OK, the linked article is rubbish. But in fact you can send quite a lot of information using one photon provided the sender and receiver can resolve its frequency to the necessary degree and the available bandwidth is sufficient. If you have a channel with a bandwidth of, say, 10 MHz, and you can resolve the frequency of a single photon to 1 kHz, then in theory each photon can be assigned to one of 5000 bands each 2 kHz wide, i.e. it can store approx. 12 bits.
How you do this, of course, is left as an exercise for the reader. When a photon is detected it ceases to exist - which means you have to arrange for a method of detection which infallibly records its energy in the one chance you get.
I can't find links to the original papers at short notice (sorry) but I believe it is well established that there is a correlation between longevity and socio-economic status as well as educational attainment. On average PhDs live longer than people with Masters who live longer than people with first degrees - and so it goes. I believe it has been demonstrated that there is a correlation between longevity and where you live on two particular subway lines, one in London and one in New York, which move between zones of higher and lower socioeconomic status.
Of course correlation does not prove causation, but in these cases it would be astonishing if there were not causative factors at work. People with higher education are more likely to be aware of the factors that influence their health, and take steps to improve them. That's more likely to be true of reflective, thoughtful people who have higher degrees rather than, say, working people who are economically successful (and may well look down on what they see as book learning.) People with higher socioeconomic status have better access to healthcare - even in countries with supposedly inclusive systems.
The one thing we don't get from the New Testament is Jesus' tone of voice. It would be really good to know _how_ he made his remark about those who had not losing all they had, and more being given to those who had a lot to start with. Acceptance of a statement of fact? Sarcasm about the way we organise society? Anger? Or did he think it was a good thing?
Wasn't actually Luddite. It was written in a day when powered vehicles on the road were heavy agricultural machines that caused road damage, gave off sparks and smoke and frightened horses badly. In the UK, with many narrow roads, this was far more of an issue than in France, which is a much emptier country.
When gasoline powered road vehicles started to appear in larger numbers, and agricultural machinery became more portable, the Act was repealed.
Unfortunately scientists are just like that. They often build up almost religious reverence for their pet theories. Look at the current debate over String Theory, and the arguments that it has become a religion (no testable conclusions and you may find it hard to get a job researching fundamental physics if you disbelieve it.) An earlier version, probably before your time, was the steady state versus the big bang theory issue.
I've worked with scientists, I have, God help me, tried to manage scientists, and its just like anything else; without a significant evangelistic tendency, scientists lack a major incentive to make progress.
However this may not be true in this case. People often write carelessly in blogs (I look back over some of my own postings and keep getting the urge to hide in a hole somewhere in Bhutan) and it is possible that what she actually meant was just something like "the scientific studies behind claims of global warming."
There is, however, definitely a case for any professional who has to present data to non-specialists - whether it be MDs, scientists or accountants - to require evidence of ongoing training in their field to retain certification. If that's what she is saying, I agree completely.
The blog cited is in such extreme form that I wonder how much truth there is in the story. It looks like someone has set up this Heidi Cullen as a straw person to claim massive discrimination against anti-Global warming advocates. The blog gets more and more extreme as it goes on until Godwin's Law is invoked. I wonder what Cullen really said, in what context.
I think you should name and shame an MP who is clearly not fit to represent a constituency in any century after the 18th.
It's sad, John Butcher died a week or so ago at the age of 60. There was an MP, one of very few, who understood technology and its importance, and even tried to explain why manufacturing was important to Mrs. Thatcher - and he was in the same party. (He was chairman of Texas Instruments UK at one point, I think.) He left Parliament in 1997, which was a pity.
Do you really want to live in a concrete house in the English climate? Concrete is good for tropical and warm climates where rainfall is not too high, but in the UK where humidity is high most of the year it is a recipe for damp and mould. And, as the formet Soviet Union showed us, it does not make for a particularly attractive architecture. Fine in Ca., where there is room to build and spread, but in the UK most new build is tiny terraced boxes. Think Soviet-era brutalistic apartment blocks, because that is what you will most likely get.
In the UK, there is usually a bloody good reason for the traditional building materials and designs in any area. Mass builders just drop standardised buildings at any angle to the weather which suits them, and then the owners wonder why the walls are always wet, or tiles fall off every time the prevailing wind blows.
The five year gap before it is due to be commercialised in the UK may be due to the development needed to address UK-specific building problems, but it is more likely just to be under funding.
In case you think this is Luddite prejudice, I live in a town where many houses date back to the 17th Century and are built of local materials. Part of the town centre was demolished in the 1970s to build small modern houses. Guess which houses had to be demolished less than 30 years later? New builds this century are already starting to look a bit decrepit as the wind and rain (which are thrown off by our local stone) do their work on cheap modern building materials.
