I just made a similar remark as you did so short while ago. Mostly calcium hydroxide is produced from lime stone by splitting off carbon dioxide at high temperatures. Your carbon footprint would just be huge in other words. I also never took my comment to be serious.
Interestingly people seem to think that more carbonic acid in the water dissolves calcium carbonate in the shells of marine creatures. The mechanism is not really obvious to me from what I learn't in chemistry class but who knows. It might have something to do with the fact that calcium carbonate dissolves into a solution with a ph higher than 7 and therefore there is some pressure for the calcium ions towards staying in a more acid solution as opposed to some shell.
Actually the wikipedia entry explains that much better:
" 3) As ambient CO2 partial pressure increases to levels above atmospheric, pH drops, and much of the carbonate ion is converted to bicarbonate ion, which results in higher solubility of Ca2+."
Not that I like debugging but I just love ddd's data display functionality. There are a few missing features, i.e. I would like to access memory behind a pointer from the data display, but on the whole I love its ability to essentially document structures like lists and trees.
Using unsafe math will get rid of the function calls to sqrt the compiler will still be making otherwise. The above code is a decent trade off between not expending too much effort and getting reasonable performance I think. I have some more ideas but they won't make the thing any easier to understand and program.
I compiled with: gfortran-4.3 -O3 -march=core2 -mfpmath=sse test.f -o test_slashdot
Also I found out that sqrt(-x)=i*sqrt(x). You would only have to calculate a subset of the 100x10240 data points, does the compiler do that? It doesn't seem so. I'm wondering whether C++ does this sort of thing too, it supposedly has a complex data type. It does have a complex data type but also uses a function call: ... cvtsi2sd -164164(%ebp), %xmm0 leal -246012(%ebp), %ebx movsd %xmm0, -164160(%ebp) movl $-5119, %edi movsd mpi, %xmm0 movsd %xmm0, -164176(%ebp) .p2align 4,,10 .p2align 3 .L6: cvtsi2sd %edi, %xmm0 leal -164144(%ebp), %eax mulsd -164176(%ebp), %xmm0 incl %edi mulsd -164160(%ebp), %xmm0 movl $0, 12(%esp) movsd %xmm0, 4(%esp) movl $0, 16(%esp) movl %eax, (%esp) call csqrt ;that wasn't necessary movsd -164144(%ebp), %xmm1 movsd -164136(%ebp), %xmm0 subl $4, %esp movsd %xmm0, (%ebx) movsd %xmm1, -8(%ebx) addl $16, %ebx cmpl $5121, %edi jne .L6 ... Here is the code: #include <iostream> #include <complex> #include <cmath> using namespace std; double mpi=3.141592653589793238462/1.024; int main(void){ int i,j; for(j=10;j<=110;j++){ complex<double> r[10240]; for(i=-5119;i<=5120;i++){ complex<double> in(mpi*i*j,0); r[i]=sqrt(in); } for(i=-5119;i<=5120;i++) cout << r[i] <<endl; } return 0; } Here is a part of the output around i=0: ... (0,9.59369) (0,7.83321) (0,5.53892) (0,0) (5.53892,0) (7.83321,0) (9.59369,0) ... I compiled with: g++ -O3 -mfpmath=sse -march=core2 test_slashdot.c -o test_slashdot3 -lm
So I would say that Fortran has the chance of better understanding what you want of it but it only goes half way because like C++ it doesn't recognize the repeated operations. You could set out and do it all by hand in C and get a better performance, but if you want to spend equal effort Fortran looks pretty good. I have this suspicion, that the floating point nature of the data causes the compiler to throw out the possibility of just moving the positive sqrt into the imaginary part of r, but my tests couldn't find any appropriate optimization settings.
Aww, I can't be bothered, but that there is only one sqrt surprises me much. I wouldn't know how to do it without some time thinking about it, but I expect C to require a major effort to get something similar going.
Supposedly we had a surcharge on cans which drove them off the market until 2006 when they changed the law again. I don't buy beer frequently, so I really have no clue about our beer market. Maybe I should check whether I can find any plastic beer bottles.
I have tried some but don't live on them. If you do, you might end up looking like some scrawny vegan or like some of those people who lived through the Irish famine, or if you focus too much on it, not live at all (this is just CYA for the nutcases).
This is actually interesting. Would the aforementioned plants allow you to survive better than plain old grasses?
