Your quote of the KE formula is incorrect (KE = 1/2*m*v^2), and your conclusion about cubes vs. squares is wrong, because a mass-flow capture device derives its energy from not just the SPEED but the AMOUNT of mass that goes by per second (i.e. the mass flow). So, if you double the velocity of the wind, the MASS part of the formula doubles as well as the velocity part; that is why the power (energy per unit time) is proportional to the cube, not just the square of the velocity in any mass-flow device.
This link is the nicest derivation I have seen online of Betz's law regarding the maximum effiency (16/27 ~= 59%) of any non-compressible mass flow capture device. At least the article doesn't claim to exceed it (40%, I think). But as for high drag-devices getting a better effeciency than a variable-pitch propeller? That sounds pretty suspicious.
On the other hand, if it can endure much higher winds than a prop installation, its OVERALL effeciency might be higher, because the energy in a mass flow is proportional to the cube of the wind-speed; so the 1% high wind speed tail of the distribution contributes a large portion of the total energy captured by the turbine. Of course, having a bit more REAL info would be helpful in determining if this is just slick FUD or something real. And when significant data is not mentioned, it does make one tend to think there is something to hide.
...is we push people with great ability to USE that ability, and center their lives around it before they are even formed enough as humans to CHOOSE what they wish to do with their lives. Many of the great scientists in history came to science after wandering many other paths in their lives, sometimes late in life. Even the idea of being a "professional" scientist is only a few hundred years old - it was seen as a "hobby" or an adjunct to a proper career in the priesthood, government, or the sport of nobles with spare time. I think this forced experience with other endeavours in life was actually highly beneficial to them.
Remember the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton U.? The idea was gather a whole bunch of world class geniuses (Einstein, Godel, Oppenheimer, etc.), put 'em in a nice, idyllic place, give them no teaching responsibilites, or for that matter, ANY responsibilites, and wait for the works of genius to flow! After all, with no other tasks to distract all these luminaries, they should be able to come up with brilliant stuff! Right?
Right?
Well, as most people know, it really didn't work out that way at all. AFAIK, it is still there (I think Dyson is the head of it now), but the qualitiy and quantity of work never came anywhere near what people expected. Feynman wrote a bit about why it failed to live up to expectations, and the conclusion he came to was that they were too isolated from real life; he said whenever he had a "block", or felt burned out, ultimately his students would pop him out of it by asking him a question he really didn't know the answer to, or suggested something that never occured to him before.
In most of the fields I have encountered, the "best" people to work with are frequently the ones who tried a few other careers, moved around a bit, and finally settled on their present job after they gathered some life-experience. These folks are usually the most motivated, have a broad and wise perspective on what makes what they do important, relevant, and fun.
I think many/.ers miss the point of a broad education - it is not to teach factiods that will be directly relevant to one's chosen career - those you will pick up when you want to and on the job, and at a much more effecient pace. It is to give one a sense of other paths in life, what other people do, and ultimately what YOU want to do. If someone is shown only ONE path (one that they happen to be really talented at, perhaps), and that is all they see in life, is it any surprise such a person would burn out young and feel lost in the world?
For the love of god - seatbelt laws were enacted because the consequence of not wearing a seatbelt was a much higher probability of DEATH in an auto accident (and assuming you are just injured, the associated higher costs of health care which has to be borne by everybody) - hardly the result of someone who "hack[s] into the [your] network and steal your most confidential data". Jeez, even that quote, "the network", like there is only one shows how clueless some of these politicians are. Now we need laws going after WiFi providers who don't secure themselves sufficently?
Let's pass some other useful laws, then:
1) Fine people who use unpatched OS's, or OS's with KNOWN, UNPATCHED security holes. They cause all those net problems! 2) Fine people who don't lock their car doors at night. They're letting car thieves make a living! 3) Fine people who purchase something without collecting a reciept - they're enabling tax fraud, and employees ripping off corporations! 4) Fine people who plug in electronic equipment without surge protectors in place. They're tempting God to wreak havok with his lightning bolts!
When did it become acceptable to penalize the victims rather than the criminals?
I agree with much of what you said, disagree with some of what you said, but I am ultimately saddened by the fact that your argument boils down to "the U.S. is the least evil of the bunch". Perhaps it is merely the rose-tinted memories of my father's stories (WW II vet), but the U.S. used to ASPIRE to much more than just being the least bad....
Yes, a soft appeal to emotion rather than a rigorous argument. So sue me for rampant sentimentality and patriotism.
