Atlanta is clearly visible-- it's the bright nexus on the left side of the triangle. It's easy to pick out which one it is, since it's on the line which continues the bright segment of the Boston/Washington corridor (the line is very clearly visible), and it's also about 2/3 of the way down from the line between Chicago and Orlando, which defines the left side of the triangle.
Actually, the Environmentalist just bitched about emissions.
Yep. I've been wondering how air traffic affects the weather for a long time. Do the climate folks model this?
Yes. It's a subject of tremendous interest. I saw a very good presentation on this at the AIAA Aerospace Sciences Conference two years ago, looking at global data on contrail-induced clouds viewed from satellites. The data from the weeks following 9-11-2001 was particularly informative, the time when global air traffic was temporarily grounded.
There's far too much research to summarize in a paragraph or two, but my quick overview is that contrail-induced high-altitude clouds (slightly) decrease daytime temperatures (reflecting incident sunlight) and also slightly increase nighttime temperatures (reflecting outgoing IR). Overall net effect on temperature is not large, but it tends to be slightly larger in heating the polar regions (on the average, less sunlight in, so the infrared is a little more important, and a significant number of flights go over the poles). But that's my summary from a non-random selection of papers and talks I've heard, not a rigorous review of the science, though, so YMMV.
Pretty, but I'm dubious. Looking at the US, it looks like nearly half the brightness is in a triangle with the southern terminus in Orlando or Miami, and going to the northeast. If brightness is mapped to density of flights, then this says that half of the flights in the US go from the northeast to Florida? I just don't think that's true. Florida is a great attractor... but not that great.
So, basically, they have secret conditions to their offer to pay for revealing of bugs, and they don't tell anybody what those secret conditions are.
So, uh, why would anybody expect to be paid? What other secret conditions do they have, which they can reveal at any time and say "oh, so sorry, but one of our terms is that we don't pay under (xx) conditions."
--I'm sorry, but we don't pay if you work for a competitor, or a company that we deem might be a competitor in the future --I'm sorry, but we don't pay if it's a vulnerability that can be traced to a flaw in an Adobe product, or in a commercial database program we may use that was purchased from an commercial source. --I'm sorry, but we don't pay if you're from a country that doesn't speak English. --I'm sorry, but we don't pay if the vulnerability is discovered by somebody from states with names beginning with a vowel. --I'm sorry, but we don't pay if the vulnerability is one that is only active on days of the week ending in "y".
I'm not sure that Dyson can easily be pigeonholed into a broad political definition. He's a very smart man who says what he thinks and doesn't really give a crap about anyone elses opinion of him. I don't always agree with him but he's generally worth listening too.
Exactly. I find him worth listening to precisely because he is identifiable neither strictly as a liberal nor a conservative.
And, indeed, "worth listening to" does not equate to "I agree with him." It means "his analyses are interesting, and often present a viewpoint that gives an unusual insight."
Number of nuclear warheads x average warhead yield has gone up because average yield has gone up faster than number of warheads have gone down.
Except it hasn't.
The multi-megaton bombs were a thing of the '50s, when accuracies were terrible, and the solution was "just get the bomb near, and make it big."
The modern thinking on nuclear weapons is to make them small, but extremely accurately targetted. You don't need a 50-megaton Tsar-bomb if you are able to put a smaller yield weapon exactly where you want it.
I think it depends on how you're counting. The 2% probably includes all photons hitting the leaf, which seems reasonable enough when comparing to a solar cell where nearly the entire surface is supposed to be converting photons to electricity. However, the individual proteins in plants that capture photons are indeed extraordinarily efficient.
No, actually they're not. Even if you're looking at the quantum efficiency of an individual photon absorption by a chlorophyll molecule, plant proteins aren't anywhere near as good as a decent solar cell, which will have very close to 100% quantum efficiency
I'm not sure where this myth that plants are extraordinarily efficient in energy conversion came from. They aren't. Energy conversion efficiency is not what they're optimized for. In evolution, "good enough" is good enough.
This statement "Millions of years have evolution has resulted in plants being the most efficient harvesters of solar energy on the planet" is flat out incorrect.