Now I noticed, you have goats and live in mostly dry Mediterranean California, that is a different story all together.
Besides, you have to look after the goats while you could be programming. Ok, a goat herder with a laptop and the dog doing the work, this may be a plan.
I made a silly mistake about calculating the cost to orbit, it had something to do with converting between pounds and kilograms. I assumed $2000/pound through a russian launch (my source: www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf).
I agree with you that looking only at the energy would be too narrow a focus. Launch costs include ground operations and other things whereas the launcher itself isn't even the biggest part of the costs.
One could use different technologies once in orbit. It might only take an ion engine to get from the junkyard/manufacturing orbit to LEO or geostationary orbit. It still would take fuel but if you focus more on increasing exhaust velocity than differential mass the powerplant mass you have to produce/collect/bring up from earth is the part you have to worry more about. A solar sail might require even less materials to be brought up from earth.
Regarding your last point, I'm wondering how the space junk is distributed. Most LEO space junk is probably not so much of a problem because it will come down by itself. I just think that careful space junk management in some further out orbit which is not frequently used might be only a bit more expensive than dropping junk into the athmosphere. We are not doing it yet so why not consider it. A junk yard is probably a more manageable thing too. If junk is securely clustered together it is easier to maintain its position until we are actually able to use it for something else. So I don't suggest we just leave things as they are and wait until the perfect solution comes along but to work towards a better solution which might save us a number of launches later.
What might ultimately bring the junk yard idea down is shrinking launch costs and this is something which is seen as the main goal nowadays. The reason I find junk collection/manufacturing in orbit great is that it could ultimately lead to people living and working in space as opposed to only running a research station which requires more terrestrial intervention. It would be a step towards a human pressence in space whereas just dropping the junk means cementing the status quo - space bussiness is for satellites.
I think that any mass in orbit is far more valuable there than back on earth. It still has all the energy the owner has paid for by launching it in the first place, and at ~$1000 per kg in LEO that is nothing to sneeze at. I think the solar sails should be used to cart the stuff into a higher orbit where the parts can be stored with less effort.
The problem is that whatever we sent up is not built for reusability it would seem. Without a decent plan to produce something from space junk I guess nobody is going to worry about where the hardware in orbit goes beyond its eol, it has paid for the launch costs already why worry about much costlier manufacturing in orbit. Then it is also safer to just drop the stuff. This proposal is more of the same shortsighted thinking however. We will continuously put stuff into orbit, why let it decay back to earth if there could be a continuous reuse of material in orbit? Something goes up nothing comes down!
The space junk problem could finally lead to better planning for the future. Somebody could come up with an in orbit manufacturing and launch facility which buys the energy + material value of your satellite/booster. Its main bussiness would be in orbit manfacturing and launch of hardware with a certain orbit.
I would venture a guess and say that we already have the technology to make this work today. So it is time to check whether this could become a viable business model.
However, it would be nice if there weren't enough to destroy the world a couple of times over.
I guess this is all based on the idea that total destruction isn't necessary to drive home any political goal a war might have. The sides involved need to understand though that total anihilation means that, and that there is no afterlife or something like another planet you can evacuate to.
Very good. I would like to point the girls to something like www.cuteoverload.com because I like to say "Awwww so cute" together with them and in perfect synchrony. (I only ever sent the link in an email, but I'm working towards it).
Now how do we combine this into a laptop? Maybe add some fur and when it plays the turn on sound, let it play a cat purring or a bunch of girls say "Awwww..." instead of that Ubuntu, Apple, or Windows noise.
Because of specialization and forgetfulness. I used to be good in chemistry, more than 15 years ago. By now Ca just lost an electron and slipped underneath Na.
I wonder whether anyone trying to earn anything trough black hattery will find it easy in those tough times. I'm sure not all parts of the world have been hit equally and so becomming an international criminal could become even more of a necessity for the so inclined. Maybe they should try getting some of that money back from Nigeria.
I also have doubts that SPAM is going be on the upturn and I guess the article already makes clear that people who were smart enough to not make the obvious financial mistakes will be the target, "The reality is we are seeing more sophisticated attacks aimed at sophisticated people."
What I'm wondering is whether it makes any sense for employed people to steal from their employer, sixty percent of all people thought that their colleagues would do that, but that doesn't mean much. They probably were overly pessimistic just to be on the safe side. I mean the real world isn't like Office Space.