...but the enforcement of its correctness is not. Let's face it, if you want to gather information on someone, you can do so pretty easily, and that is an inevitable result of computer technology and data aggregation techniques becoming cheap and fast. And the reality is, do you want banks giving loans out to any schmoe, and charging you higher interest rates when he/she defaults? There is a legitimate role for information gathering in a modern society.
The problem occurs with errors. THIS is the crucial problem - from getting on a "no-fly" list, to having your identity swiped and defaults improperly placed on your credit report, etc. And the reason it occurs is that there is no incentive for the credit bureaus and other information gatherers to get it right - there is no penality if they screw someone over with incorrect info.
So, why not come up with a law - if a data selling business, EVEN UNKNOWINGLY, provides false information that results in damages (and broadly define this) to an individual, they are liable to correct the damages, pay for any reasonable expenses borne by the individual in demonstrating the falsity of the information, and up to 100 times the amount of damages (determined by a jury based on the company's attitude toward the law) as a punitive measure. In this respect, it does not seem too far from the way slander and libel cases are handled - just allowing for the fact that in this informationally easy age, not only famous people can be libeled and slandered. Hopefully this would give them a LARGE incentive to be at least correct.
Of course, this doesn't address the privacy rights side of things at all, but at least this might tackle SOME of the abuses occurring....
(Disclaimer - I'm not a lawyer, not even close, so I'm sure there is a lot I am missing. But doesn't the general idea have some merit?)
I really like your story - and I understand its point. But sometimes, a good local restaurant is far better than one that has sold its soul to conquer the world - do you know of any large chain restaurants that are as good as the singular ones run by a dedicated family? It is in this tension between being a singularly excellent, but small, OS experience and being "Mac"-Donalds to the computing world that Apple is trying to find its place.
Indeed - I wonder how many thousands of turbines would have to be spinning how many hundreds of years before it matched the number of dead birds from one Exxon Valdez incident. Not to mention all the other critters. And while people bitch about nuclear power, it has the beauty that its (albiet highly) contaminated wastes are concentrated in one place, whereas most other power sources distribute them thinly into the atmosphere where they are virtually impossible to control, assign blame for or otherwise put EFFECTIVE mechanisms in place to account for their impact. So, while nobody likes living next to a nuke plant, wind turbine or biodiesel farm (they SMELL), you have to make tradeoffs. I'll take a few dead birds over owing my soul to a medieval kingdom any day. (hyperbole intentional)
There are an awful lot of important (meaning, we wouldn't have computers, satellites, electric power, engines, medicines, etc. without them) scientists whose graves are lost and whose names are fast fading from common memory, whilst we have untold roads, bridges, cathedrals, buildings, etc. named after fairly useless politicans, generals and actors. So, if this gives us an excuse to call attention to the man who inaugurated modern astronomy by creating a viable, heliocentric calculational system to compete with and ultimately displace the old Ptolemaic system, all the better.
Well, I don't know if the ELECTION was a failure. If you RTFA (/. here, I know), internet voting was ALLOWED, not REQUIRED. It doesn't say what the turnout was for the election as a whole. Anybody know?
Actually I went in such a chamber because my airline requires it within your first year of employment as a pilot. They do it not to create heroes, but to make plain how a) individual your symptoms are, and b) how insidious and dangerous hypoxia is. It still is a small but persistent cause of airplane crashes. You see, there is this little concept called "responsibility" that seems to escape you, which pilots have for the conduct of their flights. For similar reasons, we also practice a variety of other emergency situations on a regular basis, not just so armchair masters like you can talk about hero bullcrap. Oh, and since you are so obviously an expert, I won't bother providing the links. And I'm sorry I bothered making a suggestion that might enlighten you as to what an AVERAGE person would experience at that altitude, since you are so plainly nowhere near average. And, if you had bothered to read any of the sources I had provided, ACCLIMATED people (like Sherpas) can survive somewhat higher; and that acclimatization can take WEEKS or MONTHS, and for many people doesn't occur at all. Great stuff for someone who just wants to RIDE ON A FRIGGIN' TRAIN.
So, for 99% of the people who would ride this thing (oh wait! All those sherpas want to go sightseeing in the rest of China! It will only be 98%!), the minimum pressure factor I mentioned is the PRIMARY consideration. Wrap your non-average brain around that concept.
