Space travel is 10% science and 90% demonstrating that you can lob a nuke around the earth. But, hey, it's that 90% that pays for the science.
I think you're projecting Cold War history on everyone else. India doesn't have any particular need for ICBMs, if they're going to start a shooting war with anyone it'll probably be Pakistan and they're right next door.
So why are they testing the Agni 5, with an 8,000 kilometer range?
The answer is that they want to deter China, which they fought a war with in 1962 (China attacked them). There are also outstanding territorial disputes with China holding territory claimed by India (and held by India before being taken from them by force), and then there are India's sharp disagreements about Chinese policy in Tibet. And the general dislike most major nations have about other nations holding the threat of nuclear firepower over their heads without a way to respond.
The assumption that India is "going to start a shooting war" is unwarranted.
Any government service that isn't privatized or going to contractors will be cut in the near future.
If you're well connected to the political organs of our neo-consevative (and neo-liberal) empire, you can expect a fat paycheck from John Q. Taxpayer.
Anyone against globalization. Against austerity. Or against the currently administration has been clearly identified as an enemy of the state. Your execution papers are in the mail.
Right - if the NIST offered to privatize this, and have a company transmit the signal, with the same budget (or maybe higher, for that private sector profit incentive) then the Republicans would be fine with it. And the CEO of the company would of course kick back part of his salary from the venture to the party, just to show his appreciation. That's how it works with prisons.
Worse still, since until now they didn't have to provide a justification to access the database some of those accesses were likely cases of spying on love interests. It happens with every secret investigative system. Even when there are good controls to prevent it, some people do it anyway and get snagged. Its called LOVEINT in the spy world.
A fair number of people riding the Metro take auxiliary transportation modes with them - bikes, scooter (powered and unpowered), and skateboards all which are large metal containing objects, in addition to various other cargos. Subways aren't planes - people take them to go shopping, and there is no "cargo hold" or a place to "check baggage" - people carry everything they are taking on their person. Also people are often moving pretty fast to make it from one line to the next in their commute. What happens when one of these monitors triggers? Though they do have Metro Cops, they have never had enough to have them posted routinely at every Metro entrance or transfer point. How is this really going to work?
And does the "mass casualty" standard make any sense? Two of the worst mass shootings in the U.S. history - the Luby's (24 dead) and Virginia Tech (33 dead) massacres - were done with hand guns - both of them polymer frame Glocks that have less metal than standard handgun designs.
Sorry but Nina Teicholz is a fraudster, who has been successful in building an empire pushing dangerous nonsense. This site (thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com) provides excellent detailed exposures of her BS. What is come down to is that essentially nothing in her magnum opus "The Big Fat Surprise" is true, and the attacks an Ancel Keys are without merit. Teicholz is not mistaken, she is engaging in deliberate deception.
Don't believe me? Go to the site, read what Seth Yoder reveals about Teicholz's lies (and plagiarism) and then look up the references he decides and compare. I did this for a whole raft of his citations, and every single one of them checked out.
A typical undercounter fridge is around 60w, and has start-up spikes over 1kw - but you're correct they should be able to run a fridge. I live off solar in northern Europe so how the hell they can't live off solar in Australian is a mystery. I can only assume they don't know what they are doing and charging a pathetic leisure battery
A 1 kW spike seems high, I am looking an actual refrigerator spec that says the peak, worst case draw is 6.5 A in the US (780 watts), but with a battery backing it they should have no trouble with the very short surge.
Boaters deal with these issues too. I've got to think that a solution also exists in the boating community.
Take a look at the houses in the story. Nice circular doorways, round rooms. They could use some sprucing up of the paneling and such, but it looks like a Hobbit burrow.
The average energy drain of modern refrigerator is 25-40 watts. Actual power drain while the compressor is running is 100-150 watts. If they have any power at all on a 24 hour basis they should be able to run a refrigerator, though perhaps not open the door for part of the day to keep the compressor from kicking on. Since they do have power part of the day for sure, a 0.5 kWh battery should cover the refrigerator nicely.