In defense of myself I have to say that I hoped that most people would see that we are awefully short of naturally occuring CaOH so my offered solution would be recognized as impractical on the spot.
Ultimately we have to figure out how big the human impact on the planet is allowed to be to sustain humanity and act to reduce it if necessary (probably very much so).
I suppose a cautious approach to what the planet can stand should be taken in the meantime. Our actions so far sould be seen as an experiment too and people should be ready to learn from it just as much as from the experiment mentioned in the article (Its too little too late I would say).
So I wouldn't automatically say that the ocean fertilization experiment is only pandering to the anti global warming people because it would cure the symptoms and not the cause and potentially allow them to continue in their rut. It could have been a good tool to store some parts of CO2 and on top of that reduction of carbon emissions will still be necessary. I can see that the outcome of the experiment is helpful to green politicians but to prevent any immediate disaster, the hacks like you called them might turn out to be ugly but helpful.
I love this solution too. I must wonder though whether future generations will be able to just let the trees stand, we can't trust ourselfs really, how can we trust future generations? All the other solutions regarding carbon sequestration hide the stuff somewhere. This ocean based solution is no different.
There are other positive aspects to having forests around. They affect the local climate by transpiration and they also, because of their dark color, convert sunlight into hot air essentially. The upwelling hot air can cause rainfall downstream enabling the forest to grow furter.
There is a book called "Vegetation Climate Interaction" wich explains this effect much better.
People have also argued for the use of perennial plants and agroforestry which would help to reduce soil erosion and herbicide use. While this would fit nicely with your 10 trees per person it seems questionable to me whether perennials can become as productive as annuals and whether we will be able to live a lazy non agrarian lifestyle as we currently do.
To continue this path, what happens to the dissolved CO2 at those depths:
"Another process, called "the biological pump," transfers CO2 from the ocean's surface to its depths. Warm waters at the surface can hold much less CO2 than can cold waters in the deep. "This is the 'soda bottle on a warm day' effect," says Agassiz professor of biological oceanography James McCarthy, "and is not unique to carbon dioxide; it applies to all gases dissolved in water. There is a higher capacity to hold a gas with a lower temperature than with a higher temperature." This means that when deep ocean waters rise to the surface as part of normal ocean-circulation patterns, the water heats up and actually releases CO2."
From personal experience I would like to say that German schools don't overvalue sports even though there have been sports teachers which were annoying when I was at school. I remember one of those idiots who thought sport is the most important subject in life - yuck. While this might almost sound like the sports teacher out of "Nothing New on the Western Front" I have to say that I remember no one being that bad. Finally, if you want to actually be good at a sport you have to join a club anyway, so worrying about sport in school is pointless.
I joined a gun club while I was in school ('91ish). It was great fun, I was around 17 and nobody had ever heard of school schootings. I was even able to talk a chemistry teacher into joining the club too I think, at least he came along once.
To answer your question about external results being mentioned in school, they weren't. Which is no surprise, since shooting with anything larger than.22 isn't really advertised as a sport over here, and this wasn't enough fun for me. So I only had the gun club members to make me feel that I'm good at some sport which was great (I never thought about it that way but since you asked...). There are some sports you can excel in as kid and be even better than grownups if you spend enough time doing it. Rock climbing is one supposedly and shooting can be too if the other guys just started and that did it for me.
I always thought that the extra responsibility I had while dealing with guns was something not to be thrown away under any circumstances. Especially since my part of Germany had only gained this particular freedom in '89 and politics wasn't in favour of private gun ownership even back then (clueless whining ants exist at all times it seems).
I soon found out though that not everybody felt like that. When I was in the army I had one incident while at watch, where one fellow soldier just took of with a gun not to return again. I told two more guys to check where he might be. Interestingly they told me that they felt very unsafe because the other guy was under some pressure for all kinds of reasons. His comrades seemed to be part of his problems too somehow. Anyway, they poked their noses outside and couldn't find him, so we asked somebody else for help and the problem got resolved without any shots being fired or loss of life (Very nice!). This turned out reasonably well even for the guy who took the gun. From that experience it seems to me that some people can be prone to blowups if they get a gun. This is an anecdote of course, but it showed that I can't just assume that other people think the way I do. That should be obvious, but this sort of event drives the point home.
I have to say that the relationship among people in school was pretty good at the time. During the army I had far worse problems with bullying mainly from my comrades while our officers behaved rather decent.