What seems constantly to be missed is that in many ways Blair is the most technologically illiterate Prime Minister we have had in a long time. From Churchill (who is said to have minuted after a visit to Bletchley Park "Give them everything they want and report that this has been done" because of his immediate grasp of the strategic implications of codebreaking) it's a sad story of decline. We now have a Prime Minister whose wife has to write emails for him, who endlessly talks about science and technbology, but shows not the slightest sign of understanding any of it. He is surrounded by unelected journalists with a similar grasp. He is so ignorant of science that he sees no problem in allowing Creationists to buy State schools. He is the despair of military strategists because of his total lack of understanding of the limitations of men and materiel and his assumption that the British Army can just be moved around like chess pieces. And his utter control freakery means that anybody with better knowledge or ideas is held back or ignored, hence the Cabinet resignations, while incompentents who share his religious view of the world - like Ruth Kelly - get promoted.
In all the arguments about Bush, there have been repreated suggestions that Blair is more intelligent than Bush. I do not think this is so at all. He has superior verbal fluency (he is a barrister, i.e. a talking lawyer.) But all the signs are that in understanding of the modern world, strategic grasp and understanding of the structure of, and problems of, society, he is every bit as blinkered and limited as Bush.
I'm sorry about this rant, but thank you for reading it. Meanwhile, if you _do_ share the misfortune of being English, please do something. Write to your MP. He will probably be a technical illiterate too, so try and spell it out very plainly without using jargon. Gathering all information about citizens into a big central repository accessed by many different groups - police, NHS, Civil Servants - is a recipe for disaster in a country where newspapers buy and sell informants every day. A country that cannot prevent newspapers from illegally tapping telephones, cannot prevent criminals, Ruper Murdoch and Lord Rothermere from gaining illegal access to such a huge centralised database. Until the Government can somehow fix the abuses of the Press and the opportunities for blackmail, they should never consider such a database.
Nobody said that - you are just creating a straw man to knock down. Correlation is correlation, it cannot be direct or indirect. Either variable a has a positive or negative correlation with respect to variable b, with an given level of significance, or it does not. There is no "direct or indirect" about it.
Causality is different, of course, though "indirect cause" is a very medieval concept.
I don't think anybody would suggest that paying a banker a lot of money will suddenly cause someone to become a street robber. But if there is a correlation become income inequality and crime, and given the high cost of crime, there is a case for investigating the nature of any relationship.
As an example, it is known that high incomes in the City of London are associated with cocaine use. This inevitably brings rich people into contact with drug dealers. Given the profits to be made, it might be that the existence of a rich and rather well protected class of drug users made them a very attractive target for drug dealers, causing increased competition for access to this market. Since drug dealing is an illegal, unregulated market, this might cause more turf wars and therefore more visible drug-related crime. That is a possible chain of causation which, if correct, could have implications for policy on drugs (e.g. toleration and a legalised market.)
The US has, I believe, nearly 2 000 000 people in prison. This is a big enougfh cost item that it needs proper study.
What I learned in linguistics, long ago, was that English is not a formally designed language with a formal grammar. It's a bastard child of Latin, Gothic, and a few others in there. It doesn't actually have a "pronoun grammar", it has a mix of systems from different languages, in varying stages of decay.
This was the poinjt I was trying to mention in what I wrongly thought was an attempt at humour.
Yes. My father was in at least one of the battles of Cable Street (there were several). An amazing number of Londoners of that generation go a bit misty eyed over their days throwing bricks at Fasicsts. We seem to have lost the art of political protest in this country.
Apart from the fact that life is too short to argue over this one, consider that it arises from an inconsistency in English.
HIS book (not HES book)
HER book (you have it wrong - it is NOT "hers book")
ITS book
MY book
John's book
See the pattern? His, her and my are inflected, not formed by adding an S onto he,she and me respectively.
To form a possessive by addition, we add apostrophe s
So what do we do with "it"? "its" is not at first an inflected form. It appears to be formed by adding an S onto "it", and by the usual rules would therefore be "it's". Applying the same rule backwards to the other forms would give hes,shes and mes books respectively.
This is an example of a case where the uneducated thinks one thing, the partly educated thinks another (because they were taught a half-understood rule at school) whereas the highly educated professional (like my English teacher, a first in English from Cambridge) with a deeper understanding of grammar, points out that the rule in use is arbitrary and you could do things either way.
"Gulfstream" is an executive jet. The "Gulf stream" runs down the West side of the country (the side I now very sensibly live on...) Cambridge is on the East side (the side I grew up on.) I can assure you from in-depth personal experience over a number of years that Cambridge, East Anglia has cold winters.