Hypoxia is a "nice theory" to the same extent as gravity and evolution are "nice theories". This is a very well researched area, which you don't appear to know much about, so here are some links:
I'd like to remind you that these numbers are for extremely fit, trained individuals. For your AVERAGE human being, like the ones who are presumably going to ride in this thing, the numbers are far less. But don't take my word for it, take the FAA's (Federal Aviation Administration) when they decided what minimum levels of oxygen should be supplied to air passengers, not to mention pilots:
So, while it is possible, briefly, for extremely fit, acclimated individuals to survive at 15,000 foot plus altitudes, it is not something that you would want to go through just to ride on a bloody train. If you really want to learn more about Hypoxia, go to a local Air Force base, and they may give you a complementary ride in an altitude chamber. This is done with all military (and most civilian) pilots, so that they can learn what their personal symptoms of hypoxia are. They even videotape it - it's very entertaining to watch yourself drool and not remember it, and to see how a sentence you were to write at each 1000' pressure bump turns from neat penmanship into a seismograph.
It has nothing to do with the starting or ending altitudes. In order for people to live longer than minutes, you need a partial pressure of O2 of at least 12 kPa. Sea level O2 pressure is (typically) about 20 kPa. As your altitude increases, the partial pressure drops, to about 16 kPa at 6,000 feet (where the first symptoms of hypoxia become evident for sensitive individuals, such as smokers - usually night vision is one of the first things to go with increased altitude), to about 14 kPa at 10,000 feet, and down to 12 kPa at about 15,000 feet. IIRC, the train is supposed to go up to above 17,000 feet about sea level, so either the oxygen content of the cabin has to be enriched above 20% (can you say, Fire Hazard?), oxygen masks have to be provided, or the cabin has to be pressurized.
This link describes a bit more about the hazards of altitude:
You have a good point. Our moods in life are to a large extent reflections of the world around us, including video games. But then again, it gets ambigous when you start to dive in a bit deeper, as to WHAT mood they will induce. For instance, one of the games you mentioned that you do not like happens to be a favorite of mine, Unreal Tournament (the original) - you said it was too sadistic. My experience has been rather the opposite. When you get heated up and mad playing UT, you tend to LOSE. The game actually rewards a calm, quick, cool head. When you get mad, you make stupid mistakes - you repeately get fragged by people watching your reflexive, unintellegent step-by-step angry persuit of someone wounded (easy to bait), always going to the same place to snipe, hanging out there too long, etc. So, I don't think UT rewards sadism, I think it rewards creativity and doing the unexpected.
I find whether I am in a good or bad mood afterwards depends more on whether I thought I have done well or not. And I find a certain release from the stresses of the day - rather than yell at someone I care about, or be snapish, I like to play a 30-min session, and I feel more relaxed, like some of the stress has been burned off; and on rainy days, easier to do than jogging for a 1/2 hr.
Of course, I'm an adult, and I don't have kids. So my perspective is a bit different. But my point is that the SAME game will affect DIFFERENT people DIFFERENTLY. Who should then determine which games are acceptable and which games are not? It seems that, as with many things, it should be left to the individual. You choose not to play UT, because you don't like how it makes you feel, I choose to play UT because I like how it makes me feel. I don't think you can universally check off a game as being in the "This is a Not-Good-For-You, mean feeling inducing" category for all people.
The most fundamental reason is that it sucks to watch movies on a 3" or smaller screen. The beauty of sound is that the size of the generator doesn't matter (much - audiophiles will point out the lack of base, clipping/overshooting on square wave tests, etc.); this is just not true of visuals. The only way around this is if someone can put a 3" screen 3" from your eyeballs (to get the same angular coverage as a movie or TV screen) and hold it there, comfortably.
You're right - I was exaggerating a bit when I said "first" - what I should have said was, "among many differences, a primary one is..." or something to that effect. We didn't see discs until Galileo turned a telescope toward the sky...
My overall goal was to point out that the "roundedness" has been a primary characteristic of "planetness" for a long time; we picture a rounded body of a certain minimum size when we talk of planets. While we could come up with a highly technical definition of a planet, I think sometimes the sciences borrow too much from the common vernacular, taking a word with a common usage, and twisting it into a special technical meaning. This leads to confusion on the part of non-scientists when these concepts are explained; and at worst, they are used by anti-scientifc types to obscufy and deny scientific ideas. For example - giving quarks "color" and "flavor", describing certain mathematical structures as "groups" or "rings", calling evolution "just a theory" - all these play off of unusual/technical usage of words.
I don't think we should make it any harder to explain science (or make it easier to distort it - "those crazy scientists always change their minds; one day there are 9 planets, now there are only 8. They always get it wrong and change their answer later") to the masses by redefining a common use word into something perhaps technically useful, but not close to the common meaning.
