I'm amazed at how people love to attribute the worst possible motives to oil companies, investment fund managers with big stakes in petroleum, etc. with billions at stake, but refuse to notice that industrialized societies generally depend on fossil fuels to cover ~80% of their energy budget (yes you too).
This is the big joke really, no one could without drastic changes in life style on a large scale really change that fact. (Jimmy Carter could serve as example how politicians fare who give you sweaters instead of oil (and he did give you oil eventually). But yes honesty is a good topic and the lies are so thick, a life worth of examination wouldn't be enough to get rid of them.
If DOOM happened and say 1billion died, only one in 7 would be gone. Would you even notice it all that much? I mean even some big event taking a billion of people away would be a major catastrophe and yet we could go on without noticing the real impact. (Seeing piles of dead people in the news isn't real impact). With a little bit of doom you could still justify your view - remarkable.
Yeah, I have often thought "hey, I could snap some pictures of you where the SNR is way higher", then I remembered when I spent some time with the grainier girls, that they might not have been up for the job, so they shouldn't have such a high throughput of guests anyway.
I think my hungry look is gone (after a thorough study of prostitutes of all legal and sensible ages (ok, there are some gaps)). Also I tend to talk about plants now which some think of as decidedly girlish topic. This is way better than computers that nobody understands anyway. Of course, most people don't really understand plants either, but at least they are plentiful, pretty, and frequently edible, so they make a nice topic. It is also a better topic than talking about the weather since that has got a bad reputation.
That fishing vessel worker stereotype is way better than the living in moms basement one. It is also older, better known, and understood - Applause!
The country I'm living in doesn't prohibit prostitution, it just regulates it. So I had the chance to talk to some of the women off and on the job without much stress.
They told me that 90% of their customers seem to be married, which might come as a surprise for some women who start in the job.
Sometimes their partners seem ok with their hobby/job, sometimes the girls look for other kinds of employment because they acquired a partner.
This is mostly anecdotal information. There is a cool website in German called sexworker.at that might have some hard information though. No clue whether there is an english language website. Sexworkers in the US seem to be mainly represented by Annie Sprinkle and whatever she is doing but I might err.
See now that I can understand, your first article was kinda vague. Actually, I just wanted to fool around. Obviously I needed to peddle my favourite topic as well. I don't imply you want to control anyone.
I tried to offer you an extreme example about why what you might consider as good may not actually be that. I mean I too want to help occasionally.
The HAL2000 line in the end was added for comic relief, i.e. the mad computer has spoken.
Why its simple, if they have declined enough to not be able to read them they don't need them and no damage is done. If they can read it they won't do anything the like until they decline far enough to not be able to read them eventually.
The guide stones are a curiosity to occupy idle minds, nothing more. But they are most assuredly ineffectual like all the other information along these lines, i.e. the stuff that came out of the Club of Rome. Nobody ever cared, no matter how sensible caring might have seemed at any time.
The interesting part is in the middle, but you have enough time to watch it all. You see, there is no such thing as free will as long as it goes against the biological imperative which is survival (now, not later).
There is one particularly good piece in the reviews:
"What is really terrific about this book is the fact that it incorporates so many different voices, giving varying perspectives on the question. Too often people know about one aspect of the sex industry and make assumptions that they understand everything that there is to understand about it; this book gives enough perspectives to discourage -- though obviously not eliminate -- that assumption."
I noticed that some topics (guns, prostitution,...) are discussed by society through the same narrow view over and over. Once you check the topic out, you will find that they are still not easy to deal with, and that the people actually involved have quite a different view on it.
> I've always wanted to leave the world a better place than when I came into it.
So what is the best way of reducing entropy growth?
>Unfortunately, I can't say that I feel that way so my biggest fear is coming true and I'm having to learn to cope with the idea that I cannot fix the injustices of the world.
Now you have to explain exactly why you think that this is such a bad thing. Just imagine we would give you a switch for the sun and you would actually get your way with it. This would be bad! I mean the path to hell is plastered with good intentions.
So just relax, take a stress pill, and think things over.
Your anger comes only from your not thinking this problem through to the end. I can't really guarantee that you won't feel less angry afterward though.
I'm a bit like that chaotic guy too. If my colleagues wouldn't pay attention, naming conventions would go over board, documentation is so so. What I pay attention to is to not make mistakes regarding memory allocation and concurrent programming. Also making sure that loops run beyond array boundaries is important. I also make attempts to think about what happens "else" even if I end up just writing a comment down.