AMD, that's who. Apart from the obvious concentration of necessary skills in the area, what a good idea to start up right next to a large semi company that is expanding its product spectrum.
Cambridge, Mass. and Cambridge, East Anglia. There must be something about those freezing cold winters that encourages people to stay indoors and invent things.
The US actually has loads of capacity of all kinds, and plenty of industry. No country should expect to rely long term on pharmaceuticals for income because this creates a situation in which e.g. no drug company wants to develop a really effective long term vaccine or disease cure (among the loony liberal organs giving space to this argument is Scientific American, so at least I am in good company.) The main problem for the US is that some of its citizens have adopted perverse lifestyles (like expecting to live in desert regions with convenient access to well-watered golf courses, or thinking that commuting 80 miles a day in a truck is a rational life choice) which actually leech on, and weaken, the economy. If this can be fixed - and, despite the oil industry based administration, plenty of very smart Americans are working on it - the US is actually in very good shape. I also see no evidence that the balance of power is really shifting. China has been accepting vast amounts of dollar debt and undervaluing its currency to build manufacturing capacity. The dollar is now depreciating quite fast. Which means that one of China's largest assets is also depreciating. I am a lousy investor, and I wouldn't dare give financial advice to anybody, but what exactly makes you think China is not due for a massive correction?
Doubtless the likes of Fxxx and their right-wing backers want you to believe everything is terrible so you will accept lower wages and poor working conditions to protect you from the terrifying march of the Chinese, but it would be a good idea to look a little outside the US internal FUD industry and see what the world is really like.
Using FOSS involves no economic loss to the US whatsoever. Microsoft is not the US. Although Microsoft employees may earn less and their shareholders get less in dividends, and they may pay less tax, this is balanced by the increase in profitability of all the companies saving money by not using their products.
If you mean the loss of profits from foreign sales (i.e. the export market) this is a completely separate issue. The mere fact that other countries try to avoid buying MS products means that in the long or short term income from this source will dry up. From the point of view of the US, it is probably better that other countries continue to buy US products (Red Hat, Novell) than that they either do not develop an IT infrastructure at all, or develop entirely home grown solutions.
The history of every major industry is one of declining prices. This leads to economic expansion, not contraction, whether it is steel, cars, television. Software is not exempt from economic laws.
This may not be true of all military groupings, but I think you have hit an interesting nail on the head. People who rise to colonel or the equivalent may well have left the forces after a last command posting. They have been running an organisation. They are aware of practicalities. They have all kinds of people working for them, from ambitious junior officers down to specialists counting the days till they leave and translate their skills into civilian employment. The classical colonel-level briefing is "Boys, we've been dropped in the shit again, let's see how we're going to get out."
Generals, on the other hand, deal with people in the abstract. If they address the workforce, it is to issue a few windy generalities about loyalty,patriotism and team spirit like the guy you describe. And, a terrible downer, they have to talk to politicians, which would make anybody cynical about human nature.
Colonels should be allowed to transfer their management expertise to civilian life. They are, in my experience, often remarkably reasonable and open minded. Generals should be allowed to retire with honours. (OK, there are rare exceptions like Eisenhower.) The Roman Empire started to go into the shit big time when retired generals started to become emperors, and I see no reason why the same should not be true of companies.
Conventional four stroke engines are already sufficiently small and light, and more to the point reliable with many years of field experience. There really are no benefits to two strokes in the engine sizes considered. In the case of ship engines, despite their apparently huge size, lightness is actually very important. Two strokes achieve twice as many power strokes per cylinder per revolution, therefore other things being equal the torque variation on the crankshaft is lower and the crankshaft (and some other components) can be lighter for a given SHP.
In fact gasoline engines tend to be thermally limited - just look at the peak power rating compared to the SAE continuous rating for most small automotive engines. Your two stroke would probably need to be just as heavy as the four stroke to achieve the same continuous power rating, given the life expectancy of automotive engines. So what is the point?
Most Diesels do NOT peak at 2400-3800 rpm. Far from it. They are most reliable and efficient at around a mean piston speed of 5-7M/sec. Given the huge range of Diesel sizes (see my other post on this story) this is a range from maybe 12000 RPM down to 75. Chevy Diesels are, in world terms, hardly significant.
In fact the most efficient rpm range of the base level Volkswagen 1.9L engine - a very high volume unit - is around 1900-2400 rpm, and that is a small engine.