Regarding all the other activities you mentioned, I have never had a spelling bee competition (I do admire american kids for their skills though, I just remember that one time on NPR) probably because german spelling isn't that difficult, all the other things existed.
I ask that question because you will probably feel some pressure from them to write code they can understand. This might become an issue especially with C++ where templates can add a level of complexity they might not be willing to take on.
I mainly program embedded C so this is not an issue for me, but heard of projects where people were reluctant to use more arcane features of C++.
So if you want to go deep you can go really deep with C++. People have written Lisp interpreters on top of the template system, so go and knock yourselfs out.
However, you will not only have to provide lessons and tutorials to your colleagues but you will also have the problem of missing portability between compilers. You can even have this problem with C if you use the GNU extensions of gcc and have to port your code to some other compiler.
It seems that your programming language portfolio is C heavy. I have often found it useful to combine my C code with some other language, i.e. write the signal processing part in C/Assembly and the GUI for the demo in TCL/TK, Matlab or Scilab.
This combination of fast C code and easy to use interpreter might be something you want to play with occasionally. My current combination is C and Guile. I hope I can stick to Scheme/Lisp somehow because there are a lot of options for scheme interpreters around. I remember compiling tinyscheme for a TigerSHARC, so it definitely is portable.
To sum it up, go as deep as you want but keep in mind that other people/compilers have to translate your code. Also find out whether there are languages that can make a part of your job much easier than the ones you already know.
You seem to be taking my ramblings way too serious. Let me tell you that I consider lateralscience.co.uk to be arm chair chemistry for entertainment purposes only. The freedom over safety statement the original poster came up with wasn't meant to mean total lack of safety and disregard of human life/health. I just couldn't help it though, and had to make fun of it.
All that being said, fluorine has at least been considered as an oxidizer.
Besides, I'm sure if those young whippersnappers hadn't hurried the old guy along like that he could have fit a decent story between the ferry to Shelbyville and big yellow onions.
Slashdot Mirror
So she will now pay sqrt(-1)*$1920000 ?
I just made a similar remark as you did so short while ago. Mostly calcium hydroxide is produced from lime stone by splitting off carbon dioxide at high temperatures. Your carbon footprint would just be huge in other words. I also never took my comment to be serious.
Interestingly people seem to think that more carbonic acid in the water dissolves calcium carbonate in the shells of marine creatures. The mechanism is not really obvious to me from what I learn't in chemistry class but who knows. It might have something to do with the fact that calcium carbonate dissolves into a solution with a ph higher than 7 and therefore there is some pressure for the calcium ions towards staying in a more acid solution as opposed to some shell.
Actually the wikipedia entry explains that much better:
" 3) As ambient CO2 partial pressure increases to levels above atmospheric, pH drops, and much of the carbonate ion is converted to bicarbonate ion, which results in higher solubility of Ca2+."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calcium_carbonate
You got off with a funny, just imagine somebody would have taken you serious.
Not that I like debugging but I just love ddd's data display functionality. There are a few missing features, i.e. I would like to access memory behind a pointer from the data display, but on the whole I love its ability to essentially document structures like lists and trees.
Oddly enough the array index bug didn't cause any trouble on my side. Here is my attempt in C where I try to do the thinking for the compiler:
.p2align 4,,10
.p2align 3
#include <stdio.h>
#include <math.h>
double mpi=3.141592653589793238462/1.024;
int main(void){
int i,j;
double r_re[10240];
double r_im[10240];
for(j=10;j<=110;j++){
for(i=0;i<5119;i++){
double rt=sqrt(mpi*(5119-i)*j);
r_im[i]=rt;
r_re[i]=0.0;
r_re[5119+5119-i]=rt;
r_im[5119+5119-i]=0.0;
}
r_im[5119]=0.0;
r_re[5119]=0.0;
r_im[10239]=0.0;
r_re[10239]=sqrt(mpi*5120*j);
for(i=-5119;i<=5120;i++)
printf("(%f, %f)\n", r_re[i+5119], r_im[i+5119]);
}
return 0;
}
Using unsafe math will get rid of the function calls to sqrt the compiler will still be making otherwise.
The above code is a decent trade off between not expending too much effort and getting reasonable performance I think. I have some more ideas but they won't make the thing any easier to understand and program.
Squeaky clean, eh?
...
