Everyone pays taxes, but not everyone pays them in equal amounts. If poor people pay little in taxes, but have high energy bills because they can't afford the up-front costs of CFLs, then that segment of the population will only benefit.
Ah, so you're talking about a wealth-transfer program. Because I'm in a high tax bracket I'll help folks further down pay for their light bulbs. Should I also help them pay for their food and clothes? Maybe they should just move in? Ha ha, no thanks. Having to pay for your own stuff is the best possible incentive to stay in school, get a job, save a little, stick to a sensible budget -- i.e. to grow up. Who am I to deny the benefit of learning life's most important lessons to my fellow man?
In fact, most every tax bracket would benefit. There are long-term cost savings for the consumer, and those savings should more than counterbalance the taxes for the vast majority of taxpayers.
Sounds like doubletalk to me. Joe Poorboy, who would otherwise buy a $1 incandescent, buys a $3 swirlie instead because he gets $2 back from the government. Joe also enjoys a $20 reduction in his electricity costs over the life of the bulb (which you'd think would be enough to get him to buy the bulb directly, but I guess we're assuming poor people are irrational here). Nice for Joe. Richie Rich, investment banker, being no fool, also buys a $3 swirlie, and also enjoys a $20 reduction in his electricity cost. But he also needs to pay more taxes to cover the subsidy to Joe. How much? Hmm, well, the program is pointless unless it induces lots of people to switch bulbs, and of course by definition there are lots more poor people than rich, so Rich clearly must get whacked for a lot more than the price of one extra swirlie for Joe. Say he needs to cover the subsidy on 10 bulbs. That's $20 extra in taxes. So how does Rich see any net gain from the program?
Maybe you're thinking Rich and everyone would benefit from reduced general electricity costs, leading to less CO2 emissions, a cleaner environment, et cetera. Could be. But if that's your goal, how about attacking it directly, instead of in this weird indirect way? Tax the use of fossil fuels in power plants. Zone lots of land so it can't be used for power plants. Pass laws mandating scrubbers on power plant stacks. The problem with clever, indirect approaches to a problem is they have unexpected side effects. Just for example, you are aware, I assume, that the swirlies (unlike incandescents) contain 5-20 mg of mercury, an exceedingly nasty environmental toxin. What if the people you encourage to buy swirlies happen to be exactly the type that don't bother to recycle the bulbs? Ugh, now you've reduced electricity use but increase the amount of mercury in landfills. Maybe it works out on balance, but maybe it doesn't. That's the problem with complex mechanisms. The side effects are by definition hard to know before you begin.
The size of the bureaucracy has very little to do with the amount of money being spent.
Well, that depends, doesn't it? If the purpose of your bureaucracy is to build a fusion reactor, then maybe not. But if the purpose of your bureaucracy is to sort out which citizens get a $2/bulb benefit, and which others must pay for it, then I'd say, yeah, roughly speaking the size of the bureaucracy would scale with the number of people eligible for the benefit. I suspect the size of the Social Security Administration does indeed scale with the number of people applying for benefits, receiving benefits, dying and needing to have their benefits canceled, et cetera.
Subsidies early on could jump-start demand for CFLs, increasing production capacity, improving manufacturing techniques, and enabling them to compete more successfully in the market when the subsidies are eventually removed.
Come on. We're not talking about a market where no private party will enter because of the risks. Or some cottage industry where people are han
Er...have you thought this thoroughly through? Where do you suppose the government is going to get the money to pay everyone $2 every time they buy a $3 swirly bulb, so the price is the same as the regular bulb? Taxes, right? Which everyone pays.
So here's how it goes: everybody pays $2.50/bulb in taxes so that he can get a government benefit of $2.00/bulb. (The extra 50 cents covers the salaries of the government employees to handle the cash back and forth.) And this makes sense how?
Government funding of research into fuel cells is another thing entirely. See, the idea there is you fund the construction of a small number of advanced technology widgets, with the idea that, once you show private initiative the way, it will follow. It's like the difference between mom making your lunch every day, and mom teaching you how to make it yourself.
I've had much the same experience. They don't seem to last noticeably longer than incandescent bulbs. Maybe the problem is that those quoted lifespans are "in captivity," where the bulb is just kept quietly shining, maybe turned (gently) on and off. In the wild, so to speak, it could be that other things are more important in determining bulb lifespan, e.g. how many dings the lamp gets if it sits on your desk.
Heinlein put plenty of sex into his adult novels (his teen novels are another thing). But he didn't seem to feel the need to describe it. Perhaps he felt that if you were old enough you could supply the details from your own experience, and if you were young enough, encouraging your fantasies would only distract you from the novel.
He didn't even spend much time describing his men and women sexually. Few female characters were introduced with a description of their breasts, for example, although you might learn about their cup size by and by, somewhat incidentally. It's like the way you only learn late in the books and somewhat incidentally that Dr. Richard Ames is black and Lieutenant Rico is Hispanic.
Indeed, I think one of the reasons Heinlein is popular among geeky types is because he emphasized the sexual attractiveness of mind, character, and accomplishment. The fastest way to a Heinlein heroine's heart was witty repartee or a devastatingly clever and insightful argument...you know, the/. ideal for comments, +5 Sexy, that kind of thing.
Thanks for the link! I did not know about this prize. What a worthwhile use of the old man's fortune. What a pity he did not live to see Rutan's SS1 and so forth.
If you were talking about the study of social myths, as reflected in TV series et cetera, by social psychologists, I'd agree. That would be serious scholarship, and has its uses. But I don't think studying social myths outside of that context is scholarship. It's just mythology, or art, or someone's amusement.
The difference is like the difference between astrology and astronomy. Both study the movements of the stars and planets carefully, and construct elaborate, internally-consistent, internally-logical frameworks for understanding cause and effect. But only astronomy is a science, because only astronomy is based on things as they really are, rather than things as they may seem to be.
Beginning with a thorough understanding of human biology, individual psychology, and evolutionary biology, and then using social myths (or TV shows) as part of the evidence in your study of human social psychology makes perfect sense to me. But I suspect that's not what we're talking about here. I suspect we're talking about studying TV shows uncritically, in their own context, without a good biological and psychological background: for example accepting at face value the reasons actors and writers give for what they say and do, and the reasons audiences say is their reason for watching.
I'll illustrate. A good psychologist might wonder why Steve McGeek became a scientist or engineer. He might even ask Steve himself, and note that Steve says: "Oh, because I used to love watching Star Trek as a kid." But the good psychologist is not going to take Steve's statement at face value. He's going to assemble other evidence about Steve, based on observation, talking to his parents, what he knows about young males from other experiments, yadda yadda, before he comes to any conclusion. And his conclusion might be: Star Trek makes people want to be engineers. But it also might be: engineers are not good at knowing (or are embarassed by) the reasons they are what they are -- maybe it's because they're scared of girls or something -- and have a habit of attributing it to reasons more acceptable to their peers, or society at large.
On the other hand, I suspect someone just studying TV shows would accept Steve's statement at face value -- because he would have no other sources of information than what's within the study of myths. He's not a psychologist, cognitive scientist, or even a biologist. As I said, I think a free-standing study of myths is about as useless as a free-standing study of the movements of the planets.
Nah. I disagree. Entertainment is just entertainment. If I want to think seriously about a topic, I read a serious book on it. If I want to relax and turn the serious-thinking parts of my brain off, then I watch Star Trek. If I want to learn about life, then I talk to my father or my neighbor with the Purple Heart from Vietnam. Or I observe my children, or read the autobiography of someone who's had an interesting life. I've got plenty of sources of serious information if I want to think seriously. I don't need to try to extract snippets of good sense from one-liners by Dr. McCoy or a speech to imaginary aliens (who are really clever metaphors for ourselves, ha ha) by Captain Picard. Why mine for silver in the dump when silver mines are all around you? Sure, you might find some, but it's a bit pointlessly harder.
I don't take lessons about life from Star Trek. I don't consider its imaginary situations metaphors for anything real. It doesn't "discuss" important "issues" as far as I'm concerned, and, even if it gave itself airs and thought it did, then anything actors, screenwriters and directors said on any serious issue would have zero weight with me. Might as well ask a juggler at the State Fair which stocks to buy.
I surely agree entertainment reflects life and the society that makes it. But why study the reflection instead of the thing itself? If you want to understand American foreign policy since Vietnam, study American foreign policy. There are ample direct resources -- books written by diplomats, soldiers, professors, and reg'lar folks. Recorded speeches, newspapers archives, old photos. Why try to glean insight from the faint reflection of the culture in old Power Ranger episodes? Because it's more fun? Well, fair enough. But don't ask me to call that scholarship. Sounds more like a hobby to me.
I don't dismiss Dr. Baker and her hobby -- I just don't consider it serious scholarship, which is certainly my prerogative. I don't have to respect an accomplishment merely because it's difficult or well done. Someone who sculpts shit beautifully wouldn't impress me. Dr. Baker's work wouldn't satisfy my wish to do something serious and worthwhile with my life, but if it satisfies hers -- then bon voyage, milady. De gustibus non est disputandam.