Furthermore, the torque required to turn a prop depends on a lot of factors - even for a small boat, prop matching to engine is a pain. For the size of boat I run, props range from about 12/10 (12 inch diameter, 10 inch pitch) to maybe 24/18. The 12/10 would be used with a small high revving Japanese engine like an Isuzu, while the 24/18 would be used with a direct drive heavy engine from the 50s or 60s. Note that, to a crude first spproximation, the volume of water shifted by one revolution of the prop is proportional to diameter squared * pitch, therefore the 24/18 is nearly 8 times bigger than a 12/10. Big slow props can be more efficient at shifting water, and direct drive avoids the power loss in gears, but also big props allow you to do clever things with surface finish to minimise noise and vibration. That, metallurgy and Reynolds numbers will ensure that container ships continue to use big engines and big props for the foreseeable future, but powerboats can continue to be pushed along by silly little props and high revving low torque gasoline engines until the fuel runs out.
And I admit I love these things. The wonderful thing about Diesels is how well they scale, like a supremely well designed web server or database engine. Petrol engines seem to have a cylinder optimum of around 250-500 cc, which is why you get the usual range of engine sizes and options (from the classical 250cc single cylinder motorbike to the 12 cylinder 4 litre V12 that Jaguar once produced.) You can go outside this range, down to 25cc two strokes and up to the 700cc or so sometimes used in the US, and you can get more output, for a short time, with smaller cylinders, but you are departing from the optimum for efficiency.
Now look at Diesels. The smallest working Diesels are the little glow plug engines that are used to power model aircraft - actually semi-Diesels whose spiritual big daddy is the classical single cylinder 9 litre like the Bolinder. The biggest are these marine monsters with their two-metre throws. But they all are constrained by a few parameters that are broadly the same - the MEP and the mean piston speed.
At the normal running speed of about 100rpm the engine in the article is doing about 6-7 metres per second. At its normal cruising rpm of about 2000, my car engine is doing 33 revs per second * 2 * 90mm stroke - or 6 metres/sec. I haven't checked, but I fully expect that the working MEPs are within the same ballpark. It's nice to see that engines ranging from grammes to kilotonnes are constrained by a simple law based in metallurgy and tribology.
The other nice thing is, that with the exception of the tiny toy engines, all Diesels work more or less the same way, and the direction of change is by downwards replacement - technologies developed for large marine engines find their way ultimately into small engines. Modern auto engines with their electronic solenoid operated injection systems are basically a shrink of the marine technology of the 80s and 90s. Turbochargers also undergo shrinkage as their technology moves from marine to auto use, so we get the variable vane turbocharger turning up on entry level cars.
It would be wrong to force too many analogies, but there are resemblances between Diesel systems development and computer development that are perhaps more than skin deep.
Yes, that's right. And no, I am being serious. Forget all this garbage about colonising other planets. Stephen Hawking's views on the subject don't matter - he is a physicist, not a biologist or an ecologist or an engineer, and has no idea of the impracticalities.
Our species is turning into a major problem for itself. It is subject to all kinds of ecological problems caused by population pressure exacerbated by the growing food and energy footprints of part of the world. What we actually need is to start to decline in numbers as a species, and fast.
We, as a species, will lose nothing by it. As Stephen Gould has pointed out, human beings of 30 000 years ago (when the population was tiny) were just as intelligent as those of today, they just lacked the means of recording and developing information that allow cultural development. If our population could somehow be knocked back to, say, a hundred million tomorrow, the survivors would be all the better for it.
Global warming would not be an issue; the population could relocate to environmentally benign areas without displacing others. No Middle East problem; there would be enough land for all in Palestine (you can view the entire Middle East conflict as ultimately being a war for land and hydrology.)
Of course, if I was one of the human beings who died for this to happen, I would not be very happy about it, at least at the time.
So this is my strange, twisted ground for optimism; we look ever closer to a plague or other factors which will reduce our population, and paradoxically this will best ensure the long term survival of human beings as a species - assuming this to be a good thing.
Note for Creationists - I know you don't believe that there were human beings 30 000 years ago, and personally I don't give a shit what you think.
In no particular order, then, modern music didn't begin with the Beatles and Elvis. Possibly it began with Beethoven, but I can assure you that the likes of Mahler and Richard Strauss antedated the Beatles, as did 12 tone music. An awful lot of the background music you hear - on TV shows and adverts, for instance - owes more to 12 tone and atonal music than it does to the Beatles. When the Beatles brought out LPs (12 inch vinyl 33 rpm) they were following in a route well trodden by - what to call it? - non-rock music.
If your parents have a large collection of LPs and 45s collected in that era, they were in a middle class minority. In the 60s, the majority of the population got music from the radio and from juke boxes. The "ownership" of recorded music by a large section of the community is, I think you will find, a very recent phenomenon. Which is part of my point, really.
