Actually, "predicting shit that happens" is the only thing that scientists do. The problem is, the prediction must be based on models that are in turn based on measurable and reproducible observations. This means that your anecdotal "animals flee before earthquake" is out, unless you can prove that a certain species will exhibit a certain measurable behavior (i.e. "flee", but how far? Do they flee in the direction of the epicenter or away from it?) with a given certainty at a certain time-point before the quake strikes (by the way, you will also have to define when the quake "strikes": do you take only the time-point of the largest peak or do the smaller ones recorded before that also count? If so, how small?). And you'll have to show that there is not only just a correlation, but also that the animal exhibits the behavior because of the earthquake itself. Otherwise, the animal is just a proxy of another parameter that can be directly taken into account (thus sparing having to turn the geology department into a zoo). If, for example, the animal flees because the ground trembles, well, we can already measure this variable with good accuracy and take it into account in the modeling. Plus, other things cause the ground to tremble (again, I'm taking this as an example), like, i.e. passing trucks. So it is not "animals flee before earthquake" but rather "animals flee when ground trembles". Of course, the sensory apparatuses of a certain animal may be finer than our respective instruments (so then you know what to do in order to improve your prediction), or, maybe an animal takes something into account that we aren't, like smell. Then you'll have to figure out what component in the air jumps/sinks to a concentration level different than normal ("normal" being a state that you'll also have to define, of course) before an earthquake.
It is not the cryptic terminology that makes an answer more scientific, it is how you got it. We certainly have a lot to learn from animals, but we have to be careful.
It was not a financial success because, interestingly, people in the US thought it was a commie propaganda movie, while people outside the US found it to be something for and about trigger-happy rednecks. The critics said "exactly" and declared it a masterpiece.
Well PLOS ONE belongs to a different model than the journals in my discipline. I have papers in various very old Elsevier journals and never paid a dime for getting published. My employer always paid a fortune on the subscriptions though. I understand the merits of the business model such as PLOS ONE, but I think it would be even better if e.g. Elsevier just charged a reasonable price for their journal subscriptions. The rate of about $1.500 that they demand for an annual subscription that does not include old issues (which, interestingly, is the same as what took you to publish your paper) is, in my opinion much too high to justify the costs of formatting, hosting and a bit of organizational work. They don't pay the reviewers or the editors. With prices like these, we end up reading non-peer-reviewed preprints anyway (when they can be found).
Ahem. I misread the parent poster, and you misread mine.
I wrongly thought that the parent was talking about the costs for getting a paper published for the scientist (which are zero, as I mention in my post), whereas he was referring to the costs of reading the published paper. You, on the other hand, refer to the publication costs for the publishing company, which is yet another thing (and in which, of course, you are correct). Sorry for the mix-up, move along!
Education in 2030: Just pay up the college fee and move along.
At least everyone will know by then that the degree is worthless and everybody will get judged on what they can do. Then, hopefully, the system will reboot.
He could not write a simple sort on the board without consulting his notes, but somehow I was supposed to waste my time in his class.
This. To the teachers everywhere: How about inspiring the students to read your material/attend your class instead of merely counting the pages read/hours attended? Like someone else pointed out above, totally the wrong metric for judging understanding and competence.
Where I studied getting flunked was quite the norm. The tests were very hard and the professors didn't give a rat's ass about what percentage of the students passed their test. It was tough, disappointing but taught us a thing or two in the long run. Now I heard that a lot of universities check what percentage passed and blame the professor if their numbers are too low. Some professors could use the GP's argument in order to maintain high standards in an exam: Yes, 90% failed the test, but look! Most of them didn't even bother to read the book's cover.
Nevertheless, I'll take a tree in place of a solar panel any day of the week. Somehow the idea of needing more plants instead of needing more free surface for solar panels seems much more attractive, in spite of the lower efficiency of plants (unless, of course, we are talking about my roof!). Besides, a plant you can also eat, at least in part, and use the rest for energy. Let's see how you can do this with a solar panel!
I just want to point out that the fact remains that only 1% of the filers got almost a fifth of the total income. In contrast, the bottom half of the taxpayers only got 11.7% of the wealth. It is this distribution that most find unfair/disturbing. If the wealth gets more equally distributed, then we can even out the taxation as well.
zone refining of silicon is the single most expensive step in semiconductor production.
