Fair enough. I can see how in something as densely populated as Manhattan, with miles of existing underground passageways, short distances along which your steam can't lose too much heat, et cetera, this might work.
And, mirabile dictu, it exists.
But most of the US is nothing like Manhattan. It isn't compact, it doesn't have underground passageways, and the distance from the powerplant to the user ranges from dozens to hundreds of miles. And at that, the individual users often have miles between them. Hence our enormous use of electricity. Again, it's not like people in the late 19th century didn't already think of piping steam around for power. They did. But when electricity came in, it was so much easier and more economical that hydraulic systems except in unusual circumstances (e.g. Manhattan) disappeared.
Generally I find that when things that any random bright person can think up don't exist, it's not because of a vast conspiracy or that everyone else from 4000 BC to the present was an idiot, but because there are problems not obvious on first examination.
More specifically, I just tend to think that piping steam around because you happen to have some is, unless it's very easy, probably a dumb idea. It requires fat, well-insulated, complicated and expensive piping which is a pain to maintain because high-temperature, high-pressure steam is corrosive as heck, and high-pressure high-temperature piping is inherently far more dangerous than electricity. I can run a high-voltage wire right through residential areas just by putting it up on a pole. If something knocks the pole down, I can arrange it so that the wire goes dead pretty much instantly, the speed of light being as high as it is. Try imagining a similarly safe and inexpensive way to send a 12-inch high-pressure high-temperature steam line through suburbia. Remember, too, if your steam pipe cracks, it isn't just dangerous if you touch it, like a high-voltage line -- it can explode and send shrapnel out a hundred yards. And you can't turn it off instantly, or just put on rubber gloves to handle it safely.
Furthermore, the cost of generation is not necessarily the biggest cost of getting power to a consumer. I've got my electric bill right in front of me, and they helpfully break the charges down into generation charges and delivery-related charges. Turns out that the cost to generate the electricity I use is only about half the total cost. The rest is delivery costs. So the fact that the steam itself might be free, or low cost, is at best half the problem solved -- you need to ask about the cost of delivery.
Mmmm....the first problem is that your fridge needs to be sitting in something significantly cooler than your heat source, and finding it is clearly a problem in Alabama this time of year, or else the nuke wouldn't be having problems getting rid of this heat.
Secondly, have you thought about the infrastructure required to pump around all that heat? Are you thinking a forest of insulated two-foot steam pipes running all around town? Sounds pretty ugly, noisy, expensive and environmentally disruptive. There's a reason we prefer electricity as our medium for transporting power, and it's not because no one ever had the idea of transporting steam instead.
lots of industries would like cheap steam, e.g. food, chemical, textile
I don't think that's true. Otherwise cogeneration would be a lot more popular than it is. Most of the industries you mention need heat sources, when they do, a lot hotter than you'll find in the exit of a nuke. If you want to make ammonia, for example, you want to heat your reactor to 500C or so.
See, engineers are not idiots. If they see a reliable source of heat and a reliable source of cold nearby, there's not a one that isn't going to think I could put this temperature differential to work. But if one source of power is having problems because the temperature differential has crapped out, it just seems very unlikely some mere trick of widgetry is going to magically rehabilitate an otherwise uselessly small temperature gradient.
They don't "run off waste heat." They run off waste heat plus a cooler atmosphere into which they can allow heat to flow.
All you need to use the "waste" heat being dumped into the river is to find something significantly cooler than the river. Then you can set up a heat engine between the river and your cold thing and generate power.
The problem of finding something just lying around in Alabama that is significantly colder than the local river is left as an exercise for the student.
Um...isn't this the nature of time, life, existence, et cetera? Things change. Even if there were no such thing as man-made global warming, the Sun would still vary its output, the continents would continue to drift, evolution would continue to produce new and interesting diseases, et cetera and so forth.
What do we call individuals who run their lives under the assumption that things will always stay the same? That they'll never get old or sick, that their job will never disappear or their skills become obsolete? "Intelligent" doesn't come to mind.
Besides, consider the advice you give people bemoaning the fact that their life has changed (e.g. they had to get a new job, now they have a baby and can't party all night, et cetera). We tell them, hey, change is an opportunity. So it is with climate change, natural or man-made. It's not a lot different than new and disruptive technology (cf. the RIAA and the Internet). Some folks will lose, yes. But others, especially if they're flexible and intelligent, will win.
Personally, I think the lesson to be learned from global warming (from whatever cause it stems) is not to resolve to hold back the tide, this time or next time. That's just futile. The Earth will always be producing some new surprise or other. The general solution algorithm is not to try to put fingers in every dike that develops cracks. There aren't enough fingers, and too many dikes. The trick, as individuals and as a species, is to think creatively and adapt. Otherwise, we're just dinosaurs wondering what that flash in the sky was, and why the swamp is drying up steadily.
Heat is disorganized motion, right? Atoms and molecules just bumping around any which way. If you want organized motion, which is useful energy -- such as an organized motion of electrons, a.k.a. electricity -- then you have to get that heat motion organized, flowing in one direction.
You do this by making the heat flow from one place to another. But here's the catch: you need a source and a sink to have a flow. The hot reactor core is the source. The river is the sink. Heat flows from the former to the latter, and the turbines, in essence, dip a "paddlewheel" into that current.
If you get rid of the sink, nothing flows, your "paddlewheel" doesn't turn, and you get no useful energy.
Well...OK, and I know the Schulten work quite well from my time at UIUC. It's certainly impressive in many ways.
But my suggestion is that fundamental advances will only be made on small, cheap systems. See, a machine like this is so expensive that it's very hard to justify doing blue-sky goofball things on it, which will almost certainly turn out to be dumb ideas. You usually have to write a proposal, and the committee usually won't risk massive resources on an idea that is shaky, speculative as heck, or screwball.