In fact, I think people's choices in music say a lot. iPods are not about quality of performance or the experience of live music. They are predominantly about background. (I know that musicians are often relatively indifferent to recording quality, but that's largely because they are listening mainly to the sounds in their heads while the recording is more like a mnemonic or audio cue.) Background music is mainly consumed; it is not critically registered. As the concept of buying music has been spread by the recording industry it has become important to democratise and even abolish taste, because if all listeners were critical the market would be much smaller (there is a limit to available musical talent.) I find nowadays that I will spend money on live performances, but not on recorded music. It is not to make V-signs at **AAs, but because I get less and less out of recordings and more out of the real thing.
I'm beginning to sound like an English version of Umberto Eco and possibly wander off topic, but I think there is an important point to be made here. In our time the number of people interested in technology remains, as always, small. The application of technology has been spread by commercial interests, to people who are not interested in what the technology is or how it works. It should be obvious that you cannot compare the set of "people, mostly in their teens in the 60s interested in space exploration and with unspecified musical preferences" with the set of "people, mostly in their teens in the 00s, who use iPods." It would be far more interesting, and relevant, to find out (if it were possible) if people in the 60s and 00s who were and are technically interested in audio reproduction were and are also interested in space exploration, i.e. if there is a correlation between the desire to explore the capabilities of technology and to explore our surroundings.
I too am in the Space Exploration generation, and I too am indifferent to iPods.
And I'm not surprised. The members of our generation (in their teens in the 60s, I guess) who were interested in space flight were not exactly your average passive consumer. My brother worked for NASA, and I did work on, among other things, rad-hard real time computers. When I was an undergraduate at a university not far from Ely, your audio system did not count unless you had built it yourself, from components, and by components I mean tubes, transistors, and for real kudos turn your own vinyl turntable out of an alumin(i)um blank.
Nowadays our modern equivalent, when it isn't doing the same kind of thing, is writing its own audio decoders.
The difference between then and now is quite simple. There is a lot more rubbish about. The size of the recording industry was not so bloated in the sixties and the bandwidth was much smaller. People built their own turntables, for the most part, to listen to Mozart and Wagner and (Richard) Strauss and perhaps Berio and Ligeti as I recall, not pop music which was beneath contempt; it was, after all, the product of multiple remixings from tape and there was no depth to bring out. Now, the record industry is trying to extend copyright still further on stuff with a shelf life of hours, and this is, for the most part, what will get loaded into iPods.
My conclusion? The Space Exploration generation and the iPod generation are probably practically disjoint sets. Sheep and goats, in fact. Nothing to see here; move along.
Slashdot is run by Americans, after all, and the vast majority of our readership is in the U.S. We're certainly not opposed to doing more international stories, but we don't have any formal plans for making that happen. All we can really tell you is that if you're outside the U.S. and you have news, submit it, and if it looks interesting, we'll post it.
Some people would say that the biggest problem the US faces is that so many of its citizens are so US-centric. It's hard to be the world's policeman and leading superpower when the people who vote aren't interested. When it was the United Kingdom that had the job, it had a large pool of (frequently multilingual) sailors to draw on, and an upper class that learned Latin, Greek and French as a core part of the curriculum to prepare them for languages like Arabic later on.
Nowadays all politics are global. Pakistan is in America's back yard, Britain is a puppet state. Stories like this on Slashdot just reflect reality, not how some anonymous coward from Outer Fencepost, Wyoming would like things to be.
You aren't a chemist or you would know how much lanthanum is about in the world. Enough to provide a few Hollywood actors with hydrogen vehicles - metal hydrides are improbably scarce and expensive to store hydrogen. The only way of making and using hydrogen that has any energy benefits involves the use of nuclear, wave or wind power to produce hydrogen by electrolysis, followed by storage as a cold liquid. There is no convenient way of producing alcohols from an electricity generating plant. Much as I support the idea of producing biofuels, (though not the way they do it in the US!) it is a short term solution until climate change affects food output and the land is no longer available.
The root cause of all these problems is the demand for personal rather than mass transit. Houses can be insulated, trains can run directly on electricity, airplanes and cars must carry stored fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
How you do this, of course, is left as an exercise for the reader. When a photon is detected it ceases to exist - which means you have to arrange for a method of detection which infallibly records its energy in the one chance you get.
Of course correlation does not prove causation, but in these cases it would be astonishing if there were not causative factors at work. People with higher education are more likely to be aware of the factors that influence their health, and take steps to improve them. That's more likely to be true of reflective, thoughtful people who have higher degrees rather than, say, working people who are economically successful (and may well look down on what they see as book learning.) People with higher socioeconomic status have better access to healthcare - even in countries with supposedly inclusive systems.
The one thing we don't get from the New Testament is Jesus' tone of voice. It would be really good to know _how_ he made his remark about those who had not losing all they had, and more being given to those who had a lot to start with. Acceptance of a statement of fact? Sarcasm about the way we organise society? Anger? Or did he think it was a good thing?