.L2:
cvtsi2sd -163860(%ebp), %xmm1
xorl %edx, %edx
mulsd mpi, %xmm1
movl $5119, %eax
.L3:
cvtsi2sd %eax, %xmm0
movl $0, (%esi,%edx,8)
movl $0, 4(%esi,%edx,8)
mulsd %xmm1, %xmm0
sqrtsd %xmm0, %xmm0
movsd %xmm0, (%edi,%edx,8)
movsd %xmm0, 40952(%esi,%eax,8)
movl $0, 40952(%edi,%eax,8)
movl $0, 40956(%edi,%eax,8)
incl %edx
decl %eax
cmpl $5119, %edx
jne .L3
mulsd .LC1, %xmm1
movl $0, -122904(%ebp)
sqrtsd %xmm1, %xmm0
movl $0, -122900(%ebp)
movl $0, -40984(%ebp)
movl $0, -40980(%ebp)
movl $0, -81944(%ebp)
movl $0, -81940(%ebp)
movsd %xmm0, -24(%ebp)
...
With:
gcc -O3 -mfpmath=sse -march=core2 -funsafe-loop-optimizations -ffast-math -funsafe-math-optimizations -fassociative-math -freciprocal-math test_slashdot.c -S -o test_slashdot4.s -lm
(former Gentoo user at play)
Hard to say, the start of fort.10 (od -t x8 fort.10|less)
.p2align 4,,10
.p2align 3 ;that wasn't necessary .L6 :
looks like the following:
0000000 0000000000028000 00000000fff80000
0000020 0000000000000000 00000000fff80000
*
0237760 0000000000000000 0000000000000000
0240000 d1432f7a00000000 000000003fc66b82
I compiled with:
gfortran-4.3 -O3 -march=core2 -mfpmath=sse test.f -o test_slashdot
Also I found out that sqrt(-x)=i*sqrt(x). You would only have to calculate a subset of the 100x10240 data points, does the compiler do that? It doesn't seem so.
I'm wondering whether C++ does this sort of thing too, it supposedly has a complex data type.
It does have a complex data type but also uses a function call:
...
cvtsi2sd -164164(%ebp), %xmm0
leal -246012(%ebp), %ebx
movsd %xmm0, -164160(%ebp)
movl $-5119, %edi
movsd mpi, %xmm0
movsd %xmm0, -164176(%ebp)
.L6:
cvtsi2sd %edi, %xmm0
leal -164144(%ebp), %eax
mulsd -164176(%ebp), %xmm0
incl %edi
mulsd -164160(%ebp), %xmm0
movl $0, 12(%esp)
movsd %xmm0, 4(%esp)
movl $0, 16(%esp)
movl %eax, (%esp)
call csqrt
movsd -164144(%ebp), %xmm1
movsd -164136(%ebp), %xmm0
subl $4, %esp
movsd %xmm0, (%ebx)
movsd %xmm1, -8(%ebx)
addl $16, %ebx
cmpl $5121, %edi
jne
...
Here is the code:
#include <iostream>
#include <complex>
#include <cmath>
using namespace std;
double mpi=3.141592653589793238462/1.024;
int main(void){
int i,j;
for(j=10;j<=110;j++){
complex<double> r[10240];
for(i=-5119;i<=5120;i++){
complex<double> in(mpi*i*j,0);
r[i]=sqrt(in);
}
for(i=-5119;i<=5120;i++) cout << r[i] <<endl;
}
return 0;
}
Here is a part of the output around i=0
...
(0,9.59369)
(0,7.83321)
(0,5.53892)
(0,0)
(5.53892,0)
(7.83321,0)
(9.59369,0)
...
I compiled with:
g++ -O3 -mfpmath=sse -march=core2 test_slashdot.c -o test_slashdot3 -lm
So I would say that Fortran has the chance of better understanding what you
want of it but it only goes half way because like C++ it doesn't recognize the repeated operations.
You could set out and do it all by hand in C and get a better performance, but if you want to spend equal effort Fortran looks pretty good.
I have this suspicion, that the floating point nature of the data causes the compiler to throw out the possibility of just moving the positive sqrt into the imaginary part of r, but my tests couldn't find any appropriate optimization settings.
Too sad that I have to read intel assembler again. Fortunately there is sse now.
.p2align 4,,10
.p2align 3
.L4:
cvtsi2sd %esi, %xmm1
movl $-5119, %edx
.L2:
cvtsi2sd %edx, %xmm0
movl %edx, %eax
mulsd %xmm3, %xmm0
sall $4, %eax
mulsd %xmm1, %xmm0
incl %edx
sqrtsd %xmm0, %xmm0
cmpl $5121, %edx
movsd %xmm0, r.917+81904(%eax)
movsd %xmm2, 8(%ebx,%eax)
jne .L2
...