But of course, a truly new and powerful idea does look screwball at first. (Otherwise, some other smart guy would have already come up with it.) This is one reason the graphical web browser was not invented at Microsoft. Who would spend the money required to develop such a piece of software, when there were no graphic-intensive web pages out there for it to use, and apparently no demand for one? No one sensible, with a bottom line to protect. Only some undergraduate dreamer (Andreesen). For that matter, the development of computer simulation itself is instructive: it was not respectable in its early days, and most academics thought there was very little you could learn by doing a computer simulation. It was Bernie Alder noodling around on Livermore's big computers while no one paid attention that finally came up with something amazing that convinced everyone that computer simulation by God made a lot of sense. Sure, we can all see it now -- 20/20 hindsight and all that -- but if Alder and Wainwright had been bigshot academic scientists in the glare of publicity using very expensive public resources, I'll bet they would never have risked doing something as apparently nutty as simulating hard-sphere fluids.
So who is going to come up with new and powerful ways to solve problems in parallel? Not, I think, the people using the World's Fastest And Most Expensive Parallel Computer(TM). Those folks can't afford to be seen goofing around, making mistake after mistake while they're learning. Instead it will be someone of whom you've never heard, screwing around on a $5000 32-node cheapie cluster because that represents such a trivial investment that no one minds if he does apparently stupid, apparently pointless things on it all day.
That's a total waste of resources. The big cost in a machine like this is the lightning-speed interconnect between the processors and the fancy memory management that lets processors share memory in various ways. The cost of the processors themselves is, by comparison, trivial. Your kind of problem, a lot of small jobs running without knowledge of each other, is easily handled by a lot of small computers, and for a lot less money.
The only justification for a piece of hardware like this is a problem that needs all of the processors to even move forward. And it had better provide some truly surprising results, too, something you wouldn't have imagined had you simply solved a smaller system and scaled up in some obvious way. For example, we already know why argon freezes by simulating a few hundred atoms of the stuff. We learn nothing new by simulating a few hundred million atoms of argon.
I'd say you illustrate my point, that thinking "in parallel" is unnatural and difficult.
First of all, your problem with the rocks what in the business we call trivially parallelizable. You solve it like this:
int main() {
int n, result;
printf("Enter number of rocks: ");
scanf("%d",&n);
result = move_one_rock();
return(n * result); }
Secondly, there are plenty of resources to let you program a trivial thing like unrolling a loop with no history dependencies. In fact, you don't even need to rewrite your code. If you have something like this:
for(i = 1 ; i < 100000000000; i++) { /* important point: this step does not depend on the results of any other step */
factor(i);
}
You can just throw that puppy through any modern compiler capable of parallelizing and it will be parallized at the machine code level. No programmer thought required. But this, too, is an example of a trivially parallelizable program. There's no need for processors to communicate with each other at intermediate stages in the factoring, for example.
The nature of a difficult and interesting problem for which you'd like a parallel solution is one in which (1) you have many degrees of freedom, which you've got in your examples, but (2) the degrees of freedom are all strongly coupled (influence each other), which neither of your examples has.
All interesting problems in many-body physics have this quality. For example, why do proteins fold up the way they do? The degrees of freedom are the positions and velocities of all the atoms in the system, protein as well as water molecules, and the strong interactions are chemical bonds and the nonbonded forces between atoms. Another example: how do we make machine vision that recognizes objects as quickly and reliably (under differing light conditions, et cetera) as the human eye/brain combination? The degrees of freedom are the color and intensity of the individual pixels, and the strong interactions are the fact that an object is defined by edges, shadows, et cetera, and each of these things is a certain arrangement of pixels.
If you think about it, I hope you'll realize that it is inherently very, very difficult to write good algorithms for solving these kinds of problems. The limitation, IMHO, having worked in this field for a while, is not the hardware, and not even the software, but the wetware -- our ability to dream up algorithms to solve these problems. We know they exist: the human brain has a clock speed of 1 kHz, max, but it can solve the object recognition problem faster than the fastest computer with any number of processors you like. How? We don't know. We can't even imagine, yet. And that's the true frontier.
Since it's going to be massively parallel, it's only 500 times more powerful than some other computer if it has a beautifully parallelized problem to solve.
I've programmed computers scientifically for twenty-odd years, and one thing I've found is that massively parallel computers are very difficult to use efficiently, except when you're solving one of the relatively few problems which are obviously parallelizable and yet have interesting results. For example, solving 500 million tic-tac-toe games simultaneously is certainly impressive, but not very interesting. Solving a championship chess match is interesting, but it's not obvious at all how to do it well with 500 million simultaneous calculations. Therein lies the heart of the difficulty.
Part of the problem is undoubtably that we find it hard to think in parallel. We solve problems step by step, like a scalar machine. It's extremely difficult to even imagine what it would be like to solve a problem "all at once," in a fully parallel way, with each important factor simultaneously influencing all others.
So by me I'd say this is, for all of its Pyramid of Cheops grandeur, a second-rank research tool, for use in bashing problems to death that have well-defined, known algorithms for their solution. The real frontier is going to be people who noodle around on small systems figuring out how to "think" in parallel, who develop novel parallelizable ways to solve problems.
Folks who are as smart as you, who have the same insight as you about the band's future popularity, and who therefore buy up the tracks early in the hopes of reselling them later for a profit. This will drive the early price up, of course.
There's this other novel object called "stock," bought and sold in much the same way via a facility in New York City, for which an obvious parallel to your moneymaking scheme is:
(1) Find new, unknown company which will later hit it big. Buy their cheap stock.
(2) Wait for company to become successful and its stock to become expensive.
(3) Sell stock.
(4) Profit!
Oddly enough, this scheme has never quite worked out as easily as newcomers think it ought to.
I think there's something to what you say, but I'd say consider the tidal effects from the star, not the planet. That is, suppose this "planet" is actually just a large bulge in a ring around the star, more or less a gas giant in the process of being torn to shreds by tidal effects from the parent star. It's very close to the star, and the star is expanding, I think.
They're shits about that kind of stuff. I get the impression Congress wants to see them fund the 'eager young minds of tomorrow,' to quote the sardonic John Nash in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind movie. Trying to screw money out of NSF for equipment and infrastructure, and often even for post-docs, is like getting blood from a stone. They'd rather fund another half-dozen grad students any day.