I could go on a rant about how medicine may allow us to live, but culture makes life worth living
Not for me. Climbing mountains, running triathlons, visiting Galicia, raising children, seeing globular clusters through telescopes, setting up my own intranet, or accomplishing nifty tricks at work make my life worth living. TV and movies and novels could vanish overnight and I dare say I, like the thousands of generations of human being that lived before those things even existed, would find life well worth living.
When we foster a society that can engage critically with its own culture and media, we have a culture that is less susceptible to the influence of those who would use media to control the public.
Like masturbation teaches one about sex? I think not. Historically speaking, those least susceptible to media propagandizing are country bumpkins who spend their time with real people and actual events. It's urban elites disconnected from real life, those who routinely exercise their ability to commingle fiction and fact, who are most susceptible. The intellectuals are always first to fall prey to mass delusions -- it's the peasants who are last.
We gain understanding, or at least perspective, on the other cultures surrounding us
No doubt. But we'd gain understanding faster by turning off the tube, opening the door, and walking out into it.
How many people do you think became engineers or scientists thanks to watching Star Trek as children?
None. You confuse correlation with cause. I think people who were, for whatever reason of personality and rearing, going to become engineers and scientists
This just proves that PhD stands for "piled higher and deeper."
Not all PhD's. But in this case...I'm a little inclined to agree. No offence to the talented and fetching Dr. Baker, but here are the other three winners of the U of Melbourne's Chancellor's Prize of Excellence:
(1) "Penelope Smith (Social Sciences), who used economic modeling to better understand business cycles in Australia and large Group of 7 economies - drawing information which is critical for setting fiscal and monetary policy."
(2) "Martin de Jonge (Science and Engineering) whose work will lead to more incisive synchrotron x-ray studies that are 100 times more accurate than current levels."
(3) "Christopher Smith (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences) who identified the cell which encourages the body's immune system to fight the herpes simplex virus."
Seems like a wee bit more serious and useful work. On the other hand, clearly Baker is a right clever jane, having figured out how to get the yeomanry of 'Stralia pay her a handsome stipend for five years while she watches her favorite TV show and takes notes. Well done, lass! You have to admire that kind of panache.
I recall visiting ORNL as part of a recruiting visit to UT-Knoxville (the position offered a joint appointment at ORNL -- how cool is that?)
Two curious events from that trip:
First, I was working at the University of Chicago at the time, and when I checked in with security I had to sign in. I remember it being a wood building that looked like it had been built in the 1940s as a "temporary" war-building and never replaced. It gave me an odd feeling to sign in with security in a 1940s-looking building as Dr. So-and-so, from the University of Chicago, here to visit the Oak Ridge facility. If you know your history of The Bomb, you'll recall there was much traffic between the U of C, where Fermi and others did academic-type work on nuclear fission, including building the first pile, and Oak Ridge, where they worked on many practical aspects of atomic weapons. It was a moment that brought the history to life for me.
Second, a post-doc took me on a tour of the spectroscopy facilities near one of the reactors, and as we were picking our way through the equipment, designed to collect beams of neutrons from the reactor core, I remember him stopping suddenly before crossing an unremarkable gap in the equipment. He thought carefully for a while, then stepped across the gap, muttering in a somewhat off-hand way "Oh this will be all right, I remember now the reactor is not running today." Uh...ok.
I consider myself pretty modern and enlightened, but in that momemt I could kind of understand all those people who have paranoid fears of nuclear technology. It is unnerving to think that something completely silent and invisible, yet completely deadly, could be right next to you, and you need to take the word of some distracted-looking pocket-protector-type that, gee, it's OK today, the reactor isn't on. (I think we should take his word, but I can understand how it makes people nervous.)
No, generally speaking it's the silly geese at the Financial Times who do. Or not. This is probably just one of those outrageous speculations that journalists do to provoke outraged responses and boost circulation. Not unlike...uh...never mind.
But the proposition that a rich company would be better off in a borrowing state is not without merit. People forget companies are not people, and the same intuitive "rules" about sensible financial decisions do not apply. It's good as a person to have a lot of cash in the bank. Makes you secure. Not so for a company. A company is not an end-user of wealth, the way people are, but merely an engine for transferring wealth from one group of people (the customers) to another (the employees, investors, and subcontractors) [Value flows the other way, of course, but we're talking cash money here.] The goal is to do so as efficiently as possible. Money received from customers should be "invested" as soon as possible, i.e. transferred to new hires, new capital equipment, et cetera. It's doing nothing useful sitting in the bank. The only money a company should keep lying around is a small cushion for unexpected fluctuations in the market, the price of resources, et cetera.
But why borrow? The reason is that you don't have to wait until you've accumulated enough cash from present operations to invest in the capital expansion necessary to undertake future, more profitable operations. You borrow the money immediately, then start the new more profitable operations immediately, and pay back the loan. Presumably the fact that you start earning bigger money earlier pays for the cost of the loan. Everybody wins.
It's not the same as an individual borrowing money to buy a car, which is more nearly pure consumerism. It's more like borrowing money to go to college. It's much more sensible to borrow the money and go to college at 18, graduate, then pay the loans back over 5 years with a high-paying college-graduate job, than it is to work for 15 years at a low-paying menial job, save up, and finally go to college at age 33.
Uh, dude, I think you counted years wrong. I'm not a boomer, I'm Gen X, which it sounds like you are, or maybe Gen Y. Boomers weren't watching Apollo as grade-school kids, they were in college and marching against the draft. I have many of the same criticisms you do about the boomer generation. I'm sympathetic.
Although...you'd probably be more effective if you focussed a bit more.
Suppose energy of a particular form were amazingly easy to concentrate. That implies, naturally, that this energy would be amazingly hard to disperse. So how are you going to get your automobile engine to work? Sure, you've got this concentrated clump of energy in your strange new type of battery. And it was real easy to gather, huzzah. But that energy doesn't want to go anywhere. Unlike the normal type of energy, it's not eager to flow through your wheels, doing work, and disperse into the wide universe as heat.
It's the very fact that energy is hard to concentrate that makes it so useful. The fact that energy is hard to concentrate -- that it's eager to disperse, straining at the leash, so to speak -- is like the fact that a rubber band is hard to stretch: it's exactly what makes the stretched rubber band exert a powerful and useful force. If we had a rubber band that's very easy to stretch, it wouldn't exert much of a force. If we had a form of energy that was easy to gather, we couldn't harness its flow to do much work.
For the cognoscenti: yes, I'm aware I've merely paraphrased the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Oh I dunno. I'm part of that generation. I remember listening to the radio when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon in the summer of 1969. I was glued to the TV for every Apollo launch. I also remember thinking, in the mid 80s or so, that the Moon colonies and regularly scheduled commuter trips to Mars were sure taking their time coming.
But I don't think it's our "institutions" that failed. I think we did. The aerospace engineers didn't turn stupid, or lose heart. They just lost our interest, and we stopped paying their salaries. In the 70s and 80s the country turned its attention back inward to indulge in twenty-five years of narcissist navel gazing. We told ourselves we needed to "fix" things on Earth first, things like poverty, prejudice, war, pollution. I suppose it escaped our attention that these things are as much fixtures of life as bad luck, death and taxes, and we can no more fix them for good than we can make it so all the children are above average. But we had a lot of fun spending all that money, marching, and making fine speeches. And it was actually a lot easier than building spacecraft, and a lot less dangerous than trying to live on an airless minor planet.
So it goes. I suppose I'm disappointed. But I don't think I'm cynical about the years since then. They weren't devoid of miracles. We may not live on the Moon, but we do have amazing electronic widgets, and we've done remarkable things in medicine. I'm not even disgusted with all the money we spent standing on the brink of nuclear annihilation. We guarded half the world's freedom for 50 years, and, amazingly, without having to fight the appalling war everyone thought was coming any moment. That's something remarkable, actually.
In this sense, attitudes of cynicism and pessimism are a reflection of the profound failure by both our public and private institutions...
Maybe. But maybe attitudes of cynicism and pessimism are not the result of, but a major cause of, failures in public and private institutions. I mean, why exactly should we expect our institutions to be more courageous and dedicated than we are as individuals?
But can anyone tell me what $5 billion of our taxpayer dollars has done for us?
Maybe it's a subtle thing. But there is a practical difference between a crabbed, pessimistic, Can't-Do defeatist culture and a culture full of ambition and daring that does impractical but spectactular things with a spare 0.1% of its GNP: one produces living descendants a thousand years later, and the other merely produces elegant, sardonic essays written in a dead language that are closely studied by scholars of the future.