For some reason, there has been a bit of a dispute about what constitutes a planet vs. an asteroid, comet, other thing orbiting the sun, etc. Some astronomers have said the origin of the object should decide, others give maximum orbital eccentricities and size, etc.
Here is an easy idea for what should be called a planet, that is a somewhat "natural" definition. We first noticed planets were different from stars because we could resolve them into DISCS, not merely points of light - in other words, (aside from being close) planets are ROUND. This is not just an accident, but an indication that they had sufficient gravity to pull themselves into such a shape; thus their surfaces at some point were probably molten, there was a chance for various elements to sort into layers, etc. So why not just say if it's big enough to have pulled itself into a spherodial shape, and it's orbiting the sun, it's a planet?
Job's purpose is not necessarily happiness
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Pay vs. Happiness
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(Probably been said before, but...)
I think the biggest problem is that there is an expectation that ALL your satisfactions and accomplishments in life will come from your job. It used to be (meaning throughout most of the last 6000+ years) that your job allowed you to SURVIVE; any sort of satisfaction you get from life was on your own time and in your own way. It has only been in the last 50 years in First World countries that "choosing a career" that you actually ENJOY has even been possible.
I think burnout comes from failed expectations. In the States we tend to shuffle a person off from High School directly to college, pick a major, pick a career at the nice, experienced age of 21 or so that you will enjoy for the rest of your life - and there is a subliminal message, constant and surrounding almost every aspect of our lives, that we are SUPPOSED to enjoy our jobs, that they are all supposed to be fulfilling, useful work, and we are failures if we don't always enjoy what we do. Experience indicates that this is not realistic. Look at a sampling of the respondents whose answer can be summarized as, "You're a whiny, lazy bastard. Get out there and find a new job, get a better education, and become happy and not-at-all-mad like me!!!" - which of course, presupposes no other more pressing responsibilites (like taking care of a family), or allows for the fact that good, normal, smart people sometimes make bad career decisions at a young age that affect them for decades.
My father had to quit his job, his language, his country, culture, and most of his family (they didn't want to leave Europe in 1938 - not good if you were Jewish), and start all over again with a trunk of clothes at the age of 32. Yet he was always such a happy man - and he told me that one reason was he never confused his job with his real life.
Putting all your accomplishment and satisfaction eggs in the career basket is not a wise idea.
I know it is more important to make a game that is fun rather than one that is realistic (if it is an either/or choice), and in the original CIV, processor power was rather at a premium, so a very simple economic model was chosen - "trade units" were generated by workers on terrain that had roads, or were water tiles; these trade units were then subdivided into three baskets by the player, one for tax revenue, one for science research, and one for luxuries.
But with computer processor power so much higher and vast quantities of memory available, has thought been given to a more complex, organic economic model, somewhat along the lines of SimCity, where millions of trade routes are "tested" repeatedly over time, to see which ones succeed and which ones do not? Or perhaps some different, more sophisticated model where the fundamentals are complex, build up over time, and are not so easily/linearly controlled by the player? To make economic building as significant a part of the game as city development, diplomacy, and exploration?
I think ludacris is a rap singer, so I really don't see the connection. But if you mean ludicrous, I agree, spending $5 billion on shuttling a few hundred people a few miles is. That's why I pointed out I hope they like driving, because they are locking themselves into that for the long term, which may actually be desirable. So, I really have no dreams about it one way or the other. The sick freak comment was not really relevant. You need to practice your troll-fu better.
Train projects (or monorail or subway, same thing) are not about the present, but the future. Once an urban environment is built up enough, it becomes prohibitively expensive to buy the land rights needed for such a project, and so the urban system is then stuck with whatever transportation grid it currently has, which is usually by road. The ability to scale up the number of people who drive along a stretch of road is quite limited, even if you allow room for roadway expansion (see Houston and LA); whereas it is easy to increase the number of people who commute over a given section of track by increasing the number of cars per train, increasing the frequency of trains, etc. So what this does in the long term is inhibit a city's growth.
Which might just be a good thing, depending on your point of view.
Slashdot Mirror
Your quote of the KE formula is incorrect (KE = 1/2*m*v^2), and your conclusion about cubes vs. squares is wrong, because a mass-flow capture device derives its energy from not just the SPEED but the AMOUNT of mass that goes by per second (i.e. the mass flow). So, if you double the velocity of the wind, the MASS part of the formula doubles as well as the velocity part; that is why the power (energy per unit time) is proportional to the cube, not just the square of the velocity in any mass-flow device.
...but if someone fires at you with an RPG, I think it's time to break out the torpedoes and snipers and not bother with the non-lethal crap.