Now, to be fair, plants aren't optimimized for energy conversion efficiency-- they are basically solar-powered engineering units that synthesize complex organic molecules and make self-replicating macromolecular structures out of little more than carbon dioxide and water, plus a few trace minerals... they are harvesting, mining, concentrating, and structural machines of amazing complexity. But "efficient energy conversion engines"-- no, not even close.
When the very first sentence of an article is factually incorrect, I have no interest in reading any more of it.
I slightly disagree. Radio waves can cause thermal heating in human tissue (close enough to the emitter, if there's high enough power),
Exactly.
Cell phones don't have enough power to cause significant heating.
It turns out that the body is very well adapted for cooling. The circulatory system is a good heat exchanger; it takes a lot of input to overload. Going outside on a 90 degree (F) day, maybe. Lying in the sun and absorbing a kilowatt per square meter, maybe. A one-watt (average transmit power) cell phone, no.
There is one exception to the fact that the cooling system of the body regulates the temperature, actually, the one place the blood vessels don't reach: the lens of the eye. You can't have blood vessels running through the eyeball, since it has to be transparent! If the scaremongers had been saying that cell phones caused glassblower's cataract, they would have had a mechanism. But that isn't the charge. (And, in any case, the power of a cell phone is just way too low to cause this-- you just don't get much heating from the 0.7 to 1 watt average transmit power of a cell phone to cause any damage. Don't stare into a red-hot furnace, though.)
[...] Although I haven't seen enough specific data on cellphones in this regard, I don't expect the effects to be significant.
There are no known adverse effects of cell phones. There is no epidemiological data on adverse effects. There has been no increase in cancer rate with cell phones. The largest study done actually showed a slight correlation of a REDUCED rate of cancer with cell phone usage.
People should just learn Morse code, only one button. It's the original text message tech. And good Morse code operators go vastly faster than a mere 9.3 world per minute.
On Earth, gold veins are produced by aqueous processes. You wouldn't expect that on asteroids. Platinum, and platinum-group metals, on the other hand-- these are siderophiles, and hence depleted in the Earth's crust. Good elements to look for in asteroids
Nevertheless, asteroidal compositions (well, meteoritic compositions, assumed to be indicative of asteroids) have significantly more platinum and palladium than gold, and hydrothermal processes concentrate gold into conveniently mineable veins on Earth, but probably not on asteroids.
platinum and gold have practical uses. it would freak out the goldbugs though if it became financially feasible to get them from space and to land them.
Gold?? Who's suggesting getting gold from asteroids?
On Earth, gold veins are produced by aqueous processes. You wouldn't expect that on asteroids.
Platinum, and platinum-group metals, on the other hand-- these are siderophiles, and hence depleted in the Earth's crust. Good elements to look for in asteroids-- in fact, iridium is the very signature of an asteroid impact.
Unless they announce when and on what vehicle they are going to launch, I'm not sure you can say "they announced the plan to launch their first space missions." It's not a plan to launch if they don't have a plan to launch.
Actually, the live threads on reddit were pretty damn fast and accurate.
Fast... but not always accurate.
From the Atlantic's analysis http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/it-wasnt-sunil-tripathi-the-anatomy-of-a-misinformation-disaster/275155/ " The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here's what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, "This is the Internet's test of 'be right, not first' with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown" Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi." The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes' tweet. I've listened to it a dozen times and there's nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi's name. I've embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It's just not there."
This is pretty much useless. If people start using software filters to detect social-network frauds and spammers, the frauds and spammers will simply reverse-engineer the filter algorithm and adjust their "number of devices from which a user accesses the service, the ratio of followers to people following an account, the average number of tweets to each person, and the number of tweets to an unknown receiver" to whatever values don't trigger the fraud filter.
The working prototype is a helicopter with an added prop on the front.
This is not a new concept. Autogyros are very old tech.
No, it's not. First, it's not an autogyro, although it apparently can operate in autogyro mode. But, more important, once it has forward motion, the rotor stops rotating and becomes a wing.