Man does not live on bread alone, to paraphrase Moses, but perhaps also on dreams that inspire his best efforts and give him a sense of wonder and hope for the future. I mean, if you don't think this way -- if you're not much interested in things unless there's something in it for Number One -- then you don't have children and your genes get edited out of the species. This is perhaps why clever cynicism is more noteable among societies (and individuals) in decline than in ascendacy.
Um, I did. That's why I titled my post "Not only that..." You made very good points. I wasn't arguing with you. Just adding some thoughts your points triggered.
Designing drugs that have those properties involves a lot more design than luck.
Eh...I'm going to disagree with you very slightly here. I know people in rational drug design and QSAR, and I'm well aware remarkable strides have been made in the last few decades. But, as you point out yourself, the complexity of the human biochemical system is so awesome that my impression is that producing a truly winning drug still involves at least a 50/50 mix of cleverness and luck (or, equivalently, a 50/50 mix of design and trial-and-error). A bit of evidence would be Vioxx (ouch!), or the fact that people are still discovering interesting and possibly useful side-effects of aspirin, despite its structure being known for a century, and its principal biochemical effect well-studied.
As an aside, I'd say the truly exciting development is the possibility of understanding on an individual basis the effects and side-effects of drugs, by doing appropriate genetic tests on individuals. Just for example, someone I know just had to cope with breast cancer, and took advantage of the amazing fact that these days you can test the particular genetic sequence of an individual breast cancer and reliably predict who needs chemo and who doesn't. That is a wonderful development, considering how brutal chemo is.
I can easily foresee a future where physicians prescribe the type and dose of medicines based on their likely benefit to each individual patient, based on their particular genome, with substantially improved health care outcomes. Plus fewer misfires with new drugs going all the way to human trials and then flopping: we'd be able to characterize the individual genetic traits of the participants. Surely it's likely that some patients benefit from any Phase III trial drug -- all we need is to learn to sort out who they are. Then, a drug need not be safe and effective for everyone to make it to market -- it need only be safe and effective for someone. That will probably give people many more options for effective treatment.
We may even be able to know whether certain habits are bad for you, or harmless, based on one's individual nature. Pretty cool.
If you read TFA instead of the completely misleading summary, you'll note that...
(1) The BYU chemists don't know if the compound has painkilling properties at all. It's the mirror image of another molecule which is known not to be a painkiller. The mirror image is similar to morphine, so they hope it might have the painkilling properties of morphine. But it's painkilling properties are at this point entirely theoretical.
(2) They have no clue whatsoever whether, if it has painkilling properties, it is less addictive than morphine. It just as easily be more addictive. All they know is, while it looks like morphine, it isn't exactly morphine, so it will probably have slightly different properties.
(3) And of course, they have no idea whether the new molecule would have other, less desirable differences from morphine -- like being a deadly poison to the kidneys. Whether the stuff could even be safely taken by humans is still unknown.
In short, the summary on this article wildly exaggerates its content.
It's going to take time in geological scale for any lead to get out of the glass it is part of.
That's a very reasonable thought, with which I'd have instinctively agreed, but unfortunately it turns out not to be true. Apparently it takes mere hours to days if the glass is crushed. Here is a surprising brief report from Science News, which, since it's in a God-damned PDF, I will quote:
Though anecdotal reports have hinted that picture tubes' glass might leach [lead], no one knew how much, notes Timothy G. Townsend of the University of Florida in Gainesville. To fill that data gap, his team tested 36 picture tubes.... The researchers...took samples from different portions of the tubes' glass. Then, they crushed the glass into fine and coarse particles, shook 100 grams of each sample in a beaker of acidic water for several hours, and measured how much lead had leached into the water....lead from all 30 color [picture tubes] exceeded [the Federal safety standard for lead in water of 5 mg/L]....Some glass tainted water with more than 200 mg/l of lead [40 times the Federal safety limit]. When that glass was crushed to pieces less than 5 millimeters in diameter, it had the largest surface area and leached the most--often tainting water with 400 mg/L of lead [80 times the Federal safety limit]. The researchers also discovered why color units leach so much lead: It's their frit, which 70 percent lead by weight. From now on, the researchers conclude, color picture tubes should be considered hazardous waste and kept out of landfills and municipal-waste incinerators.
Strange and unsettling. The article is from 2000, we can hope things have improved since then.
The waste percentage is much smaller for metals than it is for other materials, but it's not zero.
Sure. But for the "recycling" schemes in question, the waste percentage is 100%. None of the material is recovered in its original form. I'm drawing a distinction -- I think a very useful distinction -- between recycling schemes that recover some percentage of the material in its original, pristine form, and "recycling" schemes that don't back up at all, that merely take material too degraded for one use and discover one or two additional uses that don't mind the degradation.
If someone had come up with a way to truly recycle rubber -- return the material to its original, pristine state -- then even if the percentage recovered was low (20%) or the process was finicky about its feedstock (it could only take bicycle tires made by Dunlop, whatever), then there'd be something to celebrate. You could reasonably hope that such a process would be subject to incremental engineering improvement to improve the percentage or broaden the feedstock possibilities. But there's no way anyone is going to be able to construct an endless chain of uses for increasingly degraded rubber (bicycle tube to bookbag to [something] to [something else] and so forth indefinitely), and that's what you'd need to make "recycling" sustainable. Hence while it's maybe interesting and worthwhile, it's still a dead end, from the point of view of reducing your waste stream.
This is a change in the attitude of the business community, not the technical community.
C'mon. When you're talking entrepreneurs, small business, these are usually one and the same. Small companies don't consist of a few pure-business guys and a few pure-tech guys who never talk to each other. Successful entrepreneurs are normally people with talent in both fields, whichever they might have started in. I don't know any techie start-ups headed by pure Executive Vice-President types with no clue about the tech involved, who aren't strongly (even sometimes too strongly) influenced by the attitudes prevalent in the relevant tech community. Are you sure you're not maybe applying stereotypes (and not very accurate stereotypes at that) about "big business" to entrepreneurs? Real small businessmen don't look and act like Scrooge McDuck any more than real programmers look and act like hackers in Hollywood movies.
Recycling this content was considered a money-loser; something you might do because you're a good person, but not something you could do to make a profit.
No, recycling was in fact a money-loser, not something you could do to make a profit. Bogus perceptions have nothing to do with it. Changing technology, changing consumer tastes, and changing prices of materials have everything to do with it.
A hungry and intelligent businessman -- and their are plenty of 'em out there -- will shovel shit if he can turn a profit doing it. He can't afford to have any illusions about what makes money and what doesn't. It's only journalists and other armchair quarterbacks, folks who don't have to actually risk their home or retirement fund testing out nice theories in the hard, cruel world of fact, who can afford to have lazy feel-good illusions about how it's possible to make money.
Every trip through the recycling cycle degrades the material to some extent...
Nonsense. Aluminum is aluminum is aluminum. Steel is steel. Silicon dioxide (glass) is silicon dioxide. You melt them down, blow off the impurities, and you are exactly back where you started -- and I mean right down to the molecule. The idea that somehow the Fe atoms that are part of your 2006 Ford car door might be "degraded" because they were once part of the trunk of a '56 Ford, and before that formed the bearing on a pushrod in a locomotive built in 1908, is inconsistent with basic principles of chemistry. (Biological recycling is even more efficient -- your food doesn't taste faintly of shit if the farmer manures the field.)
The only place you could make this kind of general argument is for composite polymer materials -- e.g. plastics, rubber and paper -- where it's not economical to reduce the materials to their original chemical form. Practically speaking, you can't reduce polystyrene waste to the olefins from which it was originally polymerized, in order to purge it of impurities, restore the original degree of polymerization, and restore the original composite mix of resin, plasticizers, et cetera. It just costs too much, as someone else has pointed out. So these materials are not, at present, significantly recycleable in any meaningful sense.
Instead, as in TFA, one "recycles" materials like these only in the toy sense of taking the used material and shaping it into another form for a while. It's as if you took your old, rusted-out car body, and, rather than melt the steel down and recast it into a pristine rust-free new car body, just turned the rustbucket into a planter, or some funky rust art. Or like my grandfather re-using wood from packing crates to stake up his tomato plants. Or GIs in the Second World War wiping their asses with pages from Stars and Stripes.
I don't think this is true recycling. It hasn't a prayer of ever becoming a closed loop, where the material recycles more or less endlessly, and you just supply energy. Turning your rusted-out automobile into a planter doesn't solve the fundamental problem at all, because the planter's just going to go into the dump itself, soon enough. You haven't done squat to figure out a way to truly close the loop, to turn the worn-out product back into a brand new product of the same type and quality.
Such "recycling" is a gimmick, an abuse of language, which conveys the false impression that something much more useful is going on than really is. The fact that some miniscule fraction of bicycle tires could be re-used by consumers one more time, for a year or so, as part of a rubber bookbag, can have no serious impact on the problem of our waste stream. It's re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Does it matter? Sure. Effort spent re-arranging deck chairs could be better spent trying to plug holes below the waterline. When people hear about all this "recycling" they may figure, hey, plenty's being done, and pay less attention to efforts at genuine recycling. (For example, although steel is infinitely recycleable, and very economically, only about 60% of American steel cans are recycled. That's idiotic.) Toy solutions can easily delay and prevent real solutions.
