But how would you be certain whether the 13th floor was the last floor the marbles could be dropped from without breaking, or the first floor at which the marbles broke?
By searching from the bottom after the first marble breaks. So, if the first one didn't break at 12 but broke at 15, try 13 and 14 in that order.
"Imagine you have two marbles and a 100-story building. You are told that the marbles will break if they are dropped from a certain floor. Figure out a way, as effectivly as possible, how high you can drop the marbles before they break. Remember, it could be the 1st floor, it could be the 99th."
"Minimize maximum search time, minimize minimum search time, or minimize average search time ?";)
If you don't like to have your ideas pwned by some corporation, ask them to take the offending lines out of the contract. If they refuse, look for a different job.
C02 does NOT cause global warming! Humans are not responsible for global warming!
Remind me again why the average temperature on Venus is higher than the maximum temperature on Mercury, even though the latter receives a whole bunch more solar irradiance ?
Back when we were emitting the most C02 during the industrial revolution
Uh... you do know when the industrial revolution was, and that the CO2 output back then was a lot lower than today because, well, only very few countries were actually industrialized ?
Volcanoes alone emit more C02 than humans - not to mention the ocean!
Spoken like someone who can't do a simple balance. Is basic math really that difficult ?
Everybody - watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle" video and please stop spouting the nonsense.
If you got all the nonsense you're spouting from that video, then I definitely don't need to watch it.
Beside, I can't get an accurate 3 day forecast, now I am supposed to rely on a 50 year one? Get the week right first, then I will listen to your models.
You're confusing weather forecasts with climate prediction. They're two very different things.
A GROWING forest since a mature one doesn't absorb net carbon.
Whoever told you that is either a liar or needs to get a fscking clue.
What do you think all the stuff (pollen, seed pods, leaves, twigs, etc) trees drop during their lifetime (and after they die) is made of ? Carbon that's been absorbed from the atmosphere. A mature forest builds up soil (= absorbed carbon from the atmosphere). Get those myths out of your head and quickly, please.
I don't know where you got the idea that I was implying that trees sponaniously combusted when they die.
Duh ! Because that's what you would have to do to release all the carbon dioxide that the tree has ever absorbed. It basic chemistry that difficult ?
All the carbon dioxide the tree was holding is released because it doesn't have the processes to use it any longer.
News flash: The whole tree is basically made of carbon it absorbed out of the atmosphere. Any dead bit of tree that remains on the ground or in the soil means that carbon dioxide that was once in the atmosphere is no longer there.
It just goes in and back out again. It is, for all practical purposes, as inert as nitrogen.
Whoever told you that is either a liar or has no fricking clue. CO2 plays a crucial role in regulating blood acidity and having either too much or too little in your blood can have serious consequences up to and including death. In order to keep the CO2 level in your blood in the acceptable range, your body requires a certain concentration gradient in the lungs so it can get rid of the excess. CO2 concentrations of more than 8% in the inspired air are fatal within minutes. I'd hardly call that "inert as nitrogen".
It's not that good, and when a tree dies it releases all the CO2 it absorbed.
Whoever put that in your head is talking BS and probably a crony of Big Energy(tm). Trees do not spontaneously combust when they die. Things like soil and coal are proof of this.
Through the course of history climate changed much more drastically than it'll ever change with human made CO2 emissions.
Those changes took a lot longer than what we're observing right now.
Sun is burning out its hydrogen, the temperatures will increase in a long run no matter what we do - that's a nature's joke about environmentalists.
It'll take a few million years before we can even observe this effect. If we haven't hauled our butts off this rock in a billion years, we deserve to be fried.
Comparing CO2 concentrations for instance to water vapour concentrations is about the same as comparing the thickness of a sheet of toilet paper to a tree stump.
Sorry, but... no. The contribution of water vapor to the greenhouse effect is estimated to be 50%-80%, the contribution of CO2 is 10%-35% (at least as far as I remember the numbers). That's not even an order of magnitude even in the worst case.
And water vapor has some fairly quick ways of leaving the atmosphere - precipitation in solid or liquid form, for example. Carbon dioxide doesn't do that, at least not naturally.
We are changing the atmosphere by adding roughly one part in 10,000 of a relatively inert gas that serves as a vital feed stock to all plant life on the planet.
We are changing the atmosphere by raising the concentration of the second most important greenhouse gas by 30%. That's what you were trying to say, right ?