Anyway, it's not my problem, since I've long since moved to private industry and I don't need to make pitches to them any more. For what it's worth, I tend to think the whole system is a little rocky, since it's gotten to the point where grantsmanship is the main figure of merit for a PI, and where big research schools utterly depend on the vast sums that come from the Feds to support research. It seems unhealthy and unproductive. I could wish that the system were more fluid, with more and varied sources of support for research, and less unholy focus on the total sums raised, or at least a greater variety of PI jobs available, so that folks who want to run giant labs with $10 million budgets can do so, and others who just want to putter away for 15 years on some odd little puzzle (that might, of course, have some gargantuan payoff in 50 years) can do that, too.
But don't ask me to get there from here, because I haven't a clue.
Oh aye, I agree entirely. I was mostly talking about where one's interests lie, what you take the trouble to seek out (as a reader) or write (as a writer). Doesn't address the fact that a good story, if it falls into your hands by accident, will always give pleasure.
Mmmm...I also agree with the quality of old Asimov and Clarke stories, not to mention Bova and Poul Anderson and the immortal RAH (although some of the latter's productions require a True Fan's willingness to overlook some pretty crude writing).
But maybe this just means I'm willing to make exceptions from nostalgia for the authors of my misspent youth. Could be that if I came to any of these authors fresh I would be as underwhelmed as a I typically am when I scan the shelves of the local bookmonger's new sf release section.
Coming up next, Slashdot follows the troubling development of a nonlethal technological device for "controlling" troublesome individuals, consisting of two small metal or plastic bracelets joined by a short chain that can be "locked" around the suspect's hands, entirely preventing him from using them until someone "unlocks" the device with a special key.
On whom will this fiendish device be used? Are YRO at risk if this nasty little tool falls into the hands of border guards and police? What if someone immobilized by this device falls and hits his head because he can't break his fall with his hands? Will he sue? Doesn't this violate the Constitution somehow?
I dunno, maybe it's just something that happens to you when you get older. You stop being quite so fascinated with gizmos and widgetry and start becoming interested in the "technology" of social interactions and human nature -- and that leads you straight to history and historical fiction.
I mean, the same transition happened to me. In my 20s and early 30s I read gobs of sf and other kinds of speculative stuff. Now (early 40s) I tend to be a much more interested in history and social psychology. Not sure why.
Maybe it's because the attraction of sf is mostly the fun of "working out the consequences" of a few mildly plausible assumptions. As in: what would happen if teleportation booths were invented? What would society be like, what would it be like to live in such a world, what other inventions would be enabled, et cetera?
But perhaps as you get older the chains of reasoning that you use to work that stuff out start to seem flimsier and less believable, since you've seen in your personal life how often predictions of the future turn out to be self-delusional garbage. You live through the 1970s "Energy Crisis" and realize how even very short-range forecasts (of e.g. a world out of oil by 2000) can be bogus, and you start to see how easy it is to delude yourself about what the future will bring, and (which is perhaps more personally discouraging), how this doesn't deter people one whit from continuing to make and consume delusional predictions of the future.
Plenty of sf writers at least unconsciously want to warn or enlighten readers about the probable consequences of present trends. It's discouraging in one sense to realize how wrong you were, but discouraging in probably an even greater sense to realize that no one even cares, that people lap up hard-headed "scientific" predictions of the future with about as much enthusiastic credulity and failure to critically re-evaluate when they prove wrong as they do astrological horoscopes. You might start to think: what's the point? Why think long and hard about what the future will bring if (1) I'm probably going to be wrong, and (2) no one even cares much about whether I'm right or wrong. Maybe you start to feel like a circus clown, making funny faces to make the rubes laugh. You feel like you could drop four major scientific goofs into your next book, and as long as there were plenty of crackling laser beams and mind-blowing nanowidgetry no one would care. Like you're George Lucas and you can sell a totally lame screenplay with pathetic acting, just so long as the computerized special effects are cool enough.
If that happens, then perhaps you start to be drawn to the past, to chains of reasoning that are more solidly-based, because they terminate in the present with consequences you can directly observe. The intellectual attraction is still "working out the consequences" of assumptions about what in the past was important and led to the present we know, but you've more assurance that your chains of reasoning aren't completely cracked, because they're anchored, so to speak, at various points by historical facts.
There is probably also some attraction in the idea that if you can understand the past in some way more consistent and believable than anything yet achieved, then you will open a unique door into predicting the future, too.
It isn't being spread out one little bit more. NCSA and ORNL have been rolling in Federal dough for the past forty years. Nothing is changing.
It's a bit weird for Livermore to be competing for NSF dollars. Usually their funding is DOE/DoD, since they've been a closed weapons shop for decades. Oak Ridge and Los Alamos made the transition to a lot more civilian research long ago, so they have plenty of NSF money. But I think it's a bit new for Livermore to be competing so strongly for it. Again, I think it's just because they're flopping around a little bit, looking for a new mission, now that nukes are kind of out of fashion even with the military. I think DoD is likely to be spending their blue-sky money more on robotics these days, e.g. UAVs, and that means NASA labs like Goddard or Ames, not Livermore or Sandia. Probably the Livermore chaps are only being kept alive by ballistic missile defense projects, with its big lasers and stuff, plus the odd fusion project and of course trying to maintain nuke readiness via computer simulation and no actual testing. Thin stuff. I can see why they'd want to tap into materials science, which I'm guessing is the point of this new machinery, if it's going to NCSA and ORNL. Few doubt that materials science is the kind of thing that (1) requires monster computers, and (2) will always be funded by NSF and at least attract the attention of DoD/DOE.
The NSF's money can simply be spread around farther.
Eh, there's a good reason for its restricted spread. Do not forget that a key component of research success, except in rare circumstances, is the quality of the support infrastructure. You need to know your grant applicant can easily get top-notch glassblowers, computer programmers, machinists, grad students, et cetera if he wins your grant. If he's at a top-notch research place, you can take that stuff as a given. Otherwise, you might worry about giving a pile of money to a PI who himself is maybe stellar, but who has to make do with second-class help.
An unspoken assumption that seems to run through all these arguments is that our 'intelligence' (and by extension ET's) is some kind of unlimited capability to understand the universe and turn that knowledge into technological tricks that make interstellar communications and/or travel steadily easier, faster, and cheaper over time, without limit.