In any case, the more interesting thing is that entrepreneurs are beginning to see the profit potential of recycling garbage.
Good grief. Are we to suppose engineers have been idiots until early in the 21st century? Any fool understands that if you can figure out a way to turn "garbage" (what you can buy cheap) into "product" (what you can sell dear), then profit follows as night follows day. Consequently, the history of technology is chock-o'-block full of engineers taking "waste" products and finding new, useful things to do with them. This isn't a new insight or development, it's as old as compost heaps.
One historical example, relevant here, is that our entire modern plastics industry is based around the
So, a guy takes old bicycle tires and makes them into messenger bags, which he sells to upper-class fashionistas willing and able to shell out $148 for a book bag made of rubber (!). Another entrepreneur makes sidewalk pavers out of old auto tires, which last longer and are more bouncy than concrete.
Ooookay. That's nice. But...er...what happens when the bag wears out? Or the paver gets too many cuts and dings from inline skates and people falling off bikes? You've got your trash back again, that's what. There's no sign that these folks can use their own worn-out products to make new products. So all they seem to have done is take some small part of the rubber trash stream and make it go 'round just one more time.
This doesn't seem to me like what we normally think of as "recycling." When you recycle an aluminum can, it can go around and around practically forever -- buy it, use it, gather it back up, melt it, form a new can, re-fill it, and sell it again. Same with glass recycling -- sell the bottle, gather it up again, smash it, melt it, make a new bottle, sell it again. Rince, lather, repeat.
Something like those technologies is what I'd call true sustainable recycling practises. Something that takes a one-pass trip from virgin resource to trash dump and turns it into a nearly closed loop, with the resource making dozens of passes through consumer products. As far as I can see, this article just talks about taking a one-pass trip and making it into a two-pass trip. Big deal.
An interesting observation. I suggest the problem is that we haven't quite resolved the conflict between a legal system with roots in Roman law, where the state functions almost entirely as a moderator of private conflicts -- and hence murder is punished by a private wrongful-death lawsuit -- and a more medieval system where the killing of a fief-holder is an offense primarily against, and hence punished by, the lord of the manor.
Perhaps this double ancestry accounts more for our double vision in terms of how certain crimes should be punished. We still seem ambivalent about it in more areas than murder. For example, consider environmental law: if someone pollutes the water, or sells a dangerous product, or spams a million people with penis-pill fraud. Is this something that should be corrected by letting people whom he's harmed sue him? Or should the state prosecute and punish the action? We can't decide. We do a little of both, and we debate rather endlessly which (i.e. regulation or liability law) is the better way to do justice without suffocating enterprise.
It's not always about delivering a message, okay? I'm relating interesting personal experience, not preaching a sermon. It's food for thought, not an attempt to tell people what to think.
Seems like you have read some book
Don't be insulting. Why would I waste time reading books about software development? My heavy reading is J. Chem. Phys. and Phys. Rev.. My light reading runs to Dorothy Sayers and Patrick O'Brian. So where did what I know come from? Well, I wrote my first code 28 years ago this September, an implementation of Conway's "Life" in 8080 machine code. I've never hacked an OS, but in the last two decades I've written megabytes of serious scientific application code on everything from VMS and CMS to Multics to half a dozen varieties of proprietary Unices, plus of course Linux itself.
but never really been part of the movement.
I said I wasn't a systems hacker. I was a user, and a pretty high-level geeky informed one at that. I didn't use my computers for editing Word documents and photoshopping Dan Quayle's head onto an elephant seal's body. I wrote big programs to solve nonlinear integral equations, run molecular dynamics simulations, evaluate many-dimensional phase-space integrals, et cetera and so forth. I squeezed every speck of raw scalar performance I could out of the hardware, and the hardware I worked on started off costing a cool million (in 1980 dollars).
Thus your knowledge is lacking.
About what? About the Right Way to program operating systems? Guilty as charged. I'm a user, not a kernel hacker. But, unless you're an utter pure theorist, a monk in an ashram, than any reasonable kernel hacker has got to care about my point of view. I mean, what are you writing operating systems for? Just to boot up and look pretty? So Brittany T. Nager can log onto her Facebook account and check out cute college guys? Surely you write operating system to be seriously and heavily used -- to do good work for scientists and engineers, for people who really need the power of the latest hardware governed by a rock-solid, powerful OS that you don't just reboot every day, or when it freezes up, whichever comes first. Well, that's me. That's why I think my "userland" perspective during the development of the free Unix is a bit relevant.
No offense, but you're confused.
About what? You're saying I don't remember correctly what it was like doing serious programming in the Late Workstation to Early Linux transition era? Because I had a stroke or something? Feh.
Or are you saying I don't "correctly" interpret my experience? Well maybe I don't, but, if so, that should be a serious warning to kernel hackers and software-movement prophets: alas, often the vast army of users who in the end determine whether your software is successful or a museum exhibit are not going to "interpret" their experience with your work the way you think they should. They're not going to act like supplicants in your temple, asking to be shown The Way. They're going to act like homeowners calling around to find someone to clean the pool. If using your work means putting up with a lot of hard to understand delays, restrictions, obfuscations or other inconveniences -- well, they won't. Even if those things are all intended to serve A Good Purpose That Someday You Will Understand.
But...I dunno. Until Linux came along, these things seemed a bit on the fringe to me, except for Emacs, which predates the FSF anyway. I installed GCC and GDB once or twice in the early 90s, but it never did as good a job as the compiler and debugger you always got along with your proprietary Unix, which you got along with your workstation. (The $1000 license fee being peanuts compared to the $40,000 hardware anyway.)
So at least in my experience -- and I admit I was a scientific programmer, a user, and not a systems programmer or applications developer -- the GNU tools were pretty much just curiosities until Linux made it possible to run Unix on your PC. Now that was a Great Thing. All the elegance, stability, security and network-savviness of the work computer now available at home. Very nice. And the GNU tools made that possible, yes. But the free kernel was the keystone to that arch, I think. Linux could have squeaked by with few less GNU tools (albeit not without GCC), but I think all the GNU tools would have remained curiosities without the free kernel. As soon as a great free Unix existed, a lot of people jumped in to add what was still missing, like a fancy desktop instead of plain old X and fvwm, drivers, or package managers instead of a giant tarball and a 64kb README. But would people have ever jumped in to create the kernel, knowing the various GNU system applications already existed? Well, they didn't -- not until Linus. Maybe it had to wait until hardware prices came down, so if it hadn't been Linus it would've been someone else anyway. But maybe it's also harder for people to get excited when they see a bunch of pieces lying around, so that if maybe you built the central piece you could assemble everything into a coherent whole. Maybe it's easier to get excited when you can see a working model, even if it's crude and belches smoke everywhere, and could use some serious extra tinkering to work better. It's from that point of view that I think Linux has inspired and will inspire more people to do OSS work, or use it, than GNU. Maybe Linus is Shakespeare stealing Roger Bacon's plays -- but it's nevertheless Shakespeare who gets remembered in the history books.
Also, what I recall (vaguely) is that between '85 and '95 or so, the GNU kernel was always coming along Real Soon Now, but seemed stuck because they wanted to Get It Right. Let's just pass lightly over the gcc/egcs wierdness, which is maybe harder to understand than the Pope's nuanced position on masturbation among priests. I think substantial dithering got short-circuited by Linus, and by the people fired up about Linux,
Now, I'm not saying RMS or the FSF's work isn't highly valuable. The value of their work isn't what I'm talking about at all. What I'm saying is that I think the future belongs more to people like Linus -- that they will have more lasting influence -- because, as the OP said, they seems more focussed on getting stuff out the door, and the FSF (and RMS in particular) seem more focussed on making sure it's the right stuff, built with the right moral philosophy, isn't going to exploit the masses or give you karma, et cetera. In all my working experience, folks who spend substantial amounts of energy on the aesthetics of their product rather than on its bare ugly function get chewed up by the real world sooner or later. Jobs and NeXT, Betamax vs. VHS, Multics, DEC's Alpha chip -- tragedies like that come to mind. The perfect is often the enemy of the good, as they say.
Absolutely right. But so far it's been Linus who's done the most to actually change the world. Proving once again the superiority of actually getting working technology out the door, versus spending a decade or so fine-tuning your philosophy about how to begin working on the great technology that you will eventually design when you have the philosophy just perfect (if everyone hasn't succumbed to old age first).
I've had enough troubles in my own career directly traceable to wanting to Get Things Right at the expense of Getting Things Done to appreciate this particular point with some sensitivity, not to say bitterness. Feh.
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Everyone pays taxes, but not everyone pays them in equal amounts. If poor people pay little in taxes, but have high energy bills because they can't afford the up-front costs of CFLs, then that segment of the population will only benefit.