The obvious annoying stuff I leave to my colleagues who are way more anal retentive. What I also noticed is that criticisms rarely probe the depths of complex code so that I'm ultimately the only guy who spends enough time with the code and who will be able to fix issues quickly enough should they arise.
I also noticed that eclipse has this most useful tool where you can go to a declaration of a function or show the call graph. This is really dangerous if your colleagues don't have it since you have much less of a pain when navigating code compared to them. Your code will end up with deeper and possibly more distributed (across files) hierarchies and annoy your colleagues horribly.
I'm now trying to envision a Strudelkugel - man, it's a doughnut! First its a ball shaped object like a Kugel, and then a vortex appears in it, i.e. a Strudel. This creates a hole, ideally a in the midst of it. The result is a torus.
It feels like this is certain. Partly since the ideas you mentioned to circumvent the problem are not really all that workable. Imagine the >2000 nuclear power plants you need to substitute the energy stored in coal, oil, and gas. What will the rate of >=INES6 events be? Remember we still can't eat wild animals in some parts of Germany due to Chernobyl, so much for the backyard.
Then you shouldn't forget that all geological resources need more and more energy to get them out of the ground over time due to declining concentration, so at some point your netto energy always declines to where your society reverts to a simpler state if you can't find anything new and better.
Then you always have the waste problem that you hope the environment will swallow but doesn't - that also affects your netto energy. The problem now with our favourite waste CO2 is that it will stay with us for a long time, look at the following for a good explanation ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsnaXlhctLY ).
Combine this with the fact that we haven't come up with any clean replacement technologies that are put into production in a credible way (renewables in my country support ~2% of electric energy consumption and we seem somewhat committed), it should become apparent that the catastrophic non-linear climate change will hit us right in time when we run out of energy to deal with it.
Also notice that on the psychological level we won't be able to make the right decisions, first of all the effects of CO2 are delayed by around 40 years http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html this will take the otherwise sensible "show me" guys out of the pool of people you can get behind your "do something, anything" agenda. Then as things go down people will fall prey to hyperbolic discounting and say lets use those resources as the danger is far away.
They are under pressure from netto energy decline now and also decide against investing in new and uncertain technologies that will give them less netto energy anyway but could help with things in the future, (this has been called the energy trap http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/, and is more generally mentioned by Denis Meadows while not involving energy), hyperbolic discounting at work again.
Notice that many people have researched the issues, politicians have attempted to deal with the issues in some halfhearted form and gotten nowhere. Also notice that people have no problem to go to war over resource issues and risk loss of live for more oil or gold (the latter being the worst reason). I'm pretty sure that they also have no problem accepting loss of live on a grand scale, but it does have to happen later and maybe stretched out over time and space so we don't notice that much.
Because of that, I'm 100% certain that no action will be taken regarding climate change that will amount to substantial preventative measures. Which is easy to say since way back in the 19th century was the time to plan ahead, and some good insights that could have led to action then, never had any impact.
I would assume that exponential fits best where you have a feedback system. Since less ice leads to possibly more methane, less albedo, and more mixing, those trends will lead to a temperature increase that again will lead to less ice and so on.
This is counteracted by the depletion of ice, the depletion of stored methane, and the reduction of currents due to ocean stratification.
While this could be the obvious and only working way, it would probably limit you to other star systems that are so far, well out of reach.
To transport our industrial society over to the next planet (lets say mars) we need to have access to similar sources of energy as we do here. Notice that those energy sources are not only fossil fuels but also concentrated ores that have been enriched by hydrothermal processes to give an example. Mars had water once, so maybe there is a tiny chance that there are concentrated ores there as well, otherwise mineral deposits are finely distributed like on the moon. Then there are no fossil fuels and no oxygen to burn them with, so we can just forget 80% of our current energy input from fossil fuels on Mars. What is left would be sunlight which would be less energy dense out there than here, and maybe nuclear energy. Given the lack of water as a cooling agent this could be a large challenge.
This moving off planet looks like a story to me that is standing on more and more tenuous ground. Maybe moving to Mercury could make using sunlight a viable proposition, or maybe putting artificial satellites on a highly elliptic orbit to catch sun and resources from the asteroid belt.