No, it definitely is not. You seem to ignore mining the quarz, breaking it up, and melting it using huge carbon electrodes in a melting pot together with coal and wood chunks, that produces lots of crappy smoke full of fly ash (that you need to clean and get rid of). You need a small power plant just to fire up the electrodes. Then you ignore letting that cool and breaking it up into metallurgical grade Si and transporting the chunks to the semiconductor factory (usually by sea or by rail). It is this Si that you can use for zone refining. Everything before that is much too "dirty".
If you use the Siemens process, that is widely used today, you need to break up the metallurgical grade Si further into particles smaller than 1 mm, letting it react with MeCl in a fluidized bed (that uses huge energy hungry ventilators and cooling systems) into various silicone chlorides. Then you need to separate these chlorides by fractional distillation, which is another energy-hungry process, to get those that will eventually form the rod from the Siemens process. This rod will be polycrystalline Si, usable only in solar panels. You need to break this up again, re-melt it and re-solidify it with the Czochralski process if you need to make electronic grade Si out of that.
Besides, from the thermodynamics point of view, melting a certain amount of Si takes a certain amount of energy and that scales linearly. The more you produce, the more energy you will require. Period. Now, the energy losses per unit volume may be less, but are you seriously telling me that the reduction in heat loss in the production of e.g. a 400 mm rod compared to a 100 mm rod is enough to make the whole production of the final wafer more energy efficient? And that this will be enough to have an impact on pricing? Really?
The price of Si, mono- or polycrystalline, did not drop because its production became more energy-efficient. The price in this case is not driven by thermodynamics. The production got larger, and so did the rods themselves and we may be using less energy per wafer than we did in the 70ies, but the price is controlled by the mere fact that all these thousands of tons of high-purity Si can be sold to people like you and me. Spending less money on producing heat will have absolutely no impact on the price, but rather on the profit margin of the Si-producing company.
Photovoltaics and computers became affordable due to economies of scale, not because it nowadays takes that much less energy to produce them. Sure, engineers made the wafer production process much less energy hungry since the 70ies with energy recovery techniques (that also require investment btw), but the main reason that they are affordable is because a company now is willing to put down 1 billion USD to build a plant and still hopes to make a profit by selling tenths of thousands of tons of high-purity Si each year. The producer of Skylab's panels only hoped to sell some panels to NASA, but that's about it. Please, do not confuse money with energy. They obey totally different laws.
Look, I didn't say that PV are no good. I said that being efficient is one thing and *shining* (as the GP mentioned) is another. What we really need to do is to stop wasting energy on vanity products and needless transportation. If we did that, then we would be having this discussion in a much more relaxed manner...
Sadly, it is not that simple. Although a solar panel certainly won't emit any CO2 when put in use, it is responsible for quite a lot of CO2 while it was being made. It will have to work flawlessly for many years before you make up from the CO2 that was released during the panel's production.
Trust me, producing high-purity Si (which is still the most widely used material for solar panels) is a pain in the ass and it takes a lot of energy. If you charge for CO2 release solar may look a bit better, but it will definitely won't shine, I'm afraid.
Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitate lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and as it always has, rock breaks scissors.
It actually did! Sometimes, when he had to run fast, he had to press down his gold chains with one hand to keep them from dangling all around his neck!
Hundreds of millions of dollars? Really? Wake me up when his funds reach the trillion mark. I thought we were discussing serious business here... And can someone please mention again why should we even care on how the North-Koreans are fairing? Oh, right they are communists... Yawn... Look, this is not the 60ies or the 70ies, the cold war is over, the Russians have gotten busy with capitalism, the Chinese wonder why *we* bother voting and the wackos north of the 38th parallel are pretty much irrelevant, WMDs or not. That, by the way, worked with Iraq, but just barely. You won't be fooling anyone now into settling such silly old business, what is done in the Korean war is done, man up and live with it. Unless, of course your space satellite, sniffing dogs or whatever showed there is oil over there, so they are pretty much fucked anyway, so just cut the crap and invade them already.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you got me. I'm a theoretician. Of course you start with the correlation, but I like getting to the bottom of things, if I can.
What additional action could we have taken that would have prevented this?
Like, you know, stop pissing people off for a change.
I love free content. In fact, I love it so much that I have created some myself and put it online. You should try it; it feels good!
Besides, what's wrong with donation buttons? I very much prefer them against an obnoxious flash commercial.
