original content as well as research papers. All that needs to be written and edited.
If that content is really useful, it can stand on its own and people will continue to pay for it.
I can't think of any journal that today asks authors to give up copyright to papers they submit. It's a choice.
You obviously haven't submitted a paper to the IEEE, then. They insist on copyright assignment.
Maybe medical journals (which seems to be what you're familiar with) are somewhat different to other types of scientific journals. For one thing, I gather many of those who submit to them are practising doctors rather than full-time researchers. Anybody who needed the kind of help you're describing as a full-time researcher wouldn't last very long at it.
I think you might be taking Arthur Clarke's 2061 a wee bit too seriously. Remember, he had to blow up Jupiter to get at the supposed diamonds in the core (I'm not even sure whether that hypothesis has been ruled out or not since the book's publication).
What there *is* known to be in great quantity is platinum group metals, mixed in with a bunch of other metals which are commercially useful but probably not viable to ship back to Earth on their own. Platinum, however, is very expensive stuff because it's both rare and incredibly useful; it's used in anti-pollution gear on cars right now, and is a key component of fuel cells (and its cost is a major barrier to their commercial viability). To make space platinum mining viable you need much cheaper launch costs than we have to today, but proposals like these are going a long way to those cheaper launch costs.
I went to a panel featuring Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, and an Australian poet Martin Harrison talking about the future of the arts. Ito was tapping away at his laptop before the presentation - probably submitting this story to Slashdot...
Ito and Lessig basically gave their stump speeches (Lessig about the need to reform copyright laws for balance, Ito about the fact that there's plenty of opportunity for artists and businessmen to make money out of a less-punitive IP landscape), but they're such great stump speeches you hardly mind. They're definitely worth hearing, and they got a pretty enthusiastic response from the crowd there (and I don't think this was entirely from preaching to the converted).
The Moon might be a great place to launch spacecraft from, but it's a shitty place to build them because, well, you're missing the massive industrial infrastructure required to build them. Setting that up on the moon would be a hugely costly undertaking.
As for private industry, there's no way that pure scientific exploration is going to be funded by the private sector. Why would they? It's an enormously expensive exercise and it's going to be damn difficult to turn a profit at it. What Virgin Galactic is proposing may or may not be profitable, but it's sure not exploration.
If I recall the pop-science summary of string theory in a PBS doco on the subject, the fact that it isn't possible to test it right now is a major concern with the theory (frankly, it sounds like it's more accurately described as "the string theory hypothesis" or "string theory hypotheses"). The scientific nature of the enterprise has therefore been questioned.
However, there is still a reasonable hope that some time in the future that it will be possible to test string theory. ID is fundamentally untestable.
The postdoc who works next to me is a full-blown creationist; he's also been published in some of the top conferences in the software engineering field.
I wonder whether he perceives any contradiction between being a hard-headed sceptic in his work and the blind faith he displays as a Christian. I don't want to ask him about it because it risks another earbashing about the supposed wonderful powers of prayer and the joys of accepting God into your life.
If every nitwit from the suburbs has it, it is by definition no longer cool, and the cool people will find some other thing to do to differentiate themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
I did the calculation with rapeseed. All the current cropland in America couldn't come close to providing its transport fuel needs. Heck, Australia can't, and it exports a far greater proportion of its agricultural production than the US does.
In the greenhouse debate, there's far too much attention paid to transport fuel use and too little to the static energy sector. The main game is going to be shutting down today's coal-fired power plants; what we replace them with is the big question.
Thermal depolymerization and this algae farming *might* be practical, but conventional crops to ethanol is a waste of time (or, at least, is not worth subsidising on environmental grounds).
However, you are right in terms of your observations of present diesel vehicle emissions. Until relatively recently, diesel particulate emissions were pretty much unregulated. That's changing rapidly. New diesels are a hell of a lot cleaner than the old ones.
If the choice is between burning biodiesel or burning petroleum-derived diesel; the biodiesel is much cleaner. In any case, there's all manner of funky new anti-pollution gear for diesels coming on line soon; one of the more important types are particulate filters.
But, in any case, you sound like a global warming denialist, so having a rational discussion on pollution with you is pretty much impossible anyway...
I've heard the Soviet pipeline software story before, and, frankly, I'm dubious. As told, there's no way the CIA could have known exactly how the software was going to be configured, and without that knowledge there's no way they could tell exactly what was going to happen when it went haywire. What if the explosion was in a densely populated area? Could you imagine the political consequences? The Soviets would have been able to say "sure, we steal technology, but the Yankee capitalist pigs slaughter thousands of innocent people.", and they would have been right. Reagan would have been impeached - even assuming the Soviets didn't decide to start rolling their tanks westward in response. I just can't see how the CIA would have taken the risk.