Third parties are fine in the USA as long as they run canidates during primaries and not the final election. If your a liberal leaning party then the Democratic primary is your runoff election where you can get your guy in. Conservative leaning should run in the Republican primary. That is what the Tea Party has been doing.
Actually, no. Primaries turn out to make the voting problem worse, not better.
Primaries have the same ballot problems, which means that they are unreliable if there are more than two candidates. And, in the case of two candidates, the primary selects a candidate that is closest to the median position of a subset of the total voting population. What this does is means that the candidates are chosen away from the center, not toward the center.
In an idealized model of two parties with the position of voters normally distributed along some axis, the two election system would mean that the elected candidate's position randomly flips back and forth from positions plus and minus 25% away from center. (Where "25% away from center" means "75% of the voting population is on one side of the candidate, 25% on the other.)
then require that every person own a gun to protect their neighbor as well.
Add in mandatory semi-yearly safety and marksmanship training.
Also, make it part of the mandatory school curriculum. I think a major reason we have so many kids these days accidentally shooting each other is a result of the fact that the only exposure many children get to firearms is playing/watching their parents play FPS games.
Maybe mandatory gun safety courses for Vice Presidents as well-- at least they could get the "if you can't see what you're shooting at, perhaps you shouldn't shoot. Oh, and maybe you shouldn't go hunting when you're drunk."
Really, it's hard to support that "mandatory gun ownership" thing when there are so many idiots, careless people, and drunks out there.
Note that multi-party systems can work fine elsewhere.
Yes, in elsewheres that have different balloting techniques.
I'm a great fan of Approval voting, myself. But there are numerous better methods than simple plurality.
So even though this'll get plenty of knee-jerk reactions for reasons that are inscrutable to me, I'd suggest direct representational voting, or some other way to stop gerrymandering being possible, or useful.
Gerrymandering is worse than merely an accidentally bad system-- it represents deliberate attempts to subvert democracy
The system was indubitably pretty neat back when
Or at least, was pretty good for a first try.
, but hasn't scaled well. Take the ingredient principles and build something that fits the current (and future, for say 50..100 years--investigating your voting system every century for effectiveness and possible revision isn't bad) situation better. In general, some system that doesn't happen to have a two-party-only implicit system property...
The election system, as it currently exists, squeeze out third parties. Worse, however, is that if a third party does get a toehold, the main result is has on an election is to takes vote away from the major party that it's most similar to-- the "spoiler" effect. This is why in many cases third-party challengers are secretly funded by entities that oppose the platforms that the third party supports: the "divide and conquer" strategy.
So, overall, my desire for your party is that your platform should adopt all the planks that I hate. Probably your party will be irrelevant, in which case it doesn't matter what your platform is. If your party does get large enough to make a difference, that difference will manifest by your taking votes away from your politically closest competitors, so I want you to be as evil as possible.
Thus: I suggest you adopt a platform of explicit fascism.
Yes, books written in 2006 and not specifically about computer use in the 1960s are the best you can do? Weak sauce, man.
These are about the Saturn F-1 engine development, not about computers. There are other books, including some memoirs. The ones I linked have the advantage of being easily available on the web.
I wasn't trying to claim that computers didn't exist in 1960!
Slashdot Mirror
Atlanta is clearly visible-- it's the bright nexus on the left side of the triangle. It's easy to pick out which one it is, since it's on the line which continues the bright segment of the Boston/Washington corridor (the line is very clearly visible), and it's also about 2/3 of the way down from the line between Chicago and Orlando, which defines the left side of the triangle.
Yep. I've been wondering how air traffic affects the weather for a long time. Do the climate folks model this?
Yes. It's a subject of tremendous interest. I saw a very good presentation on this at the AIAA Aerospace Sciences Conference two years ago, looking at global data on contrail-induced clouds viewed from satellites. The data from the weeks following 9-11-2001 was particularly informative, the time when global air traffic was temporarily grounded.
There's far too much research to summarize in a paragraph or two, but my quick overview is that contrail-induced high-altitude clouds (slightly) decrease daytime temperatures (reflecting incident sunlight) and also slightly increase nighttime temperatures (reflecting outgoing IR). Overall net effect on temperature is not large, but it tends to be slightly larger in heating the polar regions (on the average, less sunlight in, so the infrared is a little more important, and a significant number of flights go over the poles). But that's my summary from a non-random selection of papers and talks I've heard, not a rigorous review of the science, though, so YMMV.