Aww, I can't be bothered, but that there is only one sqrt surprises me much. I wouldn't know how to do it without some time thinking about it, but I expect C to require a major effort to get something similar going.
Here is an example for canned beer:
http://einestages.spiegel.de/external/ShowTopicAlbumBackground/a1876/l20/l0/F.html#featuredEntry
Supposedly we had a surcharge on cans which drove them off the market until 2006 when they changed the law again. I don't buy beer frequently, so I really have no clue about our beer market. Maybe I should check whether I can find any plastic beer bottles.
Nothing beats the taste of alcohol and plastic, eh?
I've never seen this in Germany though, its only glass for me.
There are some in aluminium cans though, and they also taste like crap.
Grass is not good for you (apart from some exceptions) - you aren't a cow.
The idea is to drive out the grass with so called "weeds" like
(shouldn't be a problem in a temperate climate):
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Urtica+dioica
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Aegopodium+podagraria
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Taraxacum+officinale
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Bellis+perennis
http://www.pfaf.org/database/plants.php?Rumex+acetosa
I have tried some but don't live on them. If you do, you might end up looking like some scrawny vegan or like some of those people who lived through the Irish famine, or if you focus too much on it, not live at all (this is just CYA for the nutcases).
This is actually interesting. Would the aforementioned plants allow you to survive better than plain old grasses?
Now I noticed, you have goats and live in mostly dry Mediterranean California, that is a different story all together.
Besides, you have to look after the goats while you could be programming. Ok, a goat herder with a laptop and the dog doing the work, this may be a plan.
I made a silly mistake about calculating the cost to orbit, it had something to do with converting between pounds and kilograms. I assumed $2000/pound through a russian launch (my source: www.futron.com/pdf/resource_center/white_papers/FutronLaunchCostWP.pdf).
I agree with you that looking only at the energy would be too narrow a focus. Launch costs include ground operations and other things whereas the launcher itself isn't even the biggest part of the costs.
One could use different technologies once in orbit. It might only take an ion engine to get from the junkyard/manufacturing orbit to LEO or geostationary orbit. It still would take fuel but if you focus more on increasing exhaust velocity than differential mass the powerplant mass you have to produce/collect/bring up from earth is the part you have to worry more about. A solar sail might require even less materials to be brought up from earth.
Regarding your last point, I'm wondering how the space junk is distributed. Most LEO space junk is probably not so much of a problem because it will come down by itself. I just think that careful space junk management in some further out orbit which is not frequently used might be only a bit more expensive than dropping junk into the athmosphere. We are not doing it yet so why not consider it. A junk yard is probably a more manageable thing too. If junk is securely clustered together it is easier to maintain its position until we are actually able to use it for something else. So I don't suggest we just leave things as they are and wait until the perfect solution comes along but to work towards a better solution which might save us a number of launches later.
What might ultimately bring the junk yard idea down is shrinking launch costs and this is something which is seen as the main goal nowadays. The reason I find junk collection/manufacturing in orbit great is that it could ultimately lead to people living and working in space as opposed to only running a research station which requires more terrestrial intervention. It would be a step towards a human pressence in space whereas just dropping the junk means cementing the status quo - space bussiness is for satellites.
I think that any mass in orbit is far more valuable there than back on earth. It still has all the energy the owner has paid for by launching it in the first place, and at ~$1000 per kg in LEO that is nothing to sneeze at. I think the solar sails should be used to cart the stuff into a higher orbit where the parts can be stored with less effort.
The problem is that whatever we sent up is not built for reusability it would seem. Without a decent plan to produce something from space junk I guess nobody is going to worry about where the hardware in orbit goes beyond its eol, it has paid for the launch costs already why worry about much costlier manufacturing in orbit. Then it is also safer to just drop the stuff. This proposal is more of the same shortsighted thinking however. We will continuously put stuff into orbit, why let it decay back to earth if there could be a continuous reuse of material in orbit? Something goes up nothing comes down!
The space junk problem could finally lead to better planning for the future. Somebody could come up with an in orbit manufacturing and launch facility which buys the energy + material value of your satellite/booster. Its main bussiness would be in orbit manfacturing and launch of hardware with a certain orbit.