Actually, "predicting shit that happens" is the only thing that scientists do. The problem is, the prediction must be based on models that are in turn based on measurable and reproducible observations. This means that your anecdotal "animals flee before earthquake" is out, unless you can prove that a certain species will exhibit a certain measurable behavior (i.e. "flee", but how far? Do they flee in the direction of the epicenter or away from it?) with a given certainty at a certain time-point before the quake strikes (by the way, you will also have to define when the quake "strikes": do you take only the time-point of the largest peak or do the smaller ones recorded before that also count? If so, how small?). And you'll have to show that there is not only just a correlation, but also that the animal exhibits the behavior because of the earthquake itself. Otherwise, the animal is just a proxy of another parameter that can be directly taken into account (thus sparing having to turn the geology department into a zoo). If, for example, the animal flees because the ground trembles, well, we can already measure this variable with good accuracy and take it into account in the modeling. Plus, other things cause the ground to tremble (again, I'm taking this as an example), like, i.e. passing trucks. So it is not "animals flee before earthquake" but rather "animals flee when ground trembles". Of course, the sensory apparatuses of a certain animal may be finer than our respective instruments (so then you know what to do in order to improve your prediction), or, maybe an animal takes something into account that we aren't, like smell. Then you'll have to figure out what component in the air jumps/sinks to a concentration level different than normal ("normal" being a state that you'll also have to define, of course) before an earthquake.
It is not the cryptic terminology that makes an answer more scientific, it is how you got it. We certainly have a lot to learn from animals, but we have to be careful.
with the aid of a computer
Have you already filed for a patent?
It refers to AMDs "Never-Settle-Bundles ". You buy an AMD card and you get a bunch of free games.
It was not a financial success because, interestingly, people in the US thought it was a commie propaganda movie, while people outside the US found it to be something for and about trigger-happy rednecks. The critics said "exactly" and declared it a masterpiece.
Well PLOS ONE belongs to a different model than the journals in my discipline. I have papers in various very old Elsevier journals and never paid a dime for getting published. My employer always paid a fortune on the subscriptions though. I understand the merits of the business model such as PLOS ONE, but I think it would be even better if e.g. Elsevier just charged a reasonable price for their journal subscriptions. The rate of about $1.500 that they demand for an annual subscription that does not include old issues (which, interestingly, is the same as what took you to publish your paper) is, in my opinion much too high to justify the costs of formatting, hosting and a bit of organizational work. They don't pay the reviewers or the editors. With prices like these, we end up reading non-peer-reviewed preprints anyway (when they can be found).
Ahem. I misread the parent poster, and you misread mine.
I wrongly thought that the parent was talking about the costs for getting a paper published for the scientist (which are zero, as I mention in my post), whereas he was referring to the costs of reading the published paper. You, on the other hand, refer to the publication costs for the publishing company, which is yet another thing (and in which, of course, you are correct). Sorry for the mix-up, move along!
Education in 2030: Just pay up the college fee and move along.
At least everyone will know by then that the degree is worthless and everybody will get judged on what they can do. Then, hopefully, the system will reboot.
He could not write a simple sort on the board without consulting his notes, but somehow I was supposed to waste my time in his class.
This. To the teachers everywhere: How about inspiring the students to read your material/attend your class instead of merely counting the pages read/hours attended? Like someone else pointed out above, totally the wrong metric for judging understanding and competence.
Where I studied getting flunked was quite the norm. The tests were very hard and the professors didn't give a rat's ass about what percentage of the students passed their test. It was tough, disappointing but taught us a thing or two in the long run. Now I heard that a lot of universities check what percentage passed and blame the professor if their numbers are too low. Some professors could use the GP's argument in order to maintain high standards in an exam: Yes, 90% failed the test, but look! Most of them didn't even bother to read the book's cover.
Last time I checked, the costs of publication for the scientist were exactly zero (if you leave out the cost of actually doing the work, of course).
Nevertheless, I'll take a tree in place of a solar panel any day of the week. Somehow the idea of needing more plants instead of needing more free surface for solar panels seems much more attractive, in spite of the lower efficiency of plants (unless, of course, we are talking about my roof!). Besides, a plant you can also eat, at least in part, and use the rest for energy. Let's see how you can do this with a solar panel!
Very interesting. Thanks for the links.
I just want to point out that the fact remains that only 1% of the filers got almost a fifth of the total income. In contrast, the bottom half of the taxpayers only got 11.7% of the wealth. It is this distribution that most find unfair/disturbing. If the wealth gets more equally distributed, then we can even out the taxation as well.
with a very high degree of uncertainty
Gotcha!
*ducks*
zone refining of silicon is the single most expensive step in semiconductor production.