Plants die eventually. And when they do, they release the carbon dioxide again - that is why plants and bio-fuel are said to be carbon-neutral
Only if you vaporize/burn each and every tiny bit of the dead plant. In all other cases, some of the carbon will remain in solid form.
Being able to extract carbon dioxide from the air and store it - for instance, in crevices deep in the ground (just like the oil we are so merrily pumping up!), will actually reduce the levels, though.
I dunno if that would really be such an improvement. CO is toxic (displaces O when you inhale it and you die from CO poisoning) while CO2 is mostly inert.
Yes it would, because you don't release the CO into the atmosphere but use it (it's an extremely versatile resource that can be used for lots of thing, including synthesizing gasoline).
Basically, you could be doing "Cheap solar power + CO2 -> O2 + useful CO". It might be more efficient than, say, photovoltaics.
what the hell will we break if we start trying to extract too much carbon from the atmosphere.
I doubt that with out current CO2 release, we can extract "too much" carbon from the atmosphere. It's not rocket science to stop the extraction when the CO2 level drops below a certain threshold.
However - how the heck are we supposed to get all the energy necessary to capture all the carbon dioxide, without releasing more than we capture ? And wouldn't it make more sense to use all of this energy to replace CO2-emitting energy sources instead ?
Technological victory sure shut up the Japanese about 60 years ago!
... please turn in your geek license.
Besides, in Civilization terms, that was a domination/conquest victory. If you're planning to win that way and end up taking long enough to reach the modern age, you usually end up nuking the $h17 out of the other civs.
Technological victory means that you manage to build a spaceship and send it off to Alpha Centauri before any of the other civs do. And, ironically, then wipe out mankind on Earth, as described in the "sequel" to Civilization, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
That close to a major body, even it it is "merely" a red dwarf star, and a planet is going to be tide-locked, one way or another.
Don't forget the Neptune-mass object that's still inside the orbit of the super-earth. I would guess its gravity would prevent a complete tidal lock.
A tide-locked world, next to a star, isn't going to have a very large habitable zone. Any atmosphere could be expected to freeze solid on the dark side of the world. For starters.
The temperature on Venus is fairly evenly distributed even though Venus rotates very slowly. An atmosphere does have convection, which will counteract any temperature gradients.
More important, from the investment company's point of view, is that there's a lot of money to be made in a very short timespan, after which any investments can easily be redrawn and moved to other, similar ventures. This allows for high, continuous profits to the investment company even if each single patent troll has only marginal success.
A technology victory is in reach! I urge everyone to contact their local governors, and hopefully we can get enough cities building spaceship parts to launch before 2020.
Technological victory is for wimps. Real winners do so by conquest. Or domination.
When you talk about American chocolate, you're talking about grocery store and gas station chocolate,
When I talk about European chocolate, I mean the cheap stuff. Even the various supermarket chains' house brands. They're even cheaper than the American chocolate you mention, and vastly, vastly better.
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You could go up in 10s, which gives you a lower maximum number of drops (19, I think) than going up in 3s (30-something).
By searching from the bottom after the first marble breaks. So, if the first one didn't break at 12 but broke at 15, try 13 and 14 in that order.
"Minimize maximum search time, minimize minimum search time, or minimize average search time ?"
If you don't like to have your ideas pwned by some corporation, ask them to take the offending lines out of the contract. If they refuse, look for a different job.
Remind me again why the average temperature on Venus is higher than the maximum temperature on Mercury, even though the latter receives a whole bunch more solar irradiance ?
Back when we were emitting the most C02 during the industrial revolution
Uh ... you do know when the industrial revolution was, and that the CO2 output back then was a lot lower than today because, well, only very few countries were actually industrialized ?
Volcanoes alone emit more C02 than humans - not to mention the ocean!
Spoken like someone who can't do a simple balance. Is basic math really that difficult ?
Everybody - watch "The Great Global Warming Swindle" video and please stop spouting the nonsense.
If you got all the nonsense you're spouting from that video, then I definitely don't need to watch it.
You're confusing weather forecasts with climate prediction. They're two very different things.
Whoever told you that is either a liar or needs to get a fscking clue.
What do you think all the stuff (pollen, seed pods, leaves, twigs, etc) trees drop during their lifetime (and after they die) is made of ? Carbon that's been absorbed from the atmosphere. A mature forest builds up soil (= absorbed carbon from the atmosphere). Get those myths out of your head and quickly, please.