But why should that be? Can anyone imagine a herd of horses ever understanding the universe well enough to do calculus and build spaceships? No matter how long the species endures? We think of the intelligence of horses as a strictly limited capability: like the speed of cheetahs or the strength of elephants, it will get you so far but no further. There are things that are forever beyond the mental ability of horses.
Why not humans? What makes us special, compared to other animals with a brain? Why should we be uniquely positioned among all animal species to understand everything about the universe, given enough time, and be able to develop technology to do arbitrarily wonderful things?
In short, consider the possibility that the human species is today -- or perhaps, at most, will be within a few centuries -- just about as advanced as it will ever be. That whatever civilization we can construct by, say, 2200 AD is going to be unchanged in essential capabilities in 22,000,000 AD or 2.2 x 10^9 AD, and that whatever understanding of the universe is required to communicate or travel over interstellar distances might be as much out of our collective reach as would be interplanetary travel for rats.
As I recall, the number of NSF-funded supercomputer centers was drastically cut maybe 10 years ago or so, and something like only three emerged intact (NCSA, Pittsburg, and SDSC). I presume those are the "Illinois," "California" and "Pennsylvania" options mentioned in this otherwise utterly clueless piece of journalistic malpractice. Although maybe "California" refers to Livermore or LANL.
That NCSA might win the contract with a proposal that IBM build the machine is about as uncontroversial and "safe" a result as one could possible imagine, given the very long track record each institution has in this area. So I suspect the "widespread concern" is probably widespread concern for somebody's job or research grant. My impression is that the NSF has been steadily decreasing the amount of money it spends on supercomputer projects, because the community of people who think you can do something with a supercomputer that you really can't with a cluster is steadily shrinking. What that means is people in the business are being brutally squeezed as the research money dries up, and some are being squeezed right out of the field. Harsh, and it's not surprising if the harshest thing they say in response -- as life dreams go up in smoke -- is that they aren't sure the NSF was totally "fair" when they awarded the mongo grant to some other center...
The bit about an "extraordinary shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centers" -- a shift toward the scientific side and away from the military -- is so strange a thing for the New York Times to bitch about, with their knee-jerk loathing of all things military, that it's hard not to believe the reporter totally misunderstood Simon's statement (which is probably not much more than him saying Livermore has always had badass computers for designing nukes, and he thinks they still should, notwithstanding the fact that the nuke design business has been a bit slow lately).
Finally, the bit about another computer going to ORNL demonstrates more cluelessness on the part of the reporter. The fact that UT runs ORNL under contract to DOE doesn't prevent the PIs at ORNL from getting NSF grants -- and plenty folks there have them, I believe. I can't see any reason why folks at ORNL couldn't submit a successful proposal for a big computer to the NSF. They do a lot of unique materials research (since they have those great neutron and X-ray sources), and materials research is a good place to do massive simulations.
I wonder who, with what personal axe to grind, submitted this curiously vapid and pointless article to slashdot?
Who says? You don't think the world needs both wild-eyed enthusiasts (to push things forward) and curmudgeonly conservatives (to prevent excess)? I do. I've no desire to live in a monochrome culture, where everybody acts like an open-source Linuxhead, or everybody acts like a Microsoft lawyer with his necktie tied too tight, or everybody acts like a constantly enraged Young Turk, or everybody acts like a cynical old fart. They're all needed. You might say my style is not yours -- fair enough -- but that doesn't mean it's bad that we differ in our priorities.
Anyway, I thought we were talking about pop music, not rocket-ship technology and gene patents. I suppose the world needs pop music in some sense, just like it needs lip gloss and David Beckham, but don't expect me to lose any sleep over the question of the precise constitutional limits to what Congress can mete out as punishments for ripping it off (and these defendants are charged with ripping it off, whatever one might think of the degree of punishment appropriate to that offense).
Even in the restricted arena of how harsh "white collar" crimes should be punished when they do no bodily harm but only reduce the value of various people's investments, there are a lot more issues that should be clarified first, e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley and its manifold implications for entrepreneurial firms. That kind of stuff affects our technological future way more than anything the RIAA does, or even arguably more than patent reform.
I hope you do not miscontrue what I said to mean that I don't think the constitutional issues here have any merit. They might. Nor have I said they should never be clarified. They probably should. I just said that I think they're about Number 667 on the priority list of what should get settled by the Supreme Court. Disagree? What's your case for the nature of pop music copyright being ahead of (say) the use of eminent domain for private purposes (Kelo and friends), how far and how intrusively the Feds can regulate drug use under the Commerce Clause (Raich and the like), whether the 2nd Amendment really means individuals have the right to keep and bear arms (Parker), the exact limitations on executive privilege when Congress wants to know what the President talked over with his lawyer (coming your way soon), and so on. These are all cases that have either been in front of the Court recently or are likely to be. Which is less important than the constitutionality of $750/song penalties for copyright infringement?
I don't care how large or small you think they are, they ALL need to get struck down.
Even if I agreed -- which I don't, the law can and should have plenty of flexible gray areas so that we don't live like cogs in an inflexible machine -- there is the question of the order in which they should be struck down. Since we can't right all ills all at once, lacking a time machine and/or infinite resources, what should go first? As I said, I'm just saying this issue should not. Or, if you prefer, there's an "economics" to justice -- an opportunity cost for pursuing judicial resolution of social issues. If you pick this issue to settle for once and all, there are umpty other issues the system will not get around to. That should be considered.
Clearly the intent behind copyrights and patents was that you'd get to own a work for a little while to make money on it (thus giving you incentive to do so) but then it would become the property of the public, so others could build upon it.
Mmmm, not quite. No one can force you to make your invention public. The purpose of patents is to give the inventor a motive to disclose the details of his invention publically as soon as he invents it, so that, as you say, others can build upon the ideas in it. The idea is to render the traditional way in which inventors controlled their invention -- keeping its details secret --
Slashdot Mirror
You need to google "Maxwell's Demon."
Fair enough. I can see how in something as densely populated as Manhattan, with miles of existing underground passageways, short distances along which your steam can't lose too much heat, et cetera, this might work.