This link is the nicest derivation I have seen online of Betz's law regarding the maximum effiency (16/27 ~= 59%) of any non-compressible mass flow capture device. At least the article doesn't claim to exceed it (40%, I think). But as for high drag-devices getting a better effeciency than a variable-pitch propeller? That sounds pretty suspicious.
http://www.windpower.org/en/stat/betzpro.htm
On the other hand, if it can endure much higher winds than a prop installation, its OVERALL effeciency might be higher, because the energy in a mass flow is proportional to the cube of the wind-speed; so the 1% high wind speed tail of the distribution contributes a large portion of the total energy captured by the turbine. Of course, having a bit more REAL info would be helpful in determining if this is just slick FUD or something real. And when significant data is not mentioned, it does make one tend to think there is something to hide.
...is we push people with great ability to USE that ability, and center their lives around it before they are even formed enough as humans to CHOOSE what they wish to do with their lives. Many of the great scientists in history came to science after wandering many other paths in their lives, sometimes late in life. Even the idea of being a "professional" scientist is only a few hundred years old - it was seen as a "hobby" or an adjunct to a proper career in the priesthood, government, or the sport of nobles with spare time. I think this forced experience with other endeavours in life was actually highly beneficial to them.
/.ers miss the point of a broad education - it is not to teach factiods that will be directly relevant to one's chosen career - those you will pick up when you want to and on the job, and at a much more effecient pace. It is to give one a sense of other paths in life, what other people do, and ultimately what YOU want to do. If someone is shown only ONE path (one that they happen to be really talented at, perhaps), and that is all they see in life, is it any surprise such a person would burn out young and feel lost in the world?
Remember the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton U.? The idea was gather a whole bunch of world class geniuses (Einstein, Godel, Oppenheimer, etc.), put 'em in a nice, idyllic place, give them no teaching responsibilites, or for that matter, ANY responsibilites, and wait for the works of genius to flow! After all, with no other tasks to distract all these luminaries, they should be able to come up with brilliant stuff! Right?
Right?
Well, as most people know, it really didn't work out that way at all. AFAIK, it is still there (I think Dyson is the head of it now), but the qualitiy and quantity of work never came anywhere near what people expected. Feynman wrote a bit about why it failed to live up to expectations, and the conclusion he came to was that they were too isolated from real life; he said whenever he had a "block", or felt burned out, ultimately his students would pop him out of it by asking him a question he really didn't know the answer to, or suggested something that never occured to him before.
In most of the fields I have encountered, the "best" people to work with are frequently the ones who tried a few other careers, moved around a bit, and finally settled on their present job after they gathered some life-experience. These folks are usually the most motivated, have a broad and wise perspective on what makes what they do important, relevant, and fun.
I think many
For the love of god - seatbelt laws were enacted because the consequence of not wearing a seatbelt was a much higher probability of DEATH in an auto accident (and assuming you are just injured, the associated higher costs of health care which has to be borne by everybody) - hardly the result of someone who "hack[s] into the [your] network and steal your most confidential data". Jeez, even that quote, "the network", like there is only one shows how clueless some of these politicians are. Now we need laws going after WiFi providers who don't secure themselves sufficently?
Let's pass some other useful laws, then:
1) Fine people who use unpatched OS's, or OS's with KNOWN, UNPATCHED security holes. They cause all those net problems!
2) Fine people who don't lock their car doors at night. They're letting car thieves make a living!
3) Fine people who purchase something without collecting a reciept - they're enabling tax fraud, and employees ripping off corporations!
4) Fine people who plug in electronic equipment without surge protectors in place. They're tempting God to wreak havok with his lightning bolts!
When did it become acceptable to penalize the victims rather than the criminals?
(/rant)
I agree with much of what you said, disagree with some of what you said, but I am ultimately saddened by the fact that your argument boils down to "the U.S. is the least evil of the bunch". Perhaps it is merely the rose-tinted memories of my father's stories (WW II vet), but the U.S. used to ASPIRE to much more than just being the least bad....
Yes, a soft appeal to emotion rather than a rigorous argument. So sue me for rampant sentimentality and patriotism.
...but the enforcement of its correctness is not. Let's face it, if you want to gather information on someone, you can do so pretty easily, and that is an inevitable result of computer technology and data aggregation techniques becoming cheap and fast. And the reality is, do you want banks giving loans out to any schmoe, and charging you higher interest rates when he/she defaults? There is a legitimate role for information gathering in a modern society.