Duh ! Because that's what you would have to do to release all the carbon dioxide that the tree has ever absorbed. It basic chemistry that difficult ?
All the carbon dioxide the tree was holding is released because it doesn't have the processes to use it any longer.
News flash: The whole tree is basically made of carbon it absorbed out of the atmosphere. Any dead bit of tree that remains on the ground or in the soil means that carbon dioxide that was once in the atmosphere is no longer there.
Not at all. Carbon dating has nothing to do with the amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but rather with the ratio of certain carbon isotopes.
Whoever told you that is either a liar or has no fricking clue. CO2 plays a crucial role in regulating blood acidity and having either too much or too little in your blood can have serious consequences up to and including death. In order to keep the CO2 level in your blood in the acceptable range, your body requires a certain concentration gradient in the lungs so it can get rid of the excess. CO2 concentrations of more than 8% in the inspired air are fatal within minutes. I'd hardly call that "inert as nitrogen".
Whoever put that in your head is talking BS and probably a crony of Big Energy(tm). Trees do not spontaneously combust when they die. Things like soil and coal are proof of this.
You're forgetting that different molecules have different greenhouse potentials.
As I said - the ratio of contributions of water and CO2 isn't even 1:10 in the worst case.
And the earth isn't all tropics and subtropics.
Your timescales are a bit off on many levels.
Through the course of history climate changed much more drastically than it'll ever change with human made CO2 emissions.
Those changes took a lot longer than what we're observing right now.
Sun is burning out its hydrogen, the temperatures will increase in a long run no matter what we do - that's a nature's joke about environmentalists.
It'll take a few million years before we can even observe this effect. If we haven't hauled our butts off this rock in a billion years, we deserve to be fried.
Sorry, but
And water vapor has some fairly quick ways of leaving the atmosphere - precipitation in solid or liquid form, for example. Carbon dioxide doesn't do that, at least not naturally.
You need to re-read the parent first. He's talking about rainforests. How much rainforest does the US have ?
We are changing the atmosphere by raising the concentration of the second most important greenhouse gas by 30%. That's what you were trying to say, right ?
Only if you vaporize/burn each and every tiny bit of the dead plant. In all other cases, some of the carbon will remain in solid form.
Being able to extract carbon dioxide from the air and store it - for instance, in crevices deep in the ground (just like the oil we are so merrily pumping up!), will actually reduce the levels, though.
Guess what coal is. Carbon, collected by plants.
Yes it would, because you don't release the CO into the atmosphere but use it (it's an extremely versatile resource that can be used for lots of thing, including synthesizing gasoline).
Basically, you could be doing "Cheap solar power + CO2 -> O2 + useful CO". It might be more efficient than, say, photovoltaics.
I doubt that with out current CO2 release, we can extract "too much" carbon from the atmosphere. It's not rocket science to stop the extraction when the CO2 level drops below a certain threshold.
However - how the heck are we supposed to get all the energy necessary to capture all the carbon dioxide, without releasing more than we capture ? And wouldn't it make more sense to use all of this energy to replace CO2-emitting energy sources instead ?
Besides, in Civilization terms, that was a domination/conquest victory. If you're planning to win that way and end up taking long enough to reach the modern age, you usually end up nuking the $h17 out of the other civs.
Technological victory means that you manage to build a spaceship and send it off to Alpha Centauri before any of the other civs do. And, ironically, then wipe out mankind on Earth, as described in the "sequel" to Civilization, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
They might also run out of breath pretty quickly, being accustomed to much higher air pressures than we are.
Don't forget the Neptune-mass object that's still inside the orbit of the super-earth. I would guess its gravity would prevent a complete tidal lock.
A tide-locked world, next to a star, isn't going to have a very large habitable zone. Any atmosphere could be expected to freeze solid on the dark side of the world. For starters.
The temperature on Venus is fairly evenly distributed even though Venus rotates very slowly. An atmosphere does have convection, which will counteract any temperature gradients.
That's not the really important thing.
More important, from the investment company's point of view, is that there's a lot of money to be made in a very short timespan, after which any investments can easily be redrawn and moved to other, similar ventures. This allows for high, continuous profits to the investment company even if each single patent troll has only marginal success.
Technological victory is for wimps. Real winners do so by conquest. Or domination.
When I talk about European chocolate, I mean the cheap stuff. Even the various supermarket chains' house brands. They're even cheaper than the American chocolate you mention, and vastly, vastly better.