Ah, so you're talking about a wealth-transfer program. Because I'm in a high tax bracket I'll help folks further down pay for their light bulbs. Should I also help them pay for their food and clothes? Maybe they should just move in? Ha ha, no thanks. Having to pay for your own stuff is the best possible incentive to stay in school, get a job, save a little, stick to a sensible budget -- i.e. to grow up. Who am I to deny the benefit of learning life's most important lessons to my fellow man?
In fact, most every tax bracket would benefit. There are long-term cost savings for the consumer, and those savings should more than counterbalance the taxes for the vast majority of taxpayers.
Sounds like doubletalk to me. Joe Poorboy, who would otherwise buy a $1 incandescent, buys a $3 swirlie instead because he gets $2 back from the government. Joe also enjoys a $20 reduction in his electricity costs over the life of the bulb (which you'd think would be enough to get him to buy the bulb directly, but I guess we're assuming poor people are irrational here). Nice for Joe. Richie Rich, investment banker, being no fool, also buys a $3 swirlie, and also enjoys a $20 reduction in his electricity cost. But he also needs to pay more taxes to cover the subsidy to Joe. How much? Hmm, well, the program is pointless unless it induces lots of people to switch bulbs, and of course by definition there are lots more poor people than rich, so Rich clearly must get whacked for a lot more than the price of one extra swirlie for Joe. Say he needs to cover the subsidy on 10 bulbs. That's $20 extra in taxes. So how does Rich see any net gain from the program?
Maybe you're thinking Rich and everyone would benefit from reduced general electricity costs, leading to less CO2 emissions, a cleaner environment, et cetera. Could be. But if that's your goal, how about attacking it directly, instead of in this weird indirect way? Tax the use of fossil fuels in power plants. Zone lots of land so it can't be used for power plants. Pass laws mandating scrubbers on power plant stacks. The problem with clever, indirect approaches to a problem is they have unexpected side effects. Just for example, you are aware, I assume, that the swirlies (unlike incandescents) contain 5-20 mg of mercury, an exceedingly nasty environmental toxin. What if the people you encourage to buy swirlies happen to be exactly the type that don't bother to recycle the bulbs? Ugh, now you've reduced electricity use but increase the amount of mercury in landfills. Maybe it works out on balance, but maybe it doesn't. That's the problem with complex mechanisms. The side effects are by definition hard to know before you begin.
The size of the bureaucracy has very little to do with the amount of money being spent.
Well, that depends, doesn't it? If the purpose of your bureaucracy is to build a fusion reactor, then maybe not. But if the purpose of your bureaucracy is to sort out which citizens get a $2/bulb benefit, and which others must pay for it, then I'd say, yeah, roughly speaking the size of the bureaucracy would scale with the number of people eligible for the benefit. I suspect the size of the Social Security Administration does indeed scale with the number of people applying for benefits, receiving benefits, dying and needing to have their benefits canceled, et cetera.
Subsidies early on could jump-start demand for CFLs, increasing production capacity, improving manufacturing techniques, and enabling them to compete more successfully in the market when the subsidies are eventually removed.
Come on. We're not talking about a market where no private party will enter because of the risks. Or some cottage industry where people are han
OK, brain fart, Rico is Filipino. Oops.
Er...have you thought this thoroughly through? Where do you suppose the government is going to get the money to pay everyone $2 every time they buy a $3 swirly bulb, so the price is the same as the regular bulb? Taxes, right? Which everyone pays.
So here's how it goes: everybody pays $2.50/bulb in taxes so that he can get a government benefit of $2.00/bulb. (The extra 50 cents covers the salaries of the government employees to handle the cash back and forth.) And this makes sense how?
Government funding of research into fuel cells is another thing entirely. See, the idea there is you fund the construction of a small number of advanced technology widgets, with the idea that, once you show private initiative the way, it will follow. It's like the difference between mom making your lunch every day, and mom teaching you how to make it yourself.
I've had much the same experience. They don't seem to last noticeably longer than incandescent bulbs. Maybe the problem is that those quoted lifespans are "in captivity," where the bulb is just kept quietly shining, maybe turned (gently) on and off. In the wild, so to speak, it could be that other things are more important in determining bulb lifespan, e.g. how many dings the lamp gets if it sits on your desk.
Heinlein put plenty of sex into his adult novels (his teen novels are another thing). But he didn't seem to feel the need to describe it. Perhaps he felt that if you were old enough you could supply the details from your own experience, and if you were young enough, encouraging your fantasies would only distract you from the novel.
/. ideal for comments, +5 Sexy, that kind of thing.
He didn't even spend much time describing his men and women sexually. Few female characters were introduced with a description of their breasts, for example, although you might learn about their cup size by and by, somewhat incidentally. It's like the way you only learn late in the books and somewhat incidentally that Dr. Richard Ames is black and Lieutenant Rico is Hispanic.
Indeed, I think one of the reasons Heinlein is popular among geeky types is because he emphasized the sexual attractiveness of mind, character, and accomplishment. The fastest way to a Heinlein heroine's heart was witty repartee or a devastatingly clever and insightful argument...you know, the
Thanks for the link! I did not know about this prize. What a worthwhile use of the old man's fortune. What a pity he did not live to see Rutan's SS1 and so forth.
If you were talking about the study of social myths, as reflected in TV series et cetera, by social psychologists, I'd agree. That would be serious scholarship, and has its uses. But I don't think studying social myths outside of that context is scholarship. It's just mythology, or art, or someone's amusement.
The difference is like the difference between astrology and astronomy. Both study the movements of the stars and planets carefully, and construct elaborate, internally-consistent, internally-logical frameworks for understanding cause and effect. But only astronomy is a science, because only astronomy is based on things as they really are, rather than things as they may seem to be.
Beginning with a thorough understanding of human biology, individual psychology, and evolutionary biology, and then using social myths (or TV shows) as part of the evidence in your study of human social psychology makes perfect sense to me. But I suspect that's not what we're talking about here. I suspect we're talking about studying TV shows uncritically, in their own context, without a good biological and psychological background: for example accepting at face value the reasons actors and writers give for what they say and do, and the reasons audiences say is their reason for watching.
I'll illustrate. A good psychologist might wonder why Steve McGeek became a scientist or engineer. He might even ask Steve himself, and note that Steve says: "Oh, because I used to love watching Star Trek as a kid." But the good psychologist is not going to take Steve's statement at face value. He's going to assemble other evidence about Steve, based on observation, talking to his parents, what he knows about young males from other experiments, yadda yadda, before he comes to any conclusion. And his conclusion might be: Star Trek makes people want to be engineers. But it also might be: engineers are not good at knowing (or are embarassed by) the reasons they are what they are -- maybe it's because they're scared of girls or something -- and have a habit of attributing it to reasons more acceptable to their peers, or society at large.
On the other hand, I suspect someone just studying TV shows would accept Steve's statement at face value -- because he would have no other sources of information than what's within the study of myths. He's not a psychologist, cognitive scientist, or even a biologist. As I said, I think a free-standing study of myths is about as useless as a free-standing study of the movements of the planets.
Nah. I disagree. Entertainment is just entertainment. If I want to think seriously about a topic, I read a serious book on it. If I want to relax and turn the serious-thinking parts of my brain off, then I watch Star Trek. If I want to learn about life, then I talk to my father or my neighbor with the Purple Heart from Vietnam. Or I observe my children, or read the autobiography of someone who's had an interesting life. I've got plenty of sources of serious information if I want to think seriously. I don't need to try to extract snippets of good sense from one-liners by Dr. McCoy or a speech to imaginary aliens (who are really clever metaphors for ourselves, ha ha) by Captain Picard. Why mine for silver in the dump when silver mines are all around you? Sure, you might find some, but it's a bit pointlessly harder.
I don't take lessons about life from Star Trek. I don't consider its imaginary situations metaphors for anything real. It doesn't "discuss" important "issues" as far as I'm concerned, and, even if it gave itself airs and thought it did, then anything actors, screenwriters and directors said on any serious issue would have zero weight with me. Might as well ask a juggler at the State Fair which stocks to buy.
I surely agree entertainment reflects life and the society that makes it. But why study the reflection instead of the thing itself? If you want to understand American foreign policy since Vietnam, study American foreign policy. There are ample direct resources -- books written by diplomats, soldiers, professors, and reg'lar folks. Recorded speeches, newspapers archives, old photos. Why try to glean insight from the faint reflection of the culture in old Power Ranger episodes? Because it's more fun? Well, fair enough. But don't ask me to call that scholarship. Sounds more like a hobby to me.
I don't dismiss Dr. Baker and her hobby -- I just don't consider it serious scholarship, which is certainly my prerogative. I don't have to respect an accomplishment merely because it's difficult or well done. Someone who sculpts shit beautifully wouldn't impress me. Dr. Baker's work wouldn't satisfy my wish to do something serious and worthwhile with my life, but if it satisfies hers -- then bon voyage, milady. De gustibus non est disputandam.