Pretty, but I'm dubious. Looking at the US, it looks like nearly half the brightness is in a triangle with the southern terminus in Orlando or Miami, and going to the northeast. If brightness is mapped to density of flights, then this says that half of the flights in the US go from the northeast to Florida? I just don't think that's true. Florida is a great attractor... but not that great.
So, basically, they have secret conditions to their offer to pay for revealing of bugs, and they don't tell anybody what those secret conditions are.
So, uh, why would anybody expect to be paid? What other secret conditions do they have, which they can reveal at any time and say "oh, so sorry, but one of our terms is that we don't pay under (xx) conditions."
--I'm sorry, but we don't pay if you work for a competitor, or a company that we deem might be a competitor in the future
--I'm sorry, but we don't pay if it's a vulnerability that can be traced to a flaw in an Adobe product, or in a commercial database program we may use that was purchased from an commercial source.
--I'm sorry, but we don't pay if you're from a country that doesn't speak English.
--I'm sorry, but we don't pay if the vulnerability is discovered by somebody from states with names beginning with a vowel.
--I'm sorry, but we don't pay if the vulnerability is one that is only active on days of the week ending in "y".
I'm not sure that Dyson can easily be pigeonholed into a broad political definition. He's a very smart man who says what he thinks and doesn't really give a crap about anyone elses opinion of him. I don't always agree with him but he's generally worth listening too.
Exactly. I find him worth listening to precisely because he is identifiable neither strictly as a liberal nor a conservative.
And, indeed, "worth listening to" does not equate to "I agree with him." It means "his analyses are interesting, and often present a viewpoint that gives an unusual insight."
Number of nuclear warheads x average warhead yield has gone up because average yield has gone up faster than number of warheads have gone down.
Except it hasn't.
The multi-megaton bombs were a thing of the '50s, when accuracies were terrible, and the solution was "just get the bomb near, and make it big."
The modern thinking on nuclear weapons is to make them small, but extremely accurately targetted. You don't need a 50-megaton Tsar-bomb if you are able to put a smaller yield weapon exactly where you want it.
I think it depends on how you're counting. The 2% probably includes all photons hitting the leaf, which seems reasonable enough when comparing to a solar cell where nearly the entire surface is supposed to be converting photons to electricity. However, the individual proteins in plants that capture photons are indeed extraordinarily efficient.
No, actually they're not. Even if you're looking at the quantum efficiency of an individual photon absorption by a chlorophyll molecule, plant proteins aren't anywhere near as good as a decent solar cell, which will have very close to 100% quantum efficiency
I'm not sure where this myth that plants are extraordinarily efficient in energy conversion came from. They aren't. Energy conversion efficiency is not what they're optimized for. In evolution, "good enough" is good enough.
This statement "Millions of years have evolution has resulted in plants being the most efficient harvesters of solar energy on the planet" is flat out incorrect.
Plants come in at about 2% energy conversion efficiency. The best solar cells are over 35% conversion efficiency.
Now, to be fair, plants aren't optimimized for energy conversion efficiency-- they are basically solar-powered engineering units that synthesize complex organic molecules and make self-replicating macromolecular structures out of little more than carbon dioxide and water, plus a few trace minerals... they are harvesting, mining, concentrating, and structural machines of amazing complexity. But "efficient energy conversion engines"-- no, not even close.
When the very first sentence of an article is factually incorrect, I have no interest in reading any more of it.
I slightly disagree. Radio waves can cause thermal heating in human tissue (close enough to the emitter, if there's high enough power),
Exactly.
Cell phones don't have enough power to cause significant heating.
It turns out that the body is very well adapted for cooling. The circulatory system is a good heat exchanger; it takes a lot of input to overload. Going outside on a 90 degree (F) day, maybe. Lying in the sun and absorbing a kilowatt per square meter, maybe. A one-watt (average transmit power) cell phone, no.