And, mirabile dictu, it exists.
But most of the US is nothing like Manhattan. It isn't compact, it doesn't have underground passageways, and the distance from the powerplant to the user ranges from dozens to hundreds of miles. And at that, the individual users often have miles between them. Hence our enormous use of electricity. Again, it's not like people in the late 19th century didn't already think of piping steam around for power. They did. But when electricity came in, it was so much easier and more economical that hydraulic systems except in unusual circumstances (e.g. Manhattan) disappeared.
Generally I find that when things that any random bright person can think up don't exist, it's not because of a vast conspiracy or that everyone else from 4000 BC to the present was an idiot, but because there are problems not obvious on first examination.
More specifically, I just tend to think that piping steam around because you happen to have some is, unless it's very easy, probably a dumb idea. It requires fat, well-insulated, complicated and expensive piping which is a pain to maintain because high-temperature, high-pressure steam is corrosive as heck, and high-pressure high-temperature piping is inherently far more dangerous than electricity. I can run a high-voltage wire right through residential areas just by putting it up on a pole. If something knocks the pole down, I can arrange it so that the wire goes dead pretty much instantly, the speed of light being as high as it is. Try imagining a similarly safe and inexpensive way to send a 12-inch high-pressure high-temperature steam line through suburbia. Remember, too, if your steam pipe cracks, it isn't just dangerous if you touch it, like a high-voltage line -- it can explode and send shrapnel out a hundred yards. And you can't turn it off instantly, or just put on rubber gloves to handle it safely.
Furthermore, the cost of generation is not necessarily the biggest cost of getting power to a consumer. I've got my electric bill right in front of me, and they helpfully break the charges down into generation charges and delivery-related charges. Turns out that the cost to generate the electricity I use is only about half the total cost. The rest is delivery costs. So the fact that the steam itself might be free, or low cost, is at best half the problem solved -- you need to ask about the cost of delivery.
Mmmm....the first problem is that your fridge needs to be sitting in something significantly cooler than your heat source, and finding it is clearly a problem in Alabama this time of year, or else the nuke wouldn't be having problems getting rid of this heat.
Secondly, have you thought about the infrastructure required to pump around all that heat? Are you thinking a forest of insulated two-foot steam pipes running all around town? Sounds pretty ugly, noisy, expensive and environmentally disruptive. There's a reason we prefer electricity as our medium for transporting power, and it's not because no one ever had the idea of transporting steam instead.
lots of industries would like cheap steam, e.g. food, chemical, textile
I don't think that's true. Otherwise cogeneration would be a lot more popular than it is. Most of the industries you mention need heat sources, when they do, a lot hotter than you'll find in the exit of a nuke. If you want to make ammonia, for example, you want to heat your reactor to 500C or so.
See, engineers are not idiots. If they see a reliable source of heat and a reliable source of cold nearby, there's not a one that isn't going to think I could put this temperature differential to work. But if one source of power is having problems because the temperature differential has crapped out, it just seems very unlikely some mere trick of widgetry is going to magically rehabilitate an otherwise uselessly small temperature gradient.
Er...but in the winter...
(1) The nuke works great, because the river is cool.
(2) The power demand is less, because people don't use air conditioning.
Sure. Now if only someone in Alabama living close to the power plant needed to heat his house in the middle of a heat wave...
They don't "run off waste heat." They run off waste heat plus a cooler atmosphere into which they can allow heat to flow.
All you need to use the "waste" heat being dumped into the river is to find something significantly cooler than the river. Then you can set up a heat engine between the river and your cold thing and generate power.
The problem of finding something just lying around in Alabama that is significantly colder than the local river is left as an exercise for the student.
Um...isn't this the nature of time, life, existence, et cetera? Things change. Even if there were no such thing as man-made global warming, the Sun would still vary its output, the continents would continue to drift, evolution would continue to produce new and interesting diseases, et cetera and so forth.
What do we call individuals who run their lives under the assumption that things will always stay the same? That they'll never get old or sick, that their job will never disappear or their skills become obsolete? "Intelligent" doesn't come to mind.
Besides, consider the advice you give people bemoaning the fact that their life has changed (e.g. they had to get a new job, now they have a baby and can't party all night, et cetera). We tell them, hey, change is an opportunity. So it is with climate change, natural or man-made. It's not a lot different than new and disruptive technology (cf. the RIAA and the Internet). Some folks will lose, yes. But others, especially if they're flexible and intelligent, will win.
Personally, I think the lesson to be learned from global warming (from whatever cause it stems) is not to resolve to hold back the tide, this time or next time. That's just futile. The Earth will always be producing some new surprise or other. The general solution algorithm is not to try to put fingers in every dike that develops cracks. There aren't enough fingers, and too many dikes. The trick, as individuals and as a species, is to think creatively and adapt. Otherwise, we're just dinosaurs wondering what that flash in the sky was, and why the swamp is drying up steadily.
Heat is disorganized motion, right? Atoms and molecules just bumping around any which way. If you want organized motion, which is useful energy -- such as an organized motion of electrons, a.k.a. electricity -- then you have to get that heat motion organized, flowing in one direction.
You do this by making the heat flow from one place to another. But here's the catch: you need a source and a sink to have a flow. The hot reactor core is the source. The river is the sink. Heat flows from the former to the latter, and the turbines, in essence, dip a "paddlewheel" into that current.
If you get rid of the sink, nothing flows, your "paddlewheel" doesn't turn, and you get no useful energy.
The biggest shark has the most remorae.
...aaaaand directly into the round file, with all the other glossy brochures written in marketspeak.
I've written quite enough of this fluff myself to be even a tiny bit impressed.
Well...OK, and I know the Schulten work quite well from my time at UIUC. It's certainly impressive in many ways.
But my suggestion is that fundamental advances will only be made on small, cheap systems. See, a machine like this is so expensive that it's very hard to justify doing blue-sky goofball things on it, which will almost certainly turn out to be dumb ideas. You usually have to write a proposal, and the committee usually won't risk massive resources on an idea that is shaky, speculative as heck, or screwball.