When gasoline powered road vehicles started to appear in larger numbers, and agricultural machinery became more portable, the Act was repealed.
I've worked with scientists, I have, God help me, tried to manage scientists, and its just like anything else; without a significant evangelistic tendency, scientists lack a major incentive to make progress.
However this may not be true in this case. People often write carelessly in blogs (I look back over some of my own postings and keep getting the urge to hide in a hole somewhere in Bhutan) and it is possible that what she actually meant was just something like "the scientific studies behind claims of global warming."
There is, however, definitely a case for any professional who has to present data to non-specialists - whether it be MDs, scientists or accountants - to require evidence of ongoing training in their field to retain certification. If that's what she is saying, I agree completely.
The blog cited is in such extreme form that I wonder how much truth there is in the story. It looks like someone has set up this Heidi Cullen as a straw person to claim massive discrimination against anti-Global warming advocates. The blog gets more and more extreme as it goes on until Godwin's Law is invoked. I wonder what Cullen really said, in what context.
It's sad, John Butcher died a week or so ago at the age of 60. There was an MP, one of very few, who understood technology and its importance, and even tried to explain why manufacturing was important to Mrs. Thatcher - and he was in the same party. (He was chairman of Texas Instruments UK at one point, I think.) He left Parliament in 1997, which was a pity.
In the UK, there is usually a bloody good reason for the traditional building materials and designs in any area. Mass builders just drop standardised buildings at any angle to the weather which suits them, and then the owners wonder why the walls are always wet, or tiles fall off every time the prevailing wind blows.
The five year gap before it is due to be commercialised in the UK may be due to the development needed to address UK-specific building problems, but it is more likely just to be under funding.
In case you think this is Luddite prejudice, I live in a town where many houses date back to the 17th Century and are built of local materials. Part of the town centre was demolished in the 1970s to build small modern houses. Guess which houses had to be demolished less than 30 years later? New builds this century are already starting to look a bit decrepit as the wind and rain (which are thrown off by our local stone) do their work on cheap modern building materials.
In all the arguments about Bush, there have been repreated suggestions that Blair is more intelligent than Bush. I do not think this is so at all. He has superior verbal fluency (he is a barrister, i.e. a talking lawyer.) But all the signs are that in understanding of the modern world, strategic grasp and understanding of the structure of, and problems of, society, he is every bit as blinkered and limited as Bush.
I'm sorry about this rant, but thank you for reading it. Meanwhile, if you _do_ share the misfortune of being English, please do something. Write to your MP. He will probably be a technical illiterate too, so try and spell it out very plainly without using jargon. Gathering all information about citizens into a big central repository accessed by many different groups - police, NHS, Civil Servants - is a recipe for disaster in a country where newspapers buy and sell informants every day. A country that cannot prevent newspapers from illegally tapping telephones, cannot prevent criminals, Ruper Murdoch and Lord Rothermere from gaining illegal access to such a huge centralised database. Until the Government can somehow fix the abuses of the Press and the opportunities for blackmail, they should never consider such a database.
Causality is different, of course, though "indirect cause" is a very medieval concept.
I don't think anybody would suggest that paying a banker a lot of money will suddenly cause someone to become a street robber. But if there is a correlation become income inequality and crime, and given the high cost of crime, there is a case for investigating the nature of any relationship.
As an example, it is known that high incomes in the City of London are associated with cocaine use. This inevitably brings rich people into contact with drug dealers. Given the profits to be made, it might be that the existence of a rich and rather well protected class of drug users made them a very attractive target for drug dealers, causing increased competition for access to this market. Since drug dealing is an illegal, unregulated market, this might cause more turf wars and therefore more visible drug-related crime. That is a possible chain of causation which, if correct, could have implications for policy on drugs (e.g. toleration and a legalised market.)
The US has, I believe, nearly 2 000 000 people in prison. This is a big enougfh cost item that it needs proper study.
This was the poinjt I was trying to mention in what I wrongly thought was an attempt at humour.
Yes. My father was in at least one of the battles of Cable Street (there were several). An amazing number of Londoners of that generation go a bit misty eyed over their days throwing bricks at Fasicsts. We seem to have lost the art of political protest in this country.
HIS book (not HES book)
HER book (you have it wrong - it is NOT "hers book")
ITS book
MY book
John's book
See the pattern? His, her and my are inflected, not formed by adding an S onto he,she and me respectively.
To form a possessive by addition, we add apostrophe s
So what do we do with "it"? "its" is not at first an inflected form. It appears to be formed by adding an S onto "it", and by the usual rules would therefore be "it's". Applying the same rule backwards to the other forms would give hes,shes and mes books respectively.