I could go on a rant about how medicine may allow us to live, but culture makes life worth living
Not for me. Climbing mountains, running triathlons, visiting Galicia, raising children, seeing globular clusters through telescopes, setting up my own intranet, or accomplishing nifty tricks at work make my life worth living. TV and movies and novels could vanish overnight and I dare say I, like the thousands of generations of human being that lived before those things even existed, would find life well worth living.
When we foster a society that can engage critically with its own culture and media, we have a culture that is less susceptible to the influence of those who would use media to control the public.
Like masturbation teaches one about sex? I think not. Historically speaking, those least susceptible to media propagandizing are country bumpkins who spend their time with real people and actual events. It's urban elites disconnected from real life, those who routinely exercise their ability to commingle fiction and fact, who are most susceptible. The intellectuals are always first to fall prey to mass delusions -- it's the peasants who are last.
We gain understanding, or at least perspective, on the other cultures surrounding us
No doubt. But we'd gain understanding faster by turning off the tube, opening the door, and walking out into it.
How many people do you think became engineers or scientists thanks to watching Star Trek as children?
None. You confuse correlation with cause. I think people who were, for whatever reason of personality and rearing, going to become engineers and scientists
This just proves that PhD stands for "piled higher and deeper."
Not all PhD's. But in this case...I'm a little inclined to agree. No offence to the talented and fetching Dr. Baker, but here are the other three winners of the U of Melbourne's Chancellor's Prize of Excellence:
(1) "Penelope Smith (Social Sciences), who used economic modeling to better understand business cycles in Australia and large Group of 7 economies - drawing information which is critical for setting fiscal and monetary policy."
(2) "Martin de Jonge (Science and Engineering) whose work will lead to more incisive synchrotron x-ray studies that are 100 times more accurate than current levels."
(3) "Christopher Smith (Medicine, Dentistry and Health Sciences) who identified the cell which encourages the body's immune system to fight the herpes simplex virus."
Seems like a wee bit more serious and useful work. On the other hand, clearly Baker is a right clever jane, having figured out how to get the yeomanry of 'Stralia pay her a handsome stipend for five years while she watches her favorite TV show and takes notes. Well done, lass! You have to admire that kind of panache.
I recall visiting ORNL as part of a recruiting visit to UT-Knoxville (the position offered a joint appointment at ORNL -- how cool is that?)
Two curious events from that trip:
First, I was working at the University of Chicago at the time, and when I checked in with security I had to sign in. I remember it being a wood building that looked like it had been built in the 1940s as a "temporary" war-building and never replaced. It gave me an odd feeling to sign in with security in a 1940s-looking building as Dr. So-and-so, from the University of Chicago, here to visit the Oak Ridge facility. If you know your history of The Bomb, you'll recall there was much traffic between the U of C, where Fermi and others did academic-type work on nuclear fission, including building the first pile, and Oak Ridge, where they worked on many practical aspects of atomic weapons. It was a moment that brought the history to life for me.
Second, a post-doc took me on a tour of the spectroscopy facilities near one of the reactors, and as we were picking our way through the equipment, designed to collect beams of neutrons from the reactor core, I remember him stopping suddenly before crossing an unremarkable gap in the equipment. He thought carefully for a while, then stepped across the gap, muttering in a somewhat off-hand way "Oh this will be all right, I remember now the reactor is not running today." Uh...ok.
I consider myself pretty modern and enlightened, but in that momemt I could kind of understand all those people who have paranoid fears of nuclear technology. It is unnerving to think that something completely silent and invisible, yet completely deadly, could be right next to you, and you need to take the word of some distracted-looking pocket-protector-type that, gee, it's OK today, the reactor isn't on. (I think we should take his word, but I can understand how it makes people nervous.)
No, generally speaking it's the silly geese at the Financial Times who do. Or not. This is probably just one of those outrageous speculations that journalists do to provoke outraged responses and boost circulation. Not unlike...uh...never mind.
But the proposition that a rich company would be better off in a borrowing state is not without merit. People forget companies are not people, and the same intuitive "rules" about sensible financial decisions do not apply. It's good as a person to have a lot of cash in the bank. Makes you secure. Not so for a company. A company is not an end-user of wealth, the way people are, but merely an engine for transferring wealth from one group of people (the customers) to another (the employees, investors, and subcontractors) [Value flows the other way, of course, but we're talking cash money here.] The goal is to do so as efficiently as possible. Money received from customers should be "invested" as soon as possible, i.e. transferred to new hires, new capital equipment, et cetera. It's doing nothing useful sitting in the bank. The only money a company should keep lying around is a small cushion for unexpected fluctuations in the market, the price of resources, et cetera.
But why borrow? The reason is that you don't have to wait until you've accumulated enough cash from present operations to invest in the capital expansion necessary to undertake future, more profitable operations. You borrow the money immediately, then start the new more profitable operations immediately, and pay back the loan. Presumably the fact that you start earning bigger money earlier pays for the cost of the loan. Everybody wins.
It's not the same as an individual borrowing money to buy a car, which is more nearly pure consumerism. It's more like borrowing money to go to college. It's much more sensible to borrow the money and go to college at 18, graduate, then pay the loans back over 5 years with a high-paying college-graduate job, than it is to work for 15 years at a low-paying menial job, save up, and finally go to college at age 33.
Uh, dude, I think you counted years wrong. I'm not a boomer, I'm Gen X, which it sounds like you are, or maybe Gen Y. Boomers weren't watching Apollo as grade-school kids, they were in college and marching against the draft. I have many of the same criticisms you do about the boomer generation. I'm sympathetic.
Although...you'd probably be more effective if you focussed a bit more.
Suppose energy of a particular form were amazingly easy to concentrate. That implies, naturally, that this energy would be amazingly hard to disperse. So how are you going to get your automobile engine to work? Sure, you've got this concentrated clump of energy in your strange new type of battery. And it was real easy to gather, huzzah. But that energy doesn't want to go anywhere. Unlike the normal type of energy, it's not eager to flow through your wheels, doing work, and disperse into the wide universe as heat.
It's the very fact that energy is hard to concentrate that makes it so useful. The fact that energy is hard to concentrate -- that it's eager to disperse, straining at the leash, so to speak -- is like the fact that a rubber band is hard to stretch: it's exactly what makes the stretched rubber band exert a powerful and useful force. If we had a rubber band that's very easy to stretch, it wouldn't exert much of a force. If we had a form of energy that was easy to gather, we couldn't harness its flow to do much work.
For the cognoscenti: yes, I'm aware I've merely paraphrased the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Oh I dunno. I'm part of that generation. I remember listening to the radio when Neil Armstrong first set foot on the Moon in the summer of 1969. I was glued to the TV for every Apollo launch. I also remember thinking, in the mid 80s or so, that the Moon colonies and regularly scheduled commuter trips to Mars were sure taking their time coming.
But I don't think it's our "institutions" that failed. I think we did. The aerospace engineers didn't turn stupid, or lose heart. They just lost our interest, and we stopped paying their salaries. In the 70s and 80s the country turned its attention back inward to indulge in twenty-five years of narcissist navel gazing. We told ourselves we needed to "fix" things on Earth first, things like poverty, prejudice, war, pollution. I suppose it escaped our attention that these things are as much fixtures of life as bad luck, death and taxes, and we can no more fix them for good than we can make it so all the children are above average. But we had a lot of fun spending all that money, marching, and making fine speeches. And it was actually a lot easier than building spacecraft, and a lot less dangerous than trying to live on an airless minor planet.
So it goes. I suppose I'm disappointed. But I don't think I'm cynical about the years since then. They weren't devoid of miracles. We may not live on the Moon, but we do have amazing electronic widgets, and we've done remarkable things in medicine. I'm not even disgusted with all the money we spent standing on the brink of nuclear annihilation. We guarded half the world's freedom for 50 years, and, amazingly, without having to fight the appalling war everyone thought was coming any moment. That's something remarkable, actually.
In this sense, attitudes of cynicism and pessimism are a reflection of the profound failure by both our public and private institutions...
Maybe. But maybe attitudes of cynicism and pessimism are not the result of, but a major cause of, failures in public and private institutions. I mean, why exactly should we expect our institutions to be more courageous and dedicated than we are as individuals?
But can anyone tell me what $5 billion of our taxpayer dollars has done for us?
Maybe it's a subtle thing. But there is a practical difference between a crabbed, pessimistic, Can't-Do defeatist culture and a culture full of ambition and daring that does impractical but spectactular things with a spare 0.1% of its GNP: one produces living descendants a thousand years later, and the other merely produces elegant, sardonic essays written in a dead language that are closely studied by scholars of the future.