But of course, a truly new and powerful idea does look screwball at first. (Otherwise, some other smart guy would have already come up with it.) This is one reason the graphical web browser was not invented at Microsoft. Who would spend the money required to develop such a piece of software, when there were no graphic-intensive web pages out there for it to use, and apparently no demand for one? No one sensible, with a bottom line to protect. Only some undergraduate dreamer (Andreesen). For that matter, the development of computer simulation itself is instructive: it was not respectable in its early days, and most academics thought there was very little you could learn by doing a computer simulation. It was Bernie Alder noodling around on Livermore's big computers while no one paid attention that finally came up with something amazing that convinced everyone that computer simulation by God made a lot of sense. Sure, we can all see it now -- 20/20 hindsight and all that -- but if Alder and Wainwright had been bigshot academic scientists in the glare of publicity using very expensive public resources, I'll bet they would never have risked doing something as apparently nutty as simulating hard-sphere fluids.
So who is going to come up with new and powerful ways to solve problems in parallel? Not, I think, the people using the World's Fastest And Most Expensive Parallel Computer(TM). Those folks can't afford to be seen goofing around, making mistake after mistake while they're learning. Instead it will be someone of whom you've never heard, screwing around on a $5000 32-node cheapie cluster because that represents such a trivial investment that no one minds if he does apparently stupid, apparently pointless things on it all day.
That's a total waste of resources. The big cost in a machine like this is the lightning-speed interconnect between the processors and the fancy memory management that lets processors share memory in various ways. The cost of the processors themselves is, by comparison, trivial. Your kind of problem, a lot of small jobs running without knowledge of each other, is easily handled by a lot of small computers, and for a lot less money.
The only justification for a piece of hardware like this is a problem that needs all of the processors to even move forward. And it had better provide some truly surprising results, too, something you wouldn't have imagined had you simply solved a smaller system and scaled up in some obvious way. For example, we already know why argon freezes by simulating a few hundred atoms of the stuff. We learn nothing new by simulating a few hundred million atoms of argon.
First of all, your problem with the rocks what in the business we call trivially parallelizable. You solve it like this: Secondly, there are plenty of resources to let you program a trivial thing like unrolling a loop with no history dependencies. In fact, you don't even need to rewrite your code. If you have something like this: You can just throw that puppy through any modern compiler capable of parallelizing and it will be parallized at the machine code level. No programmer thought required. But this, too, is an example of a trivially parallelizable program. There's no need for processors to communicate with each other at intermediate stages in the factoring, for example.
The nature of a difficult and interesting problem for which you'd like a parallel solution is one in which (1) you have many degrees of freedom, which you've got in your examples, but (2) the degrees of freedom are all strongly coupled (influence each other), which neither of your examples has.
All interesting problems in many-body physics have this quality. For example, why do proteins fold up the way they do? The degrees of freedom are the positions and velocities of all the atoms in the system, protein as well as water molecules, and the strong interactions are chemical bonds and the nonbonded forces between atoms. Another example: how do we make machine vision that recognizes objects as quickly and reliably (under differing light conditions, et cetera) as the human eye/brain combination? The degrees of freedom are the color and intensity of the individual pixels, and the strong interactions are the fact that an object is defined by edges, shadows, et cetera, and each of these things is a certain arrangement of pixels.
If you think about it, I hope you'll realize that it is inherently very, very difficult to write good algorithms for solving these kinds of problems. The limitation, IMHO, having worked in this field for a while, is not the hardware, and not even the software, but the wetware -- our ability to dream up algorithms to solve these problems. We know they exist: the human brain has a clock speed of 1 kHz, max, but it can solve the object recognition problem faster than the fastest computer with any number of processors you like. How? We don't know. We can't even imagine, yet. And that's the true frontier.
Since it's going to be massively parallel, it's only 500 times more powerful than some other computer if it has a beautifully parallelized problem to solve.
I've programmed computers scientifically for twenty-odd years, and one thing I've found is that massively parallel computers are very difficult to use efficiently, except when you're solving one of the relatively few problems which are obviously parallelizable and yet have interesting results. For example, solving 500 million tic-tac-toe games simultaneously is certainly impressive, but not very interesting. Solving a championship chess match is interesting, but it's not obvious at all how to do it well with 500 million simultaneous calculations. Therein lies the heart of the difficulty.
Part of the problem is undoubtably that we find it hard to think in parallel. We solve problems step by step, like a scalar machine. It's extremely difficult to even imagine what it would be like to solve a problem "all at once," in a fully parallel way, with each important factor simultaneously influencing all others.
So by me I'd say this is, for all of its Pyramid of Cheops grandeur, a second-rank research tool, for use in bashing problems to death that have well-defined, known algorithms for their solution. The real frontier is going to be people who noodle around on small systems figuring out how to "think" in parallel, who develop novel parallelizable ways to solve problems.
Folks who are as smart as you, who have the same insight as you about the band's future popularity, and who therefore buy up the tracks early in the hopes of reselling them later for a profit. This will drive the early price up, of course.
There's this other novel object called "stock," bought and sold in much the same way via a facility in New York City, for which an obvious parallel to your moneymaking scheme is:
(1) Find new, unknown company which will later hit it big. Buy their cheap stock.
(2) Wait for company to become successful and its stock to become expensive.
(3) Sell stock.
(4) Profit!
Oddly enough, this scheme has never quite worked out as easily as newcomers think it ought to.
Isaac Newton has mod points again, I guess.
I think there's something to what you say, but I'd say consider the tidal effects from the star, not the planet. That is, suppose this "planet" is actually just a large bulge in a ring around the star, more or less a gas giant in the process of being torn to shreds by tidal effects from the parent star. It's very close to the star, and the star is expanding, I think.
They're shits about that kind of stuff. I get the impression Congress wants to see them fund the 'eager young minds of tomorrow,' to quote the sardonic John Nash in Ron Howard's A Beautiful Mind movie. Trying to screw money out of NSF for equipment and infrastructure, and often even for post-docs, is like getting blood from a stone. They'd rather fund another half-dozen grad students any day.