What do you call getting who knows how many church leaders to plug the film, then? Best marketing campaign since The Blair Witch Project, and about as profitable...
While with my blatant heterocentrism I missed these deeper meanings, Smokey and the Bandit *is* a hell of an entertaining piece of brainless entertainment...
By the way, did the freewheeling libertarian south depicted in Bandit ever really exist (to some extent, I'm not quite so silly to believe that bootlegging in high-powered automobiles was routine behaviour...), and if so, what the hell happpened to it?
I only studied linear programming at the undergraduate level, but as I understood it simplex implementations have been around for a very long time and have been tweaked to within an inch of their life. Briefly and approximately, are you working an improved simplex implementation, or some new application for linear programming?
Call it the "Ronald Reagan Memorial Telescope" and it'd get funded for sure. The Republicans name everything else after the guy...
But, for better or worse, all of those are quite different types of tales to the six movies, and they're particularly ill-suited to being told as a blockbuster kids movie.
As to Simons' supposed genius, it's my understanding that not everybody in the genetics world accepts his accounts of things, to say the least.
Have the Buck Rogers types in the US Air Force had a look at the budget deficit recently?Flinging 10 billion at energy research would do far more to enhance America's security than this boondoggle, which is solving a non-existent problem, ever could.
I think that there should be a blanket patent exemption for pure research, though I'm not quite sure how one should define the exemption.
Long term, cutting that off (because only a very small fraction will bother to subscribe) is in my view going to cost the paper more in reputation that it'll gain in short-term revenue.
As far as the merits of the idea go, statistically each launch would give a few people cancer. You're not going to sell people on that idea unless there's an absolutely compelling need (the Big One is about to hit us, for instance).
It's about accomplishing a geopolitical outcome. Even putting aside the moral considerations for a moment, strategic bombing is a remarkably crude tool for doing that. Sure, America could have turned Iraq into a radioactive wasteland, but it would have cratered its economy as OPEC declared an oil embargo on the West in retaliation...
I'll grant you this one, possibly.
Peer review also reviews readability as weell as accuracy. A poorly-written paper can get knocked back (particularly if the content isn't that exciting) just as easily as a paper with poor content. My boss would have my balls on toast if I submitted a paper that was not clearly written.
Again, in my experience it's the peer reviewers that do this. If something is that badly written, it gets rejected anyway.
Again, it's the peer reviewers, not paid editors, who do that, as much as they can. Most of the time, only researchers active in the same area are capable of doing the checking. Maybe it's different in the world of medical journals, which you seem to be talking about.
Not in my field.
If that content is really useful, it can stand on its own and people will continue to pay for it.
You obviously haven't submitted a paper to the IEEE, then. They insist on copyright assignment.
Maybe medical journals (which seems to be what you're familiar with) are somewhat different to other types of scientific journals. For one thing, I gather many of those who submit to them are practising doctors rather than full-time researchers. Anybody who needed the kind of help you're describing as a full-time researcher wouldn't last very long at it.
What there *is* known to be in great quantity is platinum group metals, mixed in with a bunch of other metals which are commercially useful but probably not viable to ship back to Earth on their own. Platinum, however, is very expensive stuff because it's both rare and incredibly useful; it's used in anti-pollution gear on cars right now, and is a key component of fuel cells (and its cost is a major barrier to their commercial viability). To make space platinum mining viable you need much cheaper launch costs than we have to today, but proposals like these are going a long way to those cheaper launch costs.
Ito and Lessig basically gave their stump speeches (Lessig about the need to reform copyright laws for balance, Ito about the fact that there's plenty of opportunity for artists and businessmen to make money out of a less-punitive IP landscape), but they're such great stump speeches you hardly mind. They're definitely worth hearing, and they got a pretty enthusiastic response from the crowd there (and I don't think this was entirely from preaching to the converted).
As for private industry, there's no way that pure scientific exploration is going to be funded by the private sector. Why would they? It's an enormously expensive exercise and it's going to be damn difficult to turn a profit at it. What Virgin Galactic is proposing may or may not be profitable, but it's sure not exploration.
Only Genghis Khan, Napoleon and David Frost have one (but Frost pinched his...)
However, there is still a reasonable hope that some time in the future that it will be possible to test string theory. ID is fundamentally untestable.
The postdoc who works next to me is a full-blown creationist; he's also been published in some of the top conferences in the software engineering field. I wonder whether he perceives any contradiction between being a hard-headed sceptic in his work and the blind faith he displays as a Christian. I don't want to ask him about it because it risks another earbashing about the supposed wonderful powers of prayer and the joys of accepting God into your life.
If every nitwit from the suburbs has it, it is by definition no longer cool, and the cool people will find some other thing to do to differentiate themselves.