There is one exception to the fact that the cooling system of the body regulates the temperature, actually, the one place the blood vessels don't reach: the lens of the eye. You can't have blood vessels running through the eyeball, since it has to be transparent! If the scaremongers had been saying that cell phones caused glassblower's cataract, they would have had a mechanism. But that isn't the charge. (And, in any case, the power of a cell phone is just way too low to cause this-- you just don't get much heating from the 0.7 to 1 watt average transmit power of a cell phone to cause any damage. Don't stare into a red-hot furnace, though.)
[...] Although I haven't seen enough specific data on cellphones in this regard, I don't expect the effects to be significant.
You got it. The effect is not significant.
There are no known adverse effects of cell phones. There is no epidemiological data on adverse effects. There has been no increase in cancer rate with cell phones. The largest study done actually showed a slight correlation of a REDUCED rate of cancer with cell phone usage.
There is no known mechanism for adverse effects.
You should also check out some of the images on the Cassini mission webpage:
http://www.ciclops.org/view_event/191/The_Red_Rose_Of_Saturn
and some of the animations, like the ones on this page: http://www.ciclops.org/view/7620/North_Polar_Movie
Google already did this. Gmail Tap
Cool! Google "upgrades" to Morse Code!
Was that an April 1 post?
People should just learn Morse code, only one button. It's the original text message tech.
And good Morse code operators go vastly faster than a mere 9.3 world per minute.
Um, gold is also one of the siderophile elements.
OK, point.
Nevertheless, asteroidal compositions (well, meteoritic compositions, assumed to be indicative of asteroids) have significantly more platinum and palladium than gold, and hydrothermal processes concentrate gold into conveniently mineable veins on Earth, but probably not on asteroids.
platinum and gold have practical uses. it would freak out the goldbugs though if it became financially feasible to get them from space and to land them.
Gold?? Who's suggesting getting gold from asteroids?
On Earth, gold veins are produced by aqueous processes. You wouldn't expect that on asteroids.
Platinum, and platinum-group metals, on the other hand-- these are siderophiles, and hence depleted in the Earth's crust. Good elements to look for in asteroids-- in fact, iridium is the very signature of an asteroid impact.
Unless they announce when and on what vehicle they are going to launch, I'm not sure you can say "they announced the plan to launch their first space missions."
It's not a plan to launch if they don't have a plan to launch.
Reddit was a positive feedback loop. Good information may have been amplified-- but bad information was, too.
Quoting from http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2013/04/19/17826915-missing-brown-university-students-family-dragged-into-virally-fueled-false-accusation-in-boston "Reddit became overnight 'one of the more ugly and disgusting places that had a lot of traffic ... There were very intense and ugly comments throughout the last 12 hours.'"
Actually, the live threads on reddit were pretty damn fast and accurate.
Fast... but not always accurate.
From the Atlantic's analysis http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/04/it-wasnt-sunil-tripathi-the-anatomy-of-a-misinformation-disaster/275155/
" The next step in this information flow is the trickiest one. Here's what I know. At 2:42am, Greg Hughes, who had been following the Tripathi speculation, tweeted, "This is the Internet's test of 'be right, not first' with the reporting of this story. So far, people are doing a great job. #Watertown" Then, at 2:43am, he tweeted, "BPD has identified the names: Suspect 1: Mike Mulugeta. Suspect 2: Sunil Tripathi."
The only problem is that there is no mention of Sunil Tripathi in the audio preceding Hughes' tweet. I've listened to it a dozen times and there's nothing there even remotely resembling Tripathi's name. I've embedded the audio from 2:35 to 2:45 am for your own inspection. Multiple groups of people have been crowdsourcing logs of the police scanner chatter and none of them have found a reference to Tripathi, either. It's just not there."
"Be right, not first" certainly failed big time.
This is pretty much useless. If people start using software filters to detect social-network frauds and spammers, the frauds and spammers will simply reverse-engineer the filter algorithm and adjust their "number of devices from which a user accesses the service, the ratio of followers to people following an account, the average number of tweets to each person, and the number of tweets to an unknown receiver" to whatever values don't trigger the fraud filter.