This whole idea of settling on other planets seems to imply that we have to develop a whole new industrial base that is adjusted to the energetic possibilities out there. I think if we can adjust to the restrictions of space, we can do it here too. This would even be needed given our overly large ecological foot print. The problem is though that we typically take the easy to get energy source first and we are not done yet with fossil fuels, so we have to survive a little bit longer on earth until we have reached a balance where the energetic conditions down here are as crappy as up there.
Nice, and guess what? No viruses, no silly people who want their Bundespolizei trojan removed, and developers who care about security and understand that you build a secure system first and then connect it to the internet so you don't have to complain afterward that your system is insecure. Also, a wealth of different installations all so not alike that botnets could probably never happen, and a smallish userbase that would make this pointless anyway.
Somehow I'm glad that people like you are working towards keeping it that way. Otherwise we would have to resurrect George Carlin to do our bidding or something, although cloning him might then be necessary too.
Since we as "nerds" are so highly specialized and dependent on industrial society I would expect us to try to hang onto our dreams just that much harder. I mean if you would actually be willing to get rid of the fossil fuel fraction of societies energy input you would probably have only 20% left. The peak oil guys fear exactly that. The people you see here arguing that AGW is fraud are probably in some form of kicking and screaming stage while being dragged towards recognizing the problem. Once you get your head around the problems we are facing you would probably enjoy whats left of the party, instead of arguing with the stragglers. Which is essentially a waste of time, since all the information necessary to make educated policy decisions has been around for ages and has been ignored, so why would you expect more from some basement dwellers.
Slashdot Mirror
a) Yet b) Depends on where you live.
I'm amazed at how people love to attribute the worst possible motives to oil companies, investment fund managers with big stakes in petroleum, etc. with billions at stake, but refuse to notice that industrialized societies generally depend on fossil fuels to cover ~80% of their energy budget (yes you too).
This is the big joke really, no one could without drastic changes in life style on a large scale really change that fact. (Jimmy Carter could serve as example how politicians fare who give you sweaters instead of oil (and he did give you oil eventually). But yes honesty is a good topic and the lies are so thick, a life worth of examination wouldn't be enough to get rid of them.
To sum it up, don't finger point at all.
If DOOM happened and say 1billion died, only one in 7 would be gone. Would you even notice it all that much? I mean even some big event taking a billion of people away would be a major catastrophe and yet we could go on without noticing the real impact. (Seeing piles of dead people in the news isn't real impact). With a little bit of doom you could still justify your view - remarkable.
Yeah, I have often thought "hey, I could snap some pictures of you where the SNR is way higher", then I remembered when I spent some time with the grainier girls, that they might not have been up for the job, so they shouldn't have such a high throughput of guests anyway.
I think my hungry look is gone (after a thorough study of prostitutes of all legal and sensible ages (ok, there are some gaps)). Also I tend to talk about plants now which some think of as decidedly girlish topic. This is way better than computers that nobody understands anyway. Of course, most people don't really understand plants either, but at least they are plentiful, pretty, and frequently edible, so they make a nice topic. It is also a better topic than talking about the weather since that has got a bad reputation.
That fishing vessel worker stereotype is way better than the living in moms basement one. It is also older, better known, and understood - Applause!
The country I'm living in doesn't prohibit prostitution, it just regulates it. So I had the chance to talk to some of the women off and on the job without much stress.
They told me that 90% of their customers seem to be married, which might come as a surprise for some women who start in the job.
Sometimes their partners seem ok with their hobby/job, sometimes the girls look for other kinds of employment because they acquired a partner.
This is mostly anecdotal information. There is a cool website in German called sexworker.at that might have some hard information though. No clue whether there is an english language website. Sexworkers in the US seem to be mainly represented by Annie Sprinkle and whatever she is doing but I might err.
See now that I can understand, your first article was kinda vague.
Actually, I just wanted to fool around. Obviously I needed to peddle my favourite topic as well. I don't imply you want to control anyone.
I tried to offer you an extreme example about why what you might consider as good may not actually be that. I mean I too want to help occasionally.
The HAL2000 line in the end was added for comic relief, i.e. the mad computer has spoken.
Yes, despite the fact that prostitutes might have a clearer view on society than many, they can still fool themselves.
Some of them just have boyfriends/husbands though.
Why its simple, if they have declined enough to not be able to read them they don't need them and no damage is done. If they can read it they won't do anything the like until they decline far enough to not be able to read them eventually.