I would venture a guess and say that we already have the technology to make this work today. So it is time to check whether this could become a viable business model.
However, it would be nice if there weren't enough to destroy the world a couple of times over.
I guess this is all based on the idea that total destruction isn't necessary to drive home any political goal a war might have. The sides involved need to understand though that total anihilation means that, and that there is no afterlife or something like another planet you can evacuate to.
I can just hear Curnow yelling "its shrinking, its shrinking"
Very good. I would like to point the girls to something like www.cuteoverload.com because I like to say "Awwww so cute" together with them and in perfect synchrony. (I only ever sent the link in an email, but I'm working towards it).
Now how do we combine this into a laptop? Maybe add some fur and when it plays the turn on sound, let it play a cat purring or a bunch of girls say "Awwww..." instead of that Ubuntu, Apple, or Windows noise.
Why ?
Because of specialization and forgetfulness. I used to be good in chemistry, more than 15 years ago. By now Ca just lost an electron and slipped underneath Na.
I wonder whether anyone trying to earn anything trough black hattery will find it easy in those tough times. I'm sure not all parts of the world have been hit equally and so becomming an international criminal could become even more of a necessity for the so inclined. Maybe they should try getting some of that money back from Nigeria.
I also have doubts that SPAM is going be on the upturn and I guess the article already makes clear that people who were smart enough to not make the obvious financial mistakes will be the target, "The reality is we are seeing more sophisticated attacks aimed at sophisticated people."
What I'm wondering is whether it makes any sense for employed people to steal from their employer, sixty percent of all people thought that their colleagues would do that, but that doesn't mean much. They probably were overly pessimistic just to be on the safe side. I mean the real world isn't like Office Space.
In defense of myself I have to say that I hoped that most people would see that we are awefully short of naturally occuring CaOH so my offered solution would be recognized as impractical on the spot.
Ultimately we have to figure out how big the human impact on the planet is allowed to be to sustain humanity and act to reduce it if necessary (probably very much so).
I suppose a cautious approach to what the planet can stand should be taken in the meantime. Our actions so far sould be seen as an experiment too and people should be ready to learn from it just as much as from the experiment mentioned in the article (Its too little too late I would say).
So I wouldn't automatically say that the ocean fertilization experiment is only pandering to the anti global warming people because it would cure the symptoms and not the cause and potentially allow them to continue in their rut. It could have been a good tool to store some parts of CO2 and on top of that reduction of carbon emissions will still be necessary. I can see that the outcome of the experiment is helpful to green politicians but to prevent any immediate disaster, the hacks like you called them might turn out to be ugly but helpful.
I love this solution too. I must wonder though whether future generations will be able to just let the trees stand, we can't trust ourselfs really, how can we trust future generations? All the other solutions regarding carbon sequestration hide the stuff somewhere. This ocean based solution is no different.
There are other positive aspects to having forests around. They affect the local climate by transpiration and they also, because of their dark color, convert sunlight into hot air essentially. The upwelling hot air can cause rainfall downstream enabling the forest to grow furter.
There is a book called "Vegetation Climate Interaction" wich explains this effect much better.
I wonder whether the ocean would be such a great storage medium. Even if the experiment had worked
the oceans are much less productive ecosystems than land (see "Food, Energy, and Society", Pimentel,..., this is even better http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/N/NetProductivity.html ).
People have also argued for the use of perennial plants and agroforestry which would help to reduce soil erosion and herbicide use. While this would fit nicely with your 10 trees per person it seems questionable to me whether perennials can become as productive as annuals and whether we will be able to live a lazy non agrarian lifestyle as we currently do.
>Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
And then there is newegg spam.
To continue this path, what happens to the dissolved CO2 at those depths:
"Another process, called "the biological pump," transfers CO2 from the ocean's surface to its depths. Warm waters at the surface can hold much less CO2 than can cold waters in the deep. "This is the 'soda bottle on a warm day' effect," says Agassiz professor of biological oceanography James McCarthy, "and is not unique to carbon dioxide; it applies to all gases dissolved in water. There is a higher capacity to hold a gas with a lower temperature than with a higher temperature." This means that when deep ocean waters rise to the surface as part of normal ocean-circulation patterns, the water heats up and actually releases CO2."
from here,
http://harvardmagazine.com/2002/11/the-ocean-carbon-cycle.html
So this is a temporary storage solution and the fertilizer might speed up the process but the CO2 is at best dissolved it seems.