The problem occurs with errors. THIS is the crucial problem - from getting on a "no-fly" list, to having your identity swiped and defaults improperly placed on your credit report, etc. And the reason it occurs is that there is no incentive for the credit bureaus and other information gatherers to get it right - there is no penality if they screw someone over with incorrect info.
So, why not come up with a law - if a data selling business, EVEN UNKNOWINGLY, provides false information that results in damages (and broadly define this) to an individual, they are liable to correct the damages, pay for any reasonable expenses borne by the individual in demonstrating the falsity of the information, and up to 100 times the amount of damages (determined by a jury based on the company's attitude toward the law) as a punitive measure. In this respect, it does not seem too far from the way slander and libel cases are handled - just allowing for the fact that in this informationally easy age, not only famous people can be libeled and slandered. Hopefully this would give them a LARGE incentive to be at least correct.
Of course, this doesn't address the privacy rights side of things at all, but at least this might tackle SOME of the abuses occurring....
(Disclaimer - I'm not a lawyer, not even close, so I'm sure there is a lot I am missing. But doesn't the general idea have some merit?)
I really like your story - and I understand its point. But sometimes, a good local restaurant is far better than one that has sold its soul to conquer the world - do you know of any large chain restaurants that are as good as the singular ones run by a dedicated family? It is in this tension between being a singularly excellent, but small, OS experience and being "Mac"-Donalds to the computing world that Apple is trying to find its place.
Indeed - I wonder how many thousands of turbines would have to be spinning how many hundreds of years before it matched the number of dead birds from one Exxon Valdez incident. Not to mention all the other critters. And while people bitch about nuclear power, it has the beauty that its (albiet highly) contaminated wastes are concentrated in one place, whereas most other power sources distribute them thinly into the atmosphere where they are virtually impossible to control, assign blame for or otherwise put EFFECTIVE mechanisms in place to account for their impact. So, while nobody likes living next to a nuke plant, wind turbine or biodiesel farm (they SMELL), you have to make tradeoffs. I'll take a few dead birds over owing my soul to a medieval kingdom any day. (hyperbole intentional)
There are an awful lot of important (meaning, we wouldn't have computers, satellites, electric power, engines, medicines, etc. without them) scientists whose graves are lost and whose names are fast fading from common memory, whilst we have untold roads, bridges, cathedrals, buildings, etc. named after fairly useless politicans, generals and actors. So, if this gives us an excuse to call attention to the man who inaugurated modern astronomy by creating a viable, heliocentric calculational system to compete with and ultimately displace the old Ptolemaic system, all the better.
Well, I don't know if the ELECTION was a failure. If you RTFA (/. here, I know), internet voting was ALLOWED, not REQUIRED. It doesn't say what the turnout was for the election as a whole. Anybody know?
I wonder what would have had to happen for it to be considered a failure.
Actually I went in such a chamber because my airline requires it within your first year of employment as a pilot. They do it not to create heroes, but to make plain how a) individual your symptoms are, and b) how insidious and dangerous hypoxia is. It still is a small but persistent cause of airplane crashes. You see, there is this little concept called "responsibility" that seems to escape you, which pilots have for the conduct of their flights. For similar reasons, we also practice a variety of other emergency situations on a regular basis, not just so armchair masters like you can talk about hero bullcrap. Oh, and since you are so obviously an expert, I won't bother providing the links. And I'm sorry I bothered making a suggestion that might enlighten you as to what an AVERAGE person would experience at that altitude, since you are so plainly nowhere near average. And, if you had bothered to read any of the sources I had provided, ACCLIMATED people (like Sherpas) can survive somewhat higher; and that acclimatization can take WEEKS or MONTHS, and for many people doesn't occur at all. Great stuff for someone who just wants to RIDE ON A FRIGGIN' TRAIN.
So, for 99% of the people who would ride this thing (oh wait! All those sherpas want to go sightseeing in the rest of China! It will only be 98%!), the minimum pressure factor I mentioned is the PRIMARY consideration. Wrap your non-average brain around that concept.