The spammers evolve just as fast as the filters.
The working prototype is a helicopter with an added prop on the front.
This is not a new concept. Autogyros are very old tech.
No, it's not. First, it's not an autogyro, although it apparently can operate in autogyro mode. But, more important, once it has forward motion, the rotor stops rotating and becomes a wing.
check some of the images here http://www.gizmag.com/hybrid-rotorwing-stop-rotor/27092/pictures
Congrats for Antares.
The more ways to get to orbit, the better!
Third parties are fine in the USA as long as they run canidates during primaries and not the final election. If your a liberal leaning party then the Democratic primary is your runoff election where you can get your guy in. Conservative leaning should run in the Republican primary. That is what the Tea Party has been doing.
Actually, no. Primaries turn out to make the voting problem worse, not better.
Primaries have the same ballot problems, which means that they are unreliable if there are more than two candidates. And, in the case of two candidates, the primary selects a candidate that is closest to the median position of a subset of the total voting population. What this does is means that the candidates are chosen away from the center, not toward the center.
In an idealized model of two parties with the position of voters normally distributed along some axis, the two election system would mean that the elected candidate's position randomly flips back and forth from positions plus and minus 25% away from center. (Where "25% away from center" means "75% of the voting population is on one side of the candidate, 25% on the other.)
then require that every person own a gun to protect their neighbor as well.
Add in mandatory semi-yearly safety and marksmanship training.
Also, make it part of the mandatory school curriculum. I think a major reason we have so many kids these days accidentally shooting each other is a result of the fact that the only exposure many children get to firearms is playing/watching their parents play FPS games.
Make gun safety courses mandatory for police chiefs, too-- they seem remarkably careless with their guns. One around here just shot himself in the leg http://www.vindy.com/news/2013/apr/19/former-boardman-police-chief-shoots-self/, and looking at the web, day before yesterday another one shot himself at a Boy Scout meeting http://articles.chicagotribune.com/2013-04-17/news/ct-met-boy-scout-gun-discharged-20130417_1_police-officer-retired-officer-des-plaines
Maybe mandatory gun safety courses for Vice Presidents as well-- at least they could get the "if you can't see what you're shooting at, perhaps you shouldn't shoot. Oh, and maybe you shouldn't go hunting when you're drunk."
Really, it's hard to support that "mandatory gun ownership" thing when there are so many idiots, careless people, and drunks out there.
Note that multi-party systems can work fine elsewhere.
Yes, in elsewheres that have different balloting techniques.
I'm a great fan of Approval voting, myself. But there are numerous better methods than simple plurality.
So even though this'll get plenty of knee-jerk reactions for reasons that are inscrutable to me, I'd suggest direct representational voting, or some other way to stop gerrymandering being possible, or useful.
Gerrymandering is worse than merely an accidentally bad system-- it represents deliberate attempts to subvert democracy
The system was indubitably pretty neat back when
Or at least, was pretty good for a first try.
, but hasn't scaled well. Take the ingredient principles and build something that fits the current (and future, for say 50..100 years--investigating your voting system every century for effectiveness and possible revision isn't bad) situation better. In general, some system that doesn't happen to have a two-party-only implicit system property...
The election system, as it currently exists, squeeze out third parties. Worse, however, is that if a third party does get a toehold, the main result is has on an election is to takes vote away from the major party that it's most similar to-- the "spoiler" effect. This is why in many cases third-party challengers are secretly funded by entities that oppose the platforms that the third party supports: the "divide and conquer" strategy.
So, overall, my desire for your party is that your platform should adopt all the planks that I hate. Probably your party will be irrelevant, in which case it doesn't matter what your platform is. If your party does get large enough to make a difference, that difference will manifest by your taking votes away from your politically closest competitors, so I want you to be as evil as possible.
Thus: I suggest you adopt a platform of explicit fascism.
Yes, books written in 2006 and not specifically about computer use in the 1960s are the best you can do? Weak sauce, man.
These are about the Saturn F-1 engine development, not about computers. There are other books, including some memoirs. The ones I linked have the advantage of being easily available on the web.
I wasn't trying to claim that computers didn't exist in 1960!