This is an example of a case where the uneducated thinks one thing, the partly educated thinks another (because they were taught a half-understood rule at school) whereas the highly educated professional (like my English teacher, a first in English from Cambridge) with a deeper understanding of grammar, points out that the rule in use is arbitrary and you could do things either way.
Grammar Nazis. Sheesh.
"Gulfstream" is an executive jet. The "Gulf stream" runs down the West side of the country (the side I now very sensibly live on...) Cambridge is on the East side (the side I grew up on.) I can assure you from in-depth personal experience over a number of years that Cambridge, East Anglia has cold winters.
Cambridge, Mass. and Cambridge, East Anglia. There must be something about those freezing cold winters that encourages people to stay indoors and invent things.
Doubtless the likes of Fxxx and their right-wing backers want you to believe everything is terrible so you will accept lower wages and poor working conditions to protect you from the terrifying march of the Chinese, but it would be a good idea to look a little outside the US internal FUD industry and see what the world is really like.
If you mean the loss of profits from foreign sales (i.e. the export market) this is a completely separate issue. The mere fact that other countries try to avoid buying MS products means that in the long or short term income from this source will dry up. From the point of view of the US, it is probably better that other countries continue to buy US products (Red Hat, Novell) than that they either do not develop an IT infrastructure at all, or develop entirely home grown solutions.
The history of every major industry is one of declining prices. This leads to economic expansion, not contraction, whether it is steel, cars, television. Software is not exempt from economic laws.
Generals, on the other hand, deal with people in the abstract. If they address the workforce, it is to issue a few windy generalities about loyalty,patriotism and team spirit like the guy you describe. And, a terrible downer, they have to talk to politicians, which would make anybody cynical about human nature.
Colonels should be allowed to transfer their management expertise to civilian life. They are, in my experience, often remarkably reasonable and open minded. Generals should be allowed to retire with honours. (OK, there are rare exceptions like Eisenhower.) The Roman Empire started to go into the shit big time when retired generals started to become emperors, and I see no reason why the same should not be true of companies.
In fact gasoline engines tend to be thermally limited - just look at the peak power rating compared to the SAE continuous rating for most small automotive engines. Your two stroke would probably need to be just as heavy as the four stroke to achieve the same continuous power rating, given the life expectancy of automotive engines. So what is the point?
In fact the most efficient rpm range of the base level Volkswagen 1.9L engine - a very high volume unit - is around 1900-2400 rpm, and that is a small engine.
Furthermore, the torque required to turn a prop depends on a lot of factors - even for a small boat, prop matching to engine is a pain. For the size of boat I run, props range from about 12/10 (12 inch diameter, 10 inch pitch) to maybe 24/18. The 12/10 would be used with a small high revving Japanese engine like an Isuzu, while the 24/18 would be used with a direct drive heavy engine from the 50s or 60s. Note that, to a crude first spproximation, the volume of water shifted by one revolution of the prop is proportional to diameter squared * pitch, therefore the 24/18 is nearly 8 times bigger than a 12/10. Big slow props can be more efficient at shifting water, and direct drive avoids the power loss in gears, but also big props allow you to do clever things with surface finish to minimise noise and vibration. That, metallurgy and Reynolds numbers will ensure that container ships continue to use big engines and big props for the foreseeable future, but powerboats can continue to be pushed along by silly little props and high revving low torque gasoline engines until the fuel runs out.
Now look at Diesels. The smallest working Diesels are the little glow plug engines that are used to power model aircraft - actually semi-Diesels whose spiritual big daddy is the classical single cylinder 9 litre like the Bolinder. The biggest are these marine monsters with their two-metre throws. But they all are constrained by a few parameters that are broadly the same - the MEP and the mean piston speed.
At the normal running speed of about 100rpm the engine in the article is doing about 6-7 metres per second. At its normal cruising rpm of about 2000, my car engine is doing 33 revs per second * 2 * 90mm stroke - or 6 metres/sec. I haven't checked, but I fully expect that the working MEPs are within the same ballpark. It's nice to see that engines ranging from grammes to kilotonnes are constrained by a simple law based in metallurgy and tribology.
The other nice thing is, that with the exception of the tiny toy engines, all Diesels work more or less the same way, and the direction of change is by downwards replacement - technologies developed for large marine engines find their way ultimately into small engines. Modern auto engines with their electronic solenoid operated injection systems are basically a shrink of the marine technology of the 80s and 90s. Turbochargers also undergo shrinkage as their technology moves from marine to auto use, so we get the variable vane turbocharger turning up on entry level cars.
It would be wrong to force too many analogies, but there are resemblances between Diesel systems development and computer development that are perhaps more than skin deep.