Hypoxia is a "nice theory" to the same extent as gravity and evolution are "nice theories". This is a very well researched area, which you don't appear to know much about, so here are some links:
y .shtml
_ Library/rgFAR.nsf/0/BA9AFBF96DBC56F0852566CF006798 F9?OpenDocument
_ Library/rgFAR.nsf/0/38EA18D996EDBCEC86256F3C0069EB 60?OpenDocument
Maximum altitude of human habitation:
http://hypertextbook.com/facts/2005/MoniqueAnthon
Maximum altitude of human survival:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_zone
On the one in a billion who can make it to the top of Mt. Everest without supplimental oxygen:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherpa_Ang_Rita
I'd like to remind you that these numbers are for extremely fit, trained individuals. For your AVERAGE human being, like the ones who are presumably going to ride in this thing, the numbers are far less. But don't take my word for it, take the FAA's (Federal Aviation Administration) when they decided what minimum levels of oxygen should be supplied to air passengers, not to mention pilots:
For private flying:
http://www.airweb.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance
For Part 121 Airline flying:
http://www.airweb.faa.gov/Regulatory_and_Guidance
So, while it is possible, briefly, for extremely fit, acclimated individuals to survive at 15,000 foot plus altitudes, it is not something that you would want to go through just to ride on a bloody train. If you really want to learn more about Hypoxia, go to a local Air Force base, and they may give you a complementary ride in an altitude chamber. This is done with all military (and most civilian) pilots, so that they can learn what their personal symptoms of hypoxia are. They even videotape it - it's very entertaining to watch yourself drool and not remember it, and to see how a sentence you were to write at each 1000' pressure bump turns from neat penmanship into a seismograph.
It has nothing to do with the starting or ending altitudes. In order for people to live longer than minutes, you need a partial pressure of O2 of at least 12 kPa. Sea level O2 pressure is (typically) about 20 kPa. As your altitude increases, the partial pressure drops, to about 16 kPa at 6,000 feet (where the first symptoms of hypoxia become evident for sensitive individuals, such as smokers - usually night vision is one of the first things to go with increased altitude), to about 14 kPa at 10,000 feet, and down to 12 kPa at about 15,000 feet. IIRC, the train is supposed to go up to above 17,000 feet about sea level, so either the oxygen content of the cabin has to be enriched above 20% (can you say, Fire Hazard?), oxygen masks have to be provided, or the cabin has to be pressurized.
This link describes a bit more about the hazards of altitude:
http://www.high-altitude-medicine.com/AMS.html
Dude, it's not the place, it's the PACE. And they are moving along pretty quickly as of late.
You have a good point. Our moods in life are to a large extent reflections of the world around us, including video games. But then again, it gets ambigous when you start to dive in a bit deeper, as to WHAT mood they will induce. For instance, one of the games you mentioned that you do not like happens to be a favorite of mine, Unreal Tournament (the original) - you said it was too sadistic. My experience has been rather the opposite. When you get heated up and mad playing UT, you tend to LOSE. The game actually rewards a calm, quick, cool head. When you get mad, you make stupid mistakes - you repeately get fragged by people watching your reflexive, unintellegent step-by-step angry persuit of someone wounded (easy to bait), always going to the same place to snipe, hanging out there too long, etc. So, I don't think UT rewards sadism, I think it rewards creativity and doing the unexpected.
I find whether I am in a good or bad mood afterwards depends more on whether I thought I have done well or not. And I find a certain release from the stresses of the day - rather than yell at someone I care about, or be snapish, I like to play a 30-min session, and I feel more relaxed, like some of the stress has been burned off; and on rainy days, easier to do than jogging for a 1/2 hr.
Of course, I'm an adult, and I don't have kids. So my perspective is a bit different. But my point is that the SAME game will affect DIFFERENT people DIFFERENTLY. Who should then determine which games are acceptable and which games are not? It seems that, as with many things, it should be left to the individual. You choose not to play UT, because you don't like how it makes you feel, I choose to play UT because I like how it makes me feel. I don't think you can universally check off a game as being in the "This is a Not-Good-For-You, mean feeling inducing" category for all people.
And Monty Python STILL rocks.
The most fundamental reason is that it sucks to watch movies on a 3" or smaller screen. The beauty of sound is that the size of the generator doesn't matter (much - audiophiles will point out the lack of base, clipping/overshooting on square wave tests, etc.); this is just not true of visuals. The only way around this is if someone can put a 3" screen 3" from your eyeballs (to get the same angular coverage as a movie or TV screen) and hold it there, comfortably.
iGlasses, anyone?
You're right - I was exaggerating a bit when I said "first" - what I should have said was, "among many differences, a primary one is..." or something to that effect. We didn't see discs until Galileo turned a telescope toward the sky...
My overall goal was to point out that the "roundedness" has been a primary characteristic of "planetness" for a long time; we picture a rounded body of a certain minimum size when we talk of planets. While we could come up with a highly technical definition of a planet, I think sometimes the sciences borrow too much from the common vernacular, taking a word with a common usage, and twisting it into a special technical meaning. This leads to confusion on the part of non-scientists when these concepts are explained; and at worst, they are used by anti-scientifc types to obscufy and deny scientific ideas. For example - giving quarks "color" and "flavor", describing certain mathematical structures as "groups" or "rings", calling evolution "just a theory" - all these play off of unusual/technical usage of words.