Man does not live on bread alone, to paraphrase Moses, but perhaps also on dreams that inspire his best efforts and give him a sense of wonder and hope for the future. I mean, if you don't think this way -- if you're not much interested in things unless there's something in it for Number One -- then you don't have children and your genes get edited out of the species. This is perhaps why clever cynicism is more noteable among societies (and individuals) in decline than in ascendacy.
And if you RMFP (read my F-ing post)...
Um, I did. That's why I titled my post "Not only that..." You made very good points. I wasn't arguing with you. Just adding some thoughts your points triggered.
Designing drugs that have those properties involves a lot more design than luck.
Eh...I'm going to disagree with you very slightly here. I know people in rational drug design and QSAR, and I'm well aware remarkable strides have been made in the last few decades. But, as you point out yourself, the complexity of the human biochemical system is so awesome that my impression is that producing a truly winning drug still involves at least a 50/50 mix of cleverness and luck (or, equivalently, a 50/50 mix of design and trial-and-error). A bit of evidence would be Vioxx (ouch!), or the fact that people are still discovering interesting and possibly useful side-effects of aspirin, despite its structure being known for a century, and its principal biochemical effect well-studied.
As an aside, I'd say the truly exciting development is the possibility of understanding on an individual basis the effects and side-effects of drugs, by doing appropriate genetic tests on individuals. Just for example, someone I know just had to cope with breast cancer, and took advantage of the amazing fact that these days you can test the particular genetic sequence of an individual breast cancer and reliably predict who needs chemo and who doesn't. That is a wonderful development, considering how brutal chemo is.
I can easily foresee a future where physicians prescribe the type and dose of medicines based on their likely benefit to each individual patient, based on their particular genome, with substantially improved health care outcomes. Plus fewer misfires with new drugs going all the way to human trials and then flopping: we'd be able to characterize the individual genetic traits of the participants. Surely it's likely that some patients benefit from any Phase III trial drug -- all we need is to learn to sort out who they are. Then, a drug need not be safe and effective for everyone to make it to market -- it need only be safe and effective for someone. That will probably give people many more options for effective treatment.
We may even be able to know whether certain habits are bad for you, or harmless, based on one's individual nature. Pretty cool.
If you read TFA instead of the completely misleading summary, you'll note that...
(1) The BYU chemists don't know if the compound has painkilling properties at all. It's the mirror image of another molecule which is known not to be a painkiller. The mirror image is similar to morphine, so they hope it might have the painkilling properties of morphine. But it's painkilling properties are at this point entirely theoretical.
(2) They have no clue whatsoever whether, if it has painkilling properties, it is less addictive than morphine. It just as easily be more addictive. All they know is, while it looks like morphine, it isn't exactly morphine, so it will probably have slightly different properties.
(3) And of course, they have no idea whether the new molecule would have other, less desirable differences from morphine -- like being a deadly poison to the kidneys. Whether the stuff could even be safely taken by humans is still unknown.
In short, the summary on this article wildly exaggerates its content.
It's going to take time in geological scale for any lead to get out of the glass it is part of.
That's a very reasonable thought, with which I'd have instinctively agreed, but unfortunately it turns out not to be true. Apparently it takes mere hours to days if the glass is crushed. Here is a surprising brief report from Science News, which, since it's in a God-damned PDF, I will quote:
Though anecdotal reports have hinted that picture tubes' glass might leach [lead], no one knew how much, notes Timothy G. Townsend of the University of Florida in Gainesville. To fill that data gap, his team tested 36 picture tubes.... The researchers...took samples from different portions of the tubes' glass. Then, they crushed the glass into fine and coarse particles, shook 100 grams of each sample in a beaker of acidic water for several hours, and measured how much lead had leached into the water....lead from all 30 color [picture tubes] exceeded [the Federal safety standard for lead in water of 5 mg/L]....Some glass tainted water with more than 200 mg/l of lead [40 times the Federal safety limit]. When that glass was crushed to pieces less than 5 millimeters in diameter, it had the largest surface area and leached the most--often tainting water with 400 mg/L of lead [80 times the Federal safety limit]. The researchers also discovered why color units leach so much lead: It's their frit, which 70 percent lead by weight. From now on, the researchers conclude, color picture tubes should be considered hazardous waste and kept out of landfills and municipal-waste incinerators.
Strange and unsettling. The article is from 2000, we can hope things have improved since then.
The waste percentage is much smaller for metals than it is for other materials, but it's not zero.
Sure. But for the "recycling" schemes in question, the waste percentage is 100%. None of the material is recovered in its original form. I'm drawing a distinction -- I think a very useful distinction -- between recycling schemes that recover some percentage of the material in its original, pristine form, and "recycling" schemes that don't back up at all, that merely take material too degraded for one use and discover one or two additional uses that don't mind the degradation.
If someone had come up with a way to truly recycle rubber -- return the material to its original, pristine state -- then even if the percentage recovered was low (20%) or the process was finicky about its feedstock (it could only take bicycle tires made by Dunlop, whatever), then there'd be something to celebrate. You could reasonably hope that such a process would be subject to incremental engineering improvement to improve the percentage or broaden the feedstock possibilities. But there's no way anyone is going to be able to construct an endless chain of uses for increasingly degraded rubber (bicycle tube to bookbag to [something] to [something else] and so forth indefinitely), and that's what you'd need to make "recycling" sustainable. Hence while it's maybe interesting and worthwhile, it's still a dead end, from the point of view of reducing your waste stream.
This is a change in the attitude of the business community, not the technical community.
C'mon. When you're talking entrepreneurs, small business, these are usually one and the same. Small companies don't consist of a few pure-business guys and a few pure-tech guys who never talk to each other. Successful entrepreneurs are normally people with talent in both fields, whichever they might have started in. I don't know any techie start-ups headed by pure Executive Vice-President types with no clue about the tech involved, who aren't strongly (even sometimes too strongly) influenced by the attitudes prevalent in the relevant tech community. Are you sure you're not maybe applying stereotypes (and not very accurate stereotypes at that) about "big business" to entrepreneurs? Real small businessmen don't look and act like Scrooge McDuck any more than real programmers look and act like hackers in Hollywood movies.
Recycling this content was considered a money-loser; something you might do because you're a good person, but not something you could do to make a profit.
No, recycling was in fact a money-loser, not something you could do to make a profit. Bogus perceptions have nothing to do with it. Changing technology, changing consumer tastes, and changing prices of materials have everything to do with it.
A hungry and intelligent businessman -- and their are plenty of 'em out there -- will shovel shit if he can turn a profit doing it. He can't afford to have any illusions about what makes money and what doesn't. It's only journalists and other armchair quarterbacks, folks who don't have to actually risk their home or retirement fund testing out nice theories in the hard, cruel world of fact, who can afford to have lazy feel-good illusions about how it's possible to make money.
Every trip through the recycling cycle degrades the material to some extent...
Nonsense. Aluminum is aluminum is aluminum. Steel is steel. Silicon dioxide (glass) is silicon dioxide. You melt them down, blow off the impurities, and you are exactly back where you started -- and I mean right down to the molecule. The idea that somehow the Fe atoms that are part of your 2006 Ford car door might be "degraded" because they were once part of the trunk of a '56 Ford, and before that formed the bearing on a pushrod in a locomotive built in 1908, is inconsistent with basic principles of chemistry. (Biological recycling is even more efficient -- your food doesn't taste faintly of shit if the farmer manures the field.)
The only place you could make this kind of general argument is for composite polymer materials -- e.g. plastics, rubber and paper -- where it's not economical to reduce the materials to their original chemical form. Practically speaking, you can't reduce polystyrene waste to the olefins from which it was originally polymerized, in order to purge it of impurities, restore the original degree of polymerization, and restore the original composite mix of resin, plasticizers, et cetera. It just costs too much, as someone else has pointed out. So these materials are not, at present, significantly recycleable in any meaningful sense.
Instead, as in TFA, one "recycles" materials like these only in the toy sense of taking the used material and shaping it into another form for a while. It's as if you took your old, rusted-out car body, and, rather than melt the steel down and recast it into a pristine rust-free new car body, just turned the rustbucket into a planter, or some funky rust art. Or like my grandfather re-using wood from packing crates to stake up his tomato plants. Or GIs in the Second World War wiping their asses with pages from Stars and Stripes.
I don't think this is true recycling. It hasn't a prayer of ever becoming a closed loop, where the material recycles more or less endlessly, and you just supply energy. Turning your rusted-out automobile into a planter doesn't solve the fundamental problem at all, because the planter's just going to go into the dump itself, soon enough. You haven't done squat to figure out a way to truly close the loop, to turn the worn-out product back into a brand new product of the same type and quality.
Such "recycling" is a gimmick, an abuse of language, which conveys the false impression that something much more useful is going on than really is. The fact that some miniscule fraction of bicycle tires could be re-used by consumers one more time, for a year or so, as part of a rubber bookbag, can have no serious impact on the problem of our waste stream. It's re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.