Anyway, it's not my problem, since I've long since moved to private industry and I don't need to make pitches to them any more. For what it's worth, I tend to think the whole system is a little rocky, since it's gotten to the point where grantsmanship is the main figure of merit for a PI, and where big research schools utterly depend on the vast sums that come from the Feds to support research. It seems unhealthy and unproductive. I could wish that the system were more fluid, with more and varied sources of support for research, and less unholy focus on the total sums raised, or at least a greater variety of PI jobs available, so that folks who want to run giant labs with $10 million budgets can do so, and others who just want to putter away for 15 years on some odd little puzzle (that might, of course, have some gargantuan payoff in 50 years) can do that, too.
But don't ask me to get there from here, because I haven't a clue.
Oh aye, I agree entirely. I was mostly talking about where one's interests lie, what you take the trouble to seek out (as a reader) or write (as a writer). Doesn't address the fact that a good story, if it falls into your hands by accident, will always give pleasure.
Mmmm...I also agree with the quality of old Asimov and Clarke stories, not to mention Bova and Poul Anderson and the immortal RAH (although some of the latter's productions require a True Fan's willingness to overlook some pretty crude writing).
But maybe this just means I'm willing to make exceptions from nostalgia for the authors of my misspent youth. Could be that if I came to any of these authors fresh I would be as underwhelmed as a I typically am when I scan the shelves of the local bookmonger's new sf release section.
Coming up next, Slashdot follows the troubling development of a nonlethal technological device for "controlling" troublesome individuals, consisting of two small metal or plastic bracelets joined by a short chain that can be "locked" around the suspect's hands, entirely preventing him from using them until someone "unlocks" the device with a special key.
On whom will this fiendish device be used? Are YRO at risk if this nasty little tool falls into the hands of border guards and police? What if someone immobilized by this device falls and hits his head because he can't break his fall with his hands? Will he sue? Doesn't this violate the Constitution somehow?
I dunno, maybe it's just something that happens to you when you get older. You stop being quite so fascinated with gizmos and widgetry and start becoming interested in the "technology" of social interactions and human nature -- and that leads you straight to history and historical fiction.
I mean, the same transition happened to me. In my 20s and early 30s I read gobs of sf and other kinds of speculative stuff. Now (early 40s) I tend to be a much more interested in history and social psychology. Not sure why.
Maybe it's because the attraction of sf is mostly the fun of "working out the consequences" of a few mildly plausible assumptions. As in: what would happen if teleportation booths were invented? What would society be like, what would it be like to live in such a world, what other inventions would be enabled, et cetera?
But perhaps as you get older the chains of reasoning that you use to work that stuff out start to seem flimsier and less believable, since you've seen in your personal life how often predictions of the future turn out to be self-delusional garbage. You live through the 1970s "Energy Crisis" and realize how even very short-range forecasts (of e.g. a world out of oil by 2000) can be bogus, and you start to see how easy it is to delude yourself about what the future will bring, and (which is perhaps more personally discouraging), how this doesn't deter people one whit from continuing to make and consume delusional predictions of the future.
Plenty of sf writers at least unconsciously want to warn or enlighten readers about the probable consequences of present trends. It's discouraging in one sense to realize how wrong you were, but discouraging in probably an even greater sense to realize that no one even cares, that people lap up hard-headed "scientific" predictions of the future with about as much enthusiastic credulity and failure to critically re-evaluate when they prove wrong as they do astrological horoscopes. You might start to think: what's the point? Why think long and hard about what the future will bring if (1) I'm probably going to be wrong, and (2) no one even cares much about whether I'm right or wrong. Maybe you start to feel like a circus clown, making funny faces to make the rubes laugh. You feel like you could drop four major scientific goofs into your next book, and as long as there were plenty of crackling laser beams and mind-blowing nanowidgetry no one would care. Like you're George Lucas and you can sell a totally lame screenplay with pathetic acting, just so long as the computerized special effects are cool enough.
If that happens, then perhaps you start to be drawn to the past, to chains of reasoning that are more solidly-based, because they terminate in the present with consequences you can directly observe. The intellectual attraction is still "working out the consequences" of assumptions about what in the past was important and led to the present we know, but you've more assurance that your chains of reasoning aren't completely cracked, because they're anchored, so to speak, at various points by historical facts.
There is probably also some attraction in the idea that if you can understand the past in some way more consistent and believable than anything yet achieved, then you will open a unique door into predicting the future, too.
It isn't being spread out one little bit more. NCSA and ORNL have been rolling in Federal dough for the past forty years. Nothing is changing.
It's a bit weird for Livermore to be competing for NSF dollars. Usually their funding is DOE/DoD, since they've been a closed weapons shop for decades. Oak Ridge and Los Alamos made the transition to a lot more civilian research long ago, so they have plenty of NSF money. But I think it's a bit new for Livermore to be competing so strongly for it. Again, I think it's just because they're flopping around a little bit, looking for a new mission, now that nukes are kind of out of fashion even with the military. I think DoD is likely to be spending their blue-sky money more on robotics these days, e.g. UAVs, and that means NASA labs like Goddard or Ames, not Livermore or Sandia. Probably the Livermore chaps are only being kept alive by ballistic missile defense projects, with its big lasers and stuff, plus the odd fusion project and of course trying to maintain nuke readiness via computer simulation and no actual testing. Thin stuff. I can see why they'd want to tap into materials science, which I'm guessing is the point of this new machinery, if it's going to NCSA and ORNL. Few doubt that materials science is the kind of thing that (1) requires monster computers, and (2) will always be funded by NSF and at least attract the attention of DoD/DOE.
The NSF's money can simply be spread around farther.
Eh, there's a good reason for its restricted spread. Do not forget that a key component of research success, except in rare circumstances, is the quality of the support infrastructure. You need to know your grant applicant can easily get top-notch glassblowers, computer programmers, machinists, grad students, et cetera if he wins your grant. If he's at a top-notch research place, you can take that stuff as a given. Otherwise, you might worry about giving a pile of money to a PI who himself is maybe stellar, but who has to make do with second-class help.