I don't think we should make it any harder to explain science (or make it easier to distort it - "those crazy scientists always change their minds; one day there are 9 planets, now there are only 8. They always get it wrong and change their answer later") to the masses by redefining a common use word into something perhaps technically useful, but not close to the common meaning.
My 2 cents, at any rate - and IANAS, btw.
For some reason, there has been a bit of a dispute about what constitutes a planet vs. an asteroid, comet, other thing orbiting the sun, etc. Some astronomers have said the origin of the object should decide, others give maximum orbital eccentricities and size, etc.
Here is an easy idea for what should be called a planet, that is a somewhat "natural" definition. We first noticed planets were different from stars because we could resolve them into DISCS, not merely points of light - in other words, (aside from being close) planets are ROUND. This is not just an accident, but an indication that they had sufficient gravity to pull themselves into such a shape; thus their surfaces at some point were probably molten, there was a chance for various elements to sort into layers, etc. So why not just say if it's big enough to have pulled itself into a spherodial shape, and it's orbiting the sun, it's a planet?
(Probably been said before, but...)
I think the biggest problem is that there is an expectation that ALL your satisfactions and accomplishments in life will come from your job. It used to be (meaning throughout most of the last 6000+ years) that your job allowed you to SURVIVE; any sort of satisfaction you get from life was on your own time and in your own way. It has only been in the last 50 years in First World countries that "choosing a career" that you actually ENJOY has even been possible.
I think burnout comes from failed expectations. In the States we tend to shuffle a person off from High School directly to college, pick a major, pick a career at the nice, experienced age of 21 or so that you will enjoy for the rest of your life - and there is a subliminal message, constant and surrounding almost every aspect of our lives, that we are SUPPOSED to enjoy our jobs, that they are all supposed to be fulfilling, useful work, and we are failures if we don't always enjoy what we do. Experience indicates that this is not realistic. Look at a sampling of the respondents whose answer can be summarized as, "You're a whiny, lazy bastard. Get out there and find a new job, get a better education, and become happy and not-at-all-mad like me!!!" - which of course, presupposes no other more pressing responsibilites (like taking care of a family), or allows for the fact that good, normal, smart people sometimes make bad career decisions at a young age that affect them for decades.
My father had to quit his job, his language, his country, culture, and most of his family (they didn't want to leave Europe in 1938 - not good if you were Jewish), and start all over again with a trunk of clothes at the age of 32. Yet he was always such a happy man - and he told me that one reason was he never confused his job with his real life.
Putting all your accomplishment and satisfaction eggs in the career basket is not a wise idea.
I know it is more important to make a game that is fun rather than one that is realistic (if it is an either/or choice), and in the original CIV, processor power was rather at a premium, so a very simple economic model was chosen - "trade units" were generated by workers on terrain that had roads, or were water tiles; these trade units were then subdivided into three baskets by the player, one for tax revenue, one for science research, and one for luxuries.
But with computer processor power so much higher and vast quantities of memory available, has thought been given to a more complex, organic economic model, somewhat along the lines of SimCity, where millions of trade routes are "tested" repeatedly over time, to see which ones succeed and which ones do not? Or perhaps some different, more sophisticated model where the fundamentals are complex, build up over time, and are not so easily/linearly controlled by the player? To make economic building as significant a part of the game as city development, diplomacy, and exploration?
True... but does that take into account the extra drag from the floats? (NY -> London) ;)
I think ludacris is a rap singer, so I really don't see the connection. But if you mean ludicrous, I agree, spending $5 billion on shuttling a few hundred people a few miles is. That's why I pointed out I hope they like driving, because they are locking themselves into that for the long term, which may actually be desirable. So, I really have no dreams about it one way or the other. The sick freak comment was not really relevant. You need to practice your troll-fu better.
Train projects (or monorail or subway, same thing) are not about the present, but the future. Once an urban environment is built up enough, it becomes prohibitively expensive to buy the land rights needed for such a project, and so the urban system is then stuck with whatever transportation grid it currently has, which is usually by road. The ability to scale up the number of people who drive along a stretch of road is quite limited, even if you allow room for roadway expansion (see Houston and LA); whereas it is easy to increase the number of people who commute over a given section of track by increasing the number of cars per train, increasing the frequency of trains, etc. So what this does in the long term is inhibit a city's growth.
Which might just be a good thing, depending on your point of view.