I guess CO2 storage could be really helped by dumping CaOH or something like that into the ocean just where this should come from I wonder.
From personal experience I would like to say that German schools don't overvalue sports even though there have been sports teachers which were annoying when I was at school. I remember one of those idiots who thought sport is the most important subject in life - yuck. While this might almost sound like the sports teacher out of "Nothing New on the Western Front" I have to say that I remember no one being that bad. Finally, if you want to actually be good at a sport you have to join a club anyway, so worrying about sport in school is pointless.
I joined a gun club while I was in school ('91ish). It was great fun, I was around 17 and nobody had ever heard of school schootings. I was even able to talk a chemistry teacher into joining the club too I think, at least he came along once.
To answer your question about external results being mentioned in school, they weren't. Which is no surprise, since shooting with anything larger than .22 isn't really advertised as a sport over here, and this wasn't enough fun for me. So I only had the gun club members to make me feel that I'm good at some sport which was great (I never thought about it that way but since you asked...). There are some sports you can excel in as kid and be even better than grownups if you spend enough time doing it. Rock climbing is one supposedly and shooting can be too if the other guys just started and that did it for me.
I always thought that the extra responsibility I had while dealing with guns was something not to be thrown away under any circumstances. Especially since my part of Germany had only gained this particular freedom in '89 and politics wasn't in favour of private gun ownership even back then (clueless whining ants exist at all times it seems).
I soon found out though that not everybody felt like that. When I was in the army I had one incident while at watch, where one fellow soldier just took of with a gun not to return again. I told two more guys to check where he might be. Interestingly they told me that they felt very unsafe because the other guy was under some pressure for all kinds of reasons. His comrades seemed to be part of his problems too somehow.
Anyway, they poked their noses outside and couldn't find him, so we asked somebody else for help and the problem got resolved without any shots being fired or loss of life (Very nice!). This turned out reasonably well even for the guy who took the gun. From that experience it seems to me that some people can be prone to blowups if they get a gun. This is an anecdote of course, but it showed that I can't just assume that other people think the way I do. That should be obvious, but this sort of event drives the point home.
I have to say that the relationship among people in school was pretty good at the time. During the army I had far worse problems with bullying mainly from my comrades while our officers behaved rather decent.
Regarding all the other activities you mentioned, I have never had a spelling bee competition (I do admire american kids for their skills though, I just remember that one time on NPR) probably because german spelling isn't that difficult, all the other things existed.
I ask that question because you will probably feel some pressure from them to write code they can understand. This might become an issue especially with C++ where templates can add a level of complexity they might not be willing to take on.
I mainly program embedded C so this is not an issue for me, but heard of projects where people were reluctant to use more arcane features of C++.
So if you want to go deep you can go really deep with C++. People have written Lisp interpreters on top of the template system, so go and knock yourselfs out.
However, you will not only have to provide lessons and tutorials to your colleagues but you will also have the problem of missing portability between compilers. You can even have this problem with C if you use the GNU extensions of gcc and have to port your code to some other compiler.
It seems that your programming language portfolio
is C heavy. I have often found it useful to combine my C code with some other language, i.e. write the signal processing part in C/Assembly and the GUI for the demo in TCL/TK, Matlab or Scilab.
This combination of fast C code and easy to use interpreter might be something you want to play with occasionally. My current combination is C and Guile. I hope I can stick to Scheme/Lisp somehow because there are a lot of options for scheme interpreters around. I remember compiling tinyscheme for a TigerSHARC, so it definitely is portable.
To sum it up, go as deep as you want but keep in mind that other people/compilers have to translate your code. Also find out whether there are languages that can make a part of your job much easier than the ones you already know.
You seem to be taking my ramblings way too serious. Let me tell you that I consider lateralscience.co.uk to be arm chair chemistry for entertainment purposes only. The freedom over safety statement the original poster came up with wasn't meant to mean total lack of safety and disregard of human life/health. I just couldn't help it though, and had to make fun of it.
All that being said, fluorine has at least been considered as an oxidizer.
http://www.friends-partners.org/partners/mwade/props/floosene.htm
I'm really curious whether people actually test fired it.
Well at 30+ I suppose I'm getting old.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/mar/17/age-mental-health
Besides, I'm sure if those young whippersnappers hadn't hurried the old guy along like that he could have fit a decent story between the ferry to Shelbyville and big yellow onions.