Does it matter? Sure. Effort spent re-arranging deck chairs could be better spent trying to plug holes below the waterline. When people hear about all this "recycling" they may figure, hey, plenty's being done, and pay less attention to efforts at genuine recycling. (For example, although steel is infinitely recycleable, and very economically, only about 60% of American steel cans are recycled. That's idiotic.) Toy solutions can easily delay and prevent real solutions.
In any case, the more interesting thing is that entrepreneurs are beginning to see the profit potential of recycling garbage.
Good grief. Are we to suppose engineers have been idiots until early in the 21st century? Any fool understands that if you can figure out a way to turn "garbage" (what you can buy cheap) into "product" (what you can sell dear), then profit follows as night follows day. Consequently, the history of technology is chock-o'-block full of engineers taking "waste" products and finding new, useful things to do with them. This isn't a new insight or development, it's as old as compost heaps.
One historical example, relevant here, is that our entire modern plastics industry is based around the
So, a guy takes old bicycle tires and makes them into messenger bags, which he sells to upper-class fashionistas willing and able to shell out $148 for a book bag made of rubber (!). Another entrepreneur makes sidewalk pavers out of old auto tires, which last longer and are more bouncy than concrete.
Ooookay. That's nice. But...er...what happens when the bag wears out? Or the paver gets too many cuts and dings from inline skates and people falling off bikes? You've got your trash back again, that's what. There's no sign that these folks can use their own worn-out products to make new products. So all they seem to have done is take some small part of the rubber trash stream and make it go 'round just one more time.
This doesn't seem to me like what we normally think of as "recycling." When you recycle an aluminum can, it can go around and around practically forever -- buy it, use it, gather it back up, melt it, form a new can, re-fill it, and sell it again. Same with glass recycling -- sell the bottle, gather it up again, smash it, melt it, make a new bottle, sell it again. Rince, lather, repeat.
Something like those technologies is what I'd call true sustainable recycling practises. Something that takes a one-pass trip from virgin resource to trash dump and turns it into a nearly closed loop, with the resource making dozens of passes through consumer products. As far as I can see, this article just talks about taking a one-pass trip and making it into a two-pass trip. Big deal.
An interesting observation. I suggest the problem is that we haven't quite resolved the conflict between a legal system with roots in Roman law, where the state functions almost entirely as a moderator of private conflicts -- and hence murder is punished by a private wrongful-death lawsuit -- and a more medieval system where the killing of a fief-holder is an offense primarily against, and hence punished by, the lord of the manor.
Perhaps this double ancestry accounts more for our double vision in terms of how certain crimes should be punished. We still seem ambivalent about it in more areas than murder. For example, consider environmental law: if someone pollutes the water, or sells a dangerous product, or spams a million people with penis-pill fraud. Is this something that should be corrected by letting people whom he's harmed sue him? Or should the state prosecute and punish the action? We can't decide. We do a little of both, and we debate rather endlessly which (i.e. regulation or liability law) is the better way to do justice without suffocating enterprise.
Lots of words, no message.
It's not always about delivering a message, okay? I'm relating interesting personal experience, not preaching a sermon. It's food for thought, not an attempt to tell people what to think.
Seems like you have read some book
Don't be insulting. Why would I waste time reading books about software development? My heavy reading is J. Chem. Phys. and Phys. Rev.. My light reading runs to Dorothy Sayers and Patrick O'Brian. So where did what I know come from? Well, I wrote my first code 28 years ago this September, an implementation of Conway's "Life" in 8080 machine code. I've never hacked an OS, but in the last two decades I've written megabytes of serious scientific application code on everything from VMS and CMS to Multics to half a dozen varieties of proprietary Unices, plus of course Linux itself.
but never really been part of the movement.
I said I wasn't a systems hacker. I was a user, and a pretty high-level geeky informed one at that. I didn't use my computers for editing Word documents and photoshopping Dan Quayle's head onto an elephant seal's body. I wrote big programs to solve nonlinear integral equations, run molecular dynamics simulations, evaluate many-dimensional phase-space integrals, et cetera and so forth. I squeezed every speck of raw scalar performance I could out of the hardware, and the hardware I worked on started off costing a cool million (in 1980 dollars).
Thus your knowledge is lacking.
About what? About the Right Way to program operating systems? Guilty as charged. I'm a user, not a kernel hacker. But, unless you're an utter pure theorist, a monk in an ashram, than any reasonable kernel hacker has got to care about my point of view. I mean, what are you writing operating systems for? Just to boot up and look pretty? So Brittany T. Nager can log onto her Facebook account and check out cute college guys? Surely you write operating system to be seriously and heavily used -- to do good work for scientists and engineers, for people who really need the power of the latest hardware governed by a rock-solid, powerful OS that you don't just reboot every day, or when it freezes up, whichever comes first. Well, that's me. That's why I think my "userland" perspective during the development of the free Unix is a bit relevant.
No offense, but you're confused.
About what? You're saying I don't remember correctly what it was like doing serious programming in the Late Workstation to Early Linux transition era? Because I had a stroke or something? Feh.
Or are you saying I don't "correctly" interpret my experience? Well maybe I don't, but, if so, that should be a serious warning to kernel hackers and software-movement prophets: alas, often the vast army of users who in the end determine whether your software is successful or a museum exhibit are not going to "interpret" their experience with your work the way you think they should. They're not going to act like supplicants in your temple, asking to be shown The Way. They're going to act like homeowners calling around to find someone to clean the pool. If using your work means putting up with a lot of hard to understand delays, restrictions, obfuscations or other inconveniences -- well, they won't. Even if those things are all intended to serve A Good Purpose That Someday You Will Understand.
Well, yes, good point. A very good point.
But...I dunno. Until Linux came along, these things seemed a bit on the fringe to me, except for Emacs, which predates the FSF anyway. I installed GCC and GDB once or twice in the early 90s, but it never did as good a job as the compiler and debugger you always got along with your proprietary Unix, which you got along with your workstation. (The $1000 license fee being peanuts compared to the $40,000 hardware anyway.)
So at least in my experience -- and I admit I was a scientific programmer, a user, and not a systems programmer or applications developer -- the GNU tools were pretty much just curiosities until Linux made it possible to run Unix on your PC. Now that was a Great Thing. All the elegance, stability, security and network-savviness of the work computer now available at home. Very nice. And the GNU tools made that possible, yes. But the free kernel was the keystone to that arch, I think. Linux could have squeaked by with few less GNU tools (albeit not without GCC), but I think all the GNU tools would have remained curiosities without the free kernel. As soon as a great free Unix existed, a lot of people jumped in to add what was still missing, like a fancy desktop instead of plain old X and fvwm, drivers, or package managers instead of a giant tarball and a 64kb README. But would people have ever jumped in to create the kernel, knowing the various GNU system applications already existed? Well, they didn't -- not until Linus. Maybe it had to wait until hardware prices came down, so if it hadn't been Linus it would've been someone else anyway. But maybe it's also harder for people to get excited when they see a bunch of pieces lying around, so that if maybe you built the central piece you could assemble everything into a coherent whole. Maybe it's easier to get excited when you can see a working model, even if it's crude and belches smoke everywhere, and could use some serious extra tinkering to work better. It's from that point of view that I think Linux has inspired and will inspire more people to do OSS work, or use it, than GNU. Maybe Linus is Shakespeare stealing Roger Bacon's plays -- but it's nevertheless Shakespeare who gets remembered in the history books.
Also, what I recall (vaguely) is that between '85 and '95 or so, the GNU kernel was always coming along Real Soon Now, but seemed stuck because they wanted to Get It Right. Let's just pass lightly over the gcc/egcs wierdness, which is maybe harder to understand than the Pope's nuanced position on masturbation among priests. I think substantial dithering got short-circuited by Linus, and by the people fired up about Linux,
Now, I'm not saying RMS or the FSF's work isn't highly valuable. The value of their work isn't what I'm talking about at all. What I'm saying is that I think the future belongs more to people like Linus -- that they will have more lasting influence -- because, as the OP said, they seems more focussed on getting stuff out the door, and the FSF (and RMS in particular) seem more focussed on making sure it's the right stuff, built with the right moral philosophy, isn't going to exploit the masses or give you karma, et cetera. In all my working experience, folks who spend substantial amounts of energy on the aesthetics of their product rather than on its bare ugly function get chewed up by the real world sooner or later. Jobs and NeXT, Betamax vs. VHS, Multics, DEC's Alpha chip -- tragedies like that come to mind. The perfect is often the enemy of the good, as they say.
Absolutely right. But so far it's been Linus who's done the most to actually change the world. Proving once again the superiority of actually getting working technology out the door, versus spending a decade or so fine-tuning your philosophy about how to begin working on the great technology that you will eventually design when you have the philosophy just perfect (if everyone hasn't succumbed to old age first).
I've had enough troubles in my own career directly traceable to wanting to Get Things Right at the expense of Getting Things Done to appreciate this particular point with some sensitivity, not to say bitterness. Feh.