The guide stones are a curiosity to occupy idle minds, nothing more. But they are most assuredly ineffectual like all the other information along these lines, i.e. the stuff that came out of the Club of Rome. Nobody ever cared, no matter how sensible caring might have seemed at any time.
To wit:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2oyU0RusiA
The interesting part is in the middle, but you have enough time to watch it all. You see, there is no such thing as free will as long as it goes against the biological imperative which is survival (now, not later).
Precisely, nobody needs to no about the delusions of jerks with overbearing egos.
The optimists:
http://longnow.org/
the pessimists:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Abides
the second kind doesn't need any storage of information I would think.
Some might not even call them optimists or pessimists.
There is one particularly good piece in the reviews:
"What is really terrific about this book is the fact that it incorporates so many different voices, giving varying perspectives on the question. Too often people know about one aspect of the sex industry and make assumptions that they understand everything that there is to understand about it; this book gives enough perspectives to discourage -- though obviously not eliminate -- that assumption."
I noticed that some topics (guns, prostitution, ...) are discussed by society through the same narrow view over and over. Once you check the topic out, you will find that they are still not easy to deal with, and that the people actually involved have quite a different view on it.
Yeah, I remember some guys project to run a lisp interpreter based on template magic during compile time.
http://web.archive.org/web/20030204184347/http://www.prakinf.tu-ilmenau.de/~czarn/meta/metalisp.cpp
What do they need an improved c++ standard for, they can do anything with a c++ compiler already.
> I've always wanted to leave the world a better place than when I came into it.
So what is the best way of reducing entropy growth?
>Unfortunately, I can't say that I feel that way so my biggest fear is coming true and I'm having to learn to cope with the idea that I cannot fix the injustices of the world.
Now you have to explain exactly why you think that this is such a bad thing. Just imagine we would give you a switch for the sun and you would actually get your way with it. This would be bad! I mean the path to hell is plastered with good intentions.
So just relax, take a stress pill, and think things over.
http://xkcd.com/1007/
The biggest joke ever, they hardly know what is actually sustainable on earth.
Are you a moss?
Your anger comes only from your not thinking this problem through to the end. I can't really guarantee that you won't feel less angry afterward though.
I'm a bit like that chaotic guy too. If my colleagues wouldn't pay attention, naming conventions would go over board, documentation is so so. What I pay attention to is to not make mistakes regarding memory allocation and concurrent programming. Also making sure that loops run beyond array boundaries is important. I also make attempts to think about what happens "else" even if I end up just writing a comment down.
The obvious annoying stuff I leave to my colleagues who are way more anal retentive. What I also noticed is that criticisms rarely probe the depths of complex code so that I'm ultimately the only guy who spends enough time with the code and who will be able to fix issues quickly enough should they arise.
I also noticed that eclipse has this most useful tool where you can go to a declaration of a function or show the call graph. This is really dangerous if your colleagues don't have it since you have much less of a pain when navigating code compared to them. Your code will end up with deeper and possibly more distributed (across files) hierarchies and annoy your colleagues horribly.
I'm now trying to envision a Strudelkugel - man, it's a doughnut!
First its a ball shaped object like a Kugel, and then a vortex appears in it, i.e. a Strudel. This creates a hole, ideally a in the midst of it. The result is a torus.
I haven't been in the US for a while, I just read an article on gas leaks some time ago.
>Best course -- pray it turns out to have been a big gas leak.
A war on decrepit infrastructure would probably be a good thing.
>Well its all fricking moot anyway isn't it?
It feels like this is certain. Partly since the ideas you mentioned to circumvent the problem are not really all that workable. Imagine the >2000 nuclear power plants you need to substitute the energy stored in coal, oil, and gas. What will the rate of >=INES6 events be? Remember we still can't eat wild animals in some parts of Germany due to Chernobyl, so much for the backyard.
Then you shouldn't forget that all geological resources need more and more energy to get them out of the ground over time due to declining concentration, so at some point your netto energy always declines to where your society reverts to a simpler state if you can't find anything new and better.
Then you always have the waste problem that you hope the environment will swallow but doesn't - that also affects your netto energy.
The problem now with our favourite waste CO2 is that it will stay with us for a long time, look at the following for a good explanation ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CsnaXlhctLY ).
Combine this with the fact that we haven't come up with any clean replacement technologies that are put into production in a credible way (renewables in my country support ~2% of electric energy consumption and we seem somewhat committed), it should become apparent that the catastrophic non-linear climate change will hit us right in time when we run out of energy to deal with it.