An unspoken assumption that seems to run through all these arguments is that our 'intelligence' (and by extension ET's) is some kind of unlimited capability to understand the universe and turn that knowledge into technological tricks that make interstellar communications and/or travel steadily easier, faster, and cheaper over time, without limit.
But why should that be? Can anyone imagine a herd of horses ever understanding the universe well enough to do calculus and build spaceships? No matter how long the species endures? We think of the intelligence of horses as a strictly limited capability: like the speed of cheetahs or the strength of elephants, it will get you so far but no further. There are things that are forever beyond the mental ability of horses.
Why not humans? What makes us special, compared to other animals with a brain? Why should we be uniquely positioned among all animal species to understand everything about the universe, given enough time, and be able to develop technology to do arbitrarily wonderful things?
In short, consider the possibility that the human species is today -- or perhaps, at most, will be within a few centuries -- just about as advanced as it will ever be. That whatever civilization we can construct by, say, 2200 AD is going to be unchanged in essential capabilities in 22,000,000 AD or 2.2 x 10^9 AD, and that whatever understanding of the universe is required to communicate or travel over interstellar distances might be as much out of our collective reach as would be interplanetary travel for rats.
As I recall, the number of NSF-funded supercomputer centers was drastically cut maybe 10 years ago or so, and something like only three emerged intact (NCSA, Pittsburg, and SDSC). I presume those are the "Illinois," "California" and "Pennsylvania" options mentioned in this otherwise utterly clueless piece of journalistic malpractice. Although maybe "California" refers to Livermore or LANL.
That NCSA might win the contract with a proposal that IBM build the machine is about as uncontroversial and "safe" a result as one could possible imagine, given the very long track record each institution has in this area. So I suspect the "widespread concern" is probably widespread concern for somebody's job or research grant. My impression is that the NSF has been steadily decreasing the amount of money it spends on supercomputer projects, because the community of people who think you can do something with a supercomputer that you really can't with a cluster is steadily shrinking. What that means is people in the business are being brutally squeezed as the research money dries up, and some are being squeezed right out of the field. Harsh, and it's not surprising if the harshest thing they say in response -- as life dreams go up in smoke -- is that they aren't sure the NSF was totally "fair" when they awarded the mongo grant to some other center...
The bit about an "extraordinary shift in the balance of computing power between military and scientific computing centers" -- a shift toward the scientific side and away from the military -- is so strange a thing for the New York Times to bitch about, with their knee-jerk loathing of all things military, that it's hard not to believe the reporter totally misunderstood Simon's statement (which is probably not much more than him saying Livermore has always had badass computers for designing nukes, and he thinks they still should, notwithstanding the fact that the nuke design business has been a bit slow lately).
Finally, the bit about another computer going to ORNL demonstrates more cluelessness on the part of the reporter. The fact that UT runs ORNL under contract to DOE doesn't prevent the PIs at ORNL from getting NSF grants -- and plenty folks there have them, I believe. I can't see any reason why folks at ORNL couldn't submit a successful proposal for a big computer to the NSF. They do a lot of unique materials research (since they have those great neutron and X-ray sources), and materials research is a good place to do massive simulations.
I wonder who, with what personal axe to grind, submitted this curiously vapid and pointless article to slashdot?
that's not a good thing man
Who says? You don't think the world needs both wild-eyed enthusiasts (to push things forward) and curmudgeonly conservatives (to prevent excess)? I do. I've no desire to live in a monochrome culture, where everybody acts like an open-source Linuxhead, or everybody acts like a Microsoft lawyer with his necktie tied too tight, or everybody acts like a constantly enraged Young Turk, or everybody acts like a cynical old fart. They're all needed. You might say my style is not yours -- fair enough -- but that doesn't mean it's bad that we differ in our priorities.
Anyway, I thought we were talking about pop music, not rocket-ship technology and gene patents. I suppose the world needs pop music in some sense, just like it needs lip gloss and David Beckham, but don't expect me to lose any sleep over the question of the precise constitutional limits to what Congress can mete out as punishments for ripping it off (and these defendants are charged with ripping it off, whatever one might think of the degree of punishment appropriate to that offense).
Even in the restricted arena of how harsh "white collar" crimes should be punished when they do no bodily harm but only reduce the value of various people's investments, there are a lot more issues that should be clarified first, e.g. Sarbanes-Oxley and its manifold implications for entrepreneurial firms. That kind of stuff affects our technological future way more than anything the RIAA does, or even arguably more than patent reform.
I hope you do not miscontrue what I said to mean that I don't think the constitutional issues here have any merit. They might. Nor have I said they should never be clarified. They probably should. I just said that I think they're about Number 667 on the priority list of what should get settled by the Supreme Court. Disagree? What's your case for the nature of pop music copyright being ahead of (say) the use of eminent domain for private purposes (Kelo and friends), how far and how intrusively the Feds can regulate drug use under the Commerce Clause (Raich and the like), whether the 2nd Amendment really means individuals have the right to keep and bear arms (Parker), the exact limitations on executive privilege when Congress wants to know what the President talked over with his lawyer (coming your way soon), and so on. These are all cases that have either been in front of the Court recently or are likely to be. Which is less important than the constitutionality of $750/song penalties for copyright infringement?
I don't care how large or small you think they are, they ALL need to get struck down.
Even if I agreed -- which I don't, the law can and should have plenty of flexible gray areas so that we don't live like cogs in an inflexible machine -- there is the question of the order in which they should be struck down. Since we can't right all ills all at once, lacking a time machine and/or infinite resources, what should go first? As I said, I'm just saying this issue should not. Or, if you prefer, there's an "economics" to justice -- an opportunity cost for pursuing judicial resolution of social issues. If you pick this issue to settle for once and all, there are umpty other issues the system will not get around to. That should be considered.
Clearly the intent behind copyrights and patents was that you'd get to own a work for a little while to make money on it (thus giving you incentive to do so) but then it would become the property of the public, so others could build upon it.
Mmmm, not quite. No one can force you to make your invention public. The purpose of patents is to give the inventor a motive to disclose the details of his invention publically as soon as he invents it, so that, as you say, others can build upon the ideas in it. The idea is to render the traditional way in which inventors controlled their invention -- keeping its details secret --