They are still in the ship, awaiting removal. They have been defueled, but the reactors are still there. Deciding how to do that is a large part of the question.
The TFA says one option is:
The Navy would allow industry to scrap the non-nuclear parts of the ship but preserve a 27,000-ton propulsion space containing the reactors. The propulsion space would then be transported to Puget Sound Naval Base, where the reactors would be removed and sent to Hanford.
only Linux filesystem supported for storage of the Dropbox sync folder starting the 7th of November will be on a clean ext4 file system. This basically means Dropbox drops Linux support completely, as almost all Linux distributions have other file systems
As i happens I do have Dropbox on an ext4 partition - but I didn't think that made me a freak.
The gauntlet has been thrown down! We need a poll to survey/. readers for the file system they have on their Linux machine (you "other people" don't get to vote on this).
Woo woo - 100% free renewable power! But no mention of up-front capital costs. Given that batteries wear out and have to be replaced, some discussion of life-cycle cost would be interesting.
The summary links to a poor quality, ad-filled site, but this seems par for the course for/. these days. Even a tiny bit of effort Googling brings up more data though.
The entire project cost $8.8 million to install 13.5 MWh of storage, or $650/kWh, which is pretty good. The NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) estimates the lifetime of a grid battery at 10 years. Estimates of swapping out new for old runs $250 kWh (the infrastructure and controllers are still in place, old batteries are recycled) so the average annual replacement cost runs $350,000, or about 3.8% of the original capital cost.
Better for two reasons, it actually provides some data about the battery installation (it is 13.2 MWh of storage) and the site isn't packed with auto-play unstoppable video ad force-feeding like the FastCompany site.
But American Samoa, the U.S. territory, got Tesla batteries two years ago. This installation is 6 MWh, but since the population is much smaller (55,000 vs 195,000 for Samoa) it is enough to run the main island (Tutuila) for three days without needing any power production, and is nearly 100% renewable powered now.
... is exactly why humans values these stones so highly. Sure, they're hard, but thats a pretty niche use. Apparently they look pretty. To me they just look like bits of glass which also doesn't tarnish. I honestly don't get why our species craves this stone so much.
This one is really easy.
Marketing.
At one time diamonds really were rare, or at least humans had not found the abundant sources of them (diamond pipes scattered over three continents). And nothing else on Earth was known that was hard as the diamond or, when free of inclusions, had such a high chromatic dispersion (that "fire" in cut stones). They were rare and very remarkable.
But then the diamond pipes of South Africa were discovered in 1870 and they were not rare any more, they threatened to be demoted to "semi-precious".
But never fear, monopoly capitalism to the rescue! Cecil Rhodes began acquiring and consolidating mining claims on the largest pipes, using "persuasion" at times to get the reluctant to sell (just like George Hearst and the Comstock Lode) and established control over the supply, and could limit production and sales as he saw fit.
Then DeBeers, as the company Rhodes founded was called, began one of the world's longest running and most successful advertising campaigns. Convincing women the world over that their prospective spouses did not love them unless they spent big bucks on cartel price controlled diamonds. Before the Twentieth Century there was no tradition anywhere of giving diamond engagement or wedding rings. It was impossible before the South Africa discoveries, they were too rare. But after the African strikes, suddenly this rare thing, while still claimed to be "rare", was so common that every woman in the world could have several.
It was only around the time that the Baby Boomers started being born, after WWII, that diamond engagement rings became common in the first nation to adopt this very modern "tradition" -- the United States. Before the 1940s the fraction of marriages involving such rings was in the single digit percentages (and even that was due to post turn-of-the-century marketing campaigns). But DeBeers founded a marketing organization, the"American Gem Society" (sounds very professional and unbiased) in 1934, and aggressively promoted the love=diamonds equation through the 1930s and 1940s.