Also notice that on the psychological level we won't be able to make the right decisions, first of all the effects of CO2 are delayed by around 40 years http://www.skepticalscience.com/Climate-Change-The-40-Year-Delay-Between-Cause-and-Effect.html this will take the otherwise sensible "show me" guys out of the pool of people you can get behind your "do something, anything" agenda. Then as things go down people will fall prey to hyperbolic discounting and say lets use those resources as the danger is far away.
They are under pressure from netto energy decline now and also decide against investing in new and uncertain technologies that will give them less netto energy anyway but could help with things in the future, (this has been called the energy trap http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/10/the-energy-trap/, and is more generally mentioned by Denis Meadows while not involving energy), hyperbolic discounting at work again.
Notice that many people have researched the issues, politicians have attempted to deal with the issues in some halfhearted form and gotten nowhere. Also notice that people have no problem to go to war over resource issues and risk loss of live for more oil or gold (the latter being the worst reason). I'm pretty sure that they also have no problem accepting loss of live on a grand scale, but it does have to happen later and maybe stretched out over time and space so we don't notice that much.
Because of that, I'm 100% certain that no action will be taken regarding climate change that will amount to substantial preventative measures. Which is easy to say since way back in the 19th century was the time to plan ahead, and some good insights that could have led to action then, never had any impact.
I would assume that exponential fits best where you have a feedback system. Since less ice leads to possibly more methane, less albedo, and more mixing, those trends will lead to a temperature increase that again will lead to less ice and so on.
This is counteracted by the depletion of ice, the depletion of stored methane, and the reduction of currents due to ocean stratification.
This my naive understanding, ask climatologists and you get more feedbacks and interactions. Here is a link:
http://arctic-news.blogspot.de/2012/08/diagram-of-doom.html
While this could be the obvious and only working way, it would probably limit you to other star systems that are so far, well out of reach.
To transport our industrial society over to the next planet (lets say mars) we need to have access to similar sources of energy as we do here. Notice that those energy sources are not only fossil fuels but also concentrated ores that have been enriched by hydrothermal processes to give an example. Mars had water once, so maybe there is a tiny chance that there are concentrated ores there as well, otherwise mineral deposits are finely distributed like on the moon. Then there are no fossil fuels and no oxygen to burn them with, so we can just forget 80% of our current energy input from fossil fuels on Mars. What is left would be sunlight which would be less energy dense out there than here, and maybe nuclear energy. Given the lack of water as a cooling agent this could be a large challenge.
This moving off planet looks like a story to me that is standing on more and more tenuous ground. Maybe moving to Mercury could make using sunlight a viable proposition, or maybe putting artificial satellites on a highly elliptic orbit to catch sun and resources from the asteroid belt.
This whole idea of settling on other planets seems to imply that we have to develop a whole new industrial base that is adjusted to the energetic possibilities out there. I think if we can adjust to the restrictions of space, we can do it here too. This would even be needed given our overly large ecological foot print. The problem is though that we typically take the easy to get energy source first and we are not done yet with fossil fuels, so we have to survive a little bit longer on earth until we have reached a balance where the energetic conditions down here are as crappy as up there.
Nice, and guess what? No viruses, no silly people who want their Bundespolizei trojan removed, and developers who care about security and understand that you build a secure system first and then connect it to the internet so you don't have to complain afterward that your system is insecure. Also, a wealth of different installations all so not alike that botnets could probably never happen, and a smallish userbase that would make this pointless anyway.
Somehow I'm glad that people like you are working towards keeping it that way. Otherwise we would have to resurrect George Carlin to do our bidding or something, although cloning him might then be necessary too.
Since we as "nerds" are so highly specialized and dependent on industrial society I would expect us to try to hang onto our dreams just that much harder. I mean if you would actually be willing to get rid of the fossil fuel fraction of societies energy input you would probably have only 20% left. The peak oil guys fear exactly that. The people you see here arguing that AGW is fraud are probably in some form of kicking and screaming stage while being dragged towards recognizing the problem. Once you get your head around the problems we are facing you would probably enjoy whats left of the party, instead of arguing with the stragglers. Which is essentially a waste of time, since all the information necessary to make educated policy decisions has been around for ages and has been ignored, so why would you expect more from some basement dwellers.