No, it definitely is not. You seem to ignore mining the quarz, breaking it up, and melting it using huge carbon electrodes in a melting pot together with coal and wood chunks, that produces lots of crappy smoke full of fly ash (that you need to clean and get rid of). You need a small power plant just to fire up the electrodes. Then you ignore letting that cool and breaking it up into metallurgical grade Si and transporting the chunks to the semiconductor factory (usually by sea or by rail). It is this Si that you can use for zone refining. Everything before that is much too "dirty".
If you use the Siemens process, that is widely used today, you need to break up the metallurgical grade Si further into particles smaller than 1 mm, letting it react with MeCl in a fluidized bed (that uses huge energy hungry ventilators and cooling systems) into various silicone chlorides. Then you need to separate these chlorides by fractional distillation, which is another energy-hungry process, to get those that will eventually form the rod from the Siemens process. This rod will be polycrystalline Si, usable only in solar panels. You need to break this up again, re-melt it and re-solidify it with the Czochralski process if you need to make electronic grade Si out of that.
Besides, from the thermodynamics point of view, melting a certain amount of Si takes a certain amount of energy and that scales linearly. The more you produce, the more energy you will require. Period. Now, the energy losses per unit volume may be less, but are you seriously telling me that the reduction in heat loss in the production of e.g. a 400 mm rod compared to a 100 mm rod is enough to make the whole production of the final wafer more energy efficient? And that this will be enough to have an impact on pricing? Really?
The price of Si, mono- or polycrystalline, did not drop because its production became more energy-efficient. The price in this case is not driven by thermodynamics. The production got larger, and so did the rods themselves and we may be using less energy per wafer than we did in the 70ies, but the price is controlled by the mere fact that all these thousands of tons of high-purity Si can be sold to people like you and me. Spending less money on producing heat will have absolutely no impact on the price, but rather on the profit margin of the Si-producing company.
Photovoltaics and computers became affordable due to economies of scale, not because it nowadays takes that much less energy to produce them. Sure, engineers made the wafer production process much less energy hungry since the 70ies with energy recovery techniques (that also require investment btw), but the main reason that they are affordable is because a company now is willing to put down 1 billion USD to build a plant and still hopes to make a profit by selling tenths of thousands of tons of high-purity Si each year. The producer of Skylab's panels only hoped to sell some panels to NASA, but that's about it. Please, do not confuse money with energy. They obey totally different laws.
Look, I didn't say that PV are no good. I said that being efficient is one thing and *shining* (as the GP mentioned) is another. What we really need to do is to stop wasting energy on vanity products and needless transportation. If we did that, then we would be having this discussion in a much more relaxed manner...
Sadly, it is not that simple.
Although a solar panel certainly won't emit any CO2 when put in use, it is responsible for quite a lot of CO2 while it was being made. It will have to work flawlessly for many years before you make up from the CO2 that was released during the panel's production.
Trust me, producing high-purity Si (which is still the most widely used material for solar panels) is a pain in the ass and it takes a lot of energy. If you charge for CO2 release solar may look a bit better, but it will definitely won't shine, I'm afraid.
I'm Greek, you insensitive clod!
Scissors cut paper, paper covers rock, rock crushes lizard, lizard poisons Spock, Spock smashes scissors, scissors decapitate lizard, lizard eats paper, paper disproves Spock, Spock vaporizes rock, and as it always has, rock breaks scissors.
It actually did! Sometimes, when he had to run fast, he had to press down his gold chains with one hand to keep them from dangling all around his neck!
Hundreds of millions of dollars? Really? Wake me up when his funds reach the trillion mark. I thought we were discussing serious business here... And can someone please mention again why should we even care on how the North-Koreans are fairing? Oh, right they are communists... Yawn... Look, this is not the 60ies or the 70ies, the cold war is over, the Russians have gotten busy with capitalism, the Chinese wonder why *we* bother voting and the wackos north of the 38th parallel are pretty much irrelevant, WMDs or not. That, by the way, worked with Iraq, but just barely. You won't be fooling anyone now into settling such silly old business, what is done in the Korean war is done, man up and live with it. Unless, of course your space satellite, sniffing dogs or whatever showed there is oil over there, so they are pretty much fucked anyway, so just cut the crap and invade them already.
I tried reading your comment, but I got into an infinite loop between lines 2 and 3. Could you please add a loop counter and repost? Thanks.
Yes, but it is always September 11th, never the 11th of September.
It is just a matter of what sticks (i.e. what is used most in the media).