Our species is turning into a major problem for itself. It is subject to all kinds of ecological problems caused by population pressure exacerbated by the growing food and energy footprints of part of the world. What we actually need is to start to decline in numbers as a species, and fast.
We, as a species, will lose nothing by it. As Stephen Gould has pointed out, human beings of 30 000 years ago (when the population was tiny) were just as intelligent as those of today, they just lacked the means of recording and developing information that allow cultural development. If our population could somehow be knocked back to, say, a hundred million tomorrow, the survivors would be all the better for it.
Global warming would not be an issue; the population could relocate to environmentally benign areas without displacing others. No Middle East problem; there would be enough land for all in Palestine (you can view the entire Middle East conflict as ultimately being a war for land and hydrology.)
Of course, if I was one of the human beings who died for this to happen, I would not be very happy about it, at least at the time.
So this is my strange, twisted ground for optimism; we look ever closer to a plague or other factors which will reduce our population, and paradoxically this will best ensure the long term survival of human beings as a species - assuming this to be a good thing.
Note for Creationists - I know you don't believe that there were human beings 30 000 years ago, and personally I don't give a shit what you think.
In no particular order, then, modern music didn't begin with the Beatles and Elvis. Possibly it began with Beethoven, but I can assure you that the likes of Mahler and Richard Strauss antedated the Beatles, as did 12 tone music. An awful lot of the background music you hear - on TV shows and adverts, for instance - owes more to 12 tone and atonal music than it does to the Beatles. When the Beatles brought out LPs (12 inch vinyl 33 rpm) they were following in a route well trodden by - what to call it? - non-rock music.
If your parents have a large collection of LPs and 45s collected in that era, they were in a middle class minority. In the 60s, the majority of the population got music from the radio and from juke boxes. The "ownership" of recorded music by a large section of the community is, I think you will find, a very recent phenomenon. Which is part of my point, really.
In fact, I think people's choices in music say a lot. iPods are not about quality of performance or the experience of live music. They are predominantly about background. (I know that musicians are often relatively indifferent to recording quality, but that's largely because they are listening mainly to the sounds in their heads while the recording is more like a mnemonic or audio cue.) Background music is mainly consumed; it is not critically registered. As the concept of buying music has been spread by the recording industry it has become important to democratise and even abolish taste, because if all listeners were critical the market would be much smaller (there is a limit to available musical talent.) I find nowadays that I will spend money on live performances, but not on recorded music. It is not to make V-signs at **AAs, but because I get less and less out of recordings and more out of the real thing.
I'm beginning to sound like an English version of Umberto Eco and possibly wander off topic, but I think there is an important point to be made here. In our time the number of people interested in technology remains, as always, small. The application of technology has been spread by commercial interests, to people who are not interested in what the technology is or how it works. It should be obvious that you cannot compare the set of "people, mostly in their teens in the 60s interested in space exploration and with unspecified musical preferences" with the set of "people, mostly in their teens in the 00s, who use iPods." It would be far more interesting, and relevant, to find out (if it were possible) if people in the 60s and 00s who were and are technically interested in audio reproduction were and are also interested in space exploration, i.e. if there is a correlation between the desire to explore the capabilities of technology and to explore our surroundings.
And I'm not surprised. The members of our generation (in their teens in the 60s, I guess) who were interested in space flight were not exactly your average passive consumer. My brother worked for NASA, and I did work on, among other things, rad-hard real time computers. When I was an undergraduate at a university not far from Ely, your audio system did not count unless you had built it yourself, from components, and by components I mean tubes, transistors, and for real kudos turn your own vinyl turntable out of an alumin(i)um blank.
Nowadays our modern equivalent, when it isn't doing the same kind of thing, is writing its own audio decoders.
The difference between then and now is quite simple. There is a lot more rubbish about. The size of the recording industry was not so bloated in the sixties and the bandwidth was much smaller. People built their own turntables, for the most part, to listen to Mozart and Wagner and (Richard) Strauss and perhaps Berio and Ligeti as I recall, not pop music which was beneath contempt; it was, after all, the product of multiple remixings from tape and there was no depth to bring out. Now, the record industry is trying to extend copyright still further on stuff with a shelf life of hours, and this is, for the most part, what will get loaded into iPods.
My conclusion? The Space Exploration generation and the iPod generation are probably practically disjoint sets. Sheep and goats, in fact. Nothing to see here; move along.
Nowadays all politics are global. Pakistan is in America's back yard, Britain is a puppet state. Stories like this on Slashdot just reflect reality, not how some anonymous coward from Outer Fencepost, Wyoming would like things to be.
The root cause of all these problems is the demand for personal rather than mass transit. Houses can be insulated, trains can run directly on electricity, airplanes and cars must carry stored fuel.