And then in the 1950s some of the other unique qualities that of diamonds became "less unique". Synthetic gemstones where manufactured that exceed the chromatic dispersion of diamond -- cubic zirconia and silicon carbide -- it not longer held the record for fire (of course the American Gem Society held that such stones were "too fiery", only diamonds had "just the right amount"). Things got a little more complicated when deposits of natural silicon carbide gemstones, called moissanite, were discovered. Suddenly the ultra-fiery silicon carbide was a real gemstone after all, but only if they were mined in Africa and sold by a "gemologist" (a label making the profession gemstone purveyor sound like a scientist), cheaper synthetics ones were still "fake" (though exactly the same material).
The hardness record however diamond still holds. Other materials nearly as hard have been found, and there are theoretical predictions of harder materials, and when dealing with super-hard materials problems of defining and measuring hardness arise, but diamond is still the unqualified record holder. But now we can make them much cheaper than market-controlled selling price, even in gem quality versions. This fall DeBeers, which gave up its cartel control 20 years ago, is going to start underselling natural diamonds with its own line of synthetics. Up until now the synthetic diamond makers had been participating in the de facto cartel that still exists, refusing to undersell. I knew someone would break this line some day, and thought maybe it would be wild cat Chinese producers. But that DeBeers itself decided to capture this market makes perfect sense.
And beyond a certain point, the strength of the vehicle -- or lack thereof -- does compromise safety.
Beyond a certain point anything is a reductio ad absurdum fallacy.
Safety really isn't about strength. A very strong, very stiff body might be fine in a crash, but the occupants would be dead as they suffered an extremely high deceleration when the strong, rigid body came to a very sudden halt. Modern cars are safer because they collapse in a controlled manner in a front or rear end crash, reducing the forces that the occupants experience.
Claiming that Malthus "has been wrong for 120 years" shows you have no idea what you are talking about (for one thing I believe you want to say "220 years" since "An Essay on the Principle of Population" was written in 1798).
Malthus was describing the actual state of affairs of the world in which he lived, and which included all of human history up to that time, and remained correct for the next 140 years everywhere, and then was still correct for another 15 years for most of the world.
Agricultural productivity increase, the topic about which he was writing, remained had advanced very slowly something like 0.01% a year for thousands of years. Growth in population (to the extent it occurred) was mostly from bringing more land under agricultural use. After the start of the Industrial Revolution helped this increase to about 0.4% a year, mostly by the industrial importing of nitrates from finite natural deposits, and by the broad extension of agriculture - especially in the New World (the old process, but extended to a new area, which artificially inflates the world average productivity increase). So from Mathus time to 1925 - 125 years - the world population doubled once, one billion to two billion, with 1/8 of that increase due simply due to the expansion of farming area in North America, and much of the rest in bringing backward areas up to the productivity level of efficient 1800 (or for that matter ancient) farmers, and the increase in farming of more productive natural crops (such as potatoes). All of these factors were limited in what they could accomplish - there is a finite amount of arable land, only so many backward farmers to bring up to best practice standards, only potatoes are potatoes. And only rich countries could afford to mine (and exhaust) guano deposits.
During all the ages before Malthus, and for well over a century afterward, populations the world over remained bound by the nearly fixed productivity of the land, exactly as Malthus said.
But something happened in 1938 in the United States. Agricultural productivity in the U.S. (yield per acre) had been increasing at rate of about 0.0% a year (that's right, no measurabl increase) extending back as far as records go in the 19th century. But in 1938 the rate suddenly switch to 3% a year. This was the start of the Green Revolution, which has not stopped yet. Agricultural productivity began doubling every 25 years.
Part of the explanation for this can be attributed to one single industrial process - the Haber process for fixing nitrogen. Starting about 1920 this process began flooding the world with cheap fixed nitrogen, inexhaustible as long as energy supplies are around to fuel it. Currently 2/3 of world's population is alive because of the Haber process, its nitrogen output exceeds all natural nitrogen fixation processes on land. Without it the world population would have plateaued around at little more than 2 billion. Half of the nitrogen in bodies of human's world wide is was fixed by Haber nitrogen, rising to maybe 3/4 in the U.S.
The development agriculture, and crop varieties, that depend on heavy nitrogen application is a large part of the Green Revolution.
In summary, Malthus was always right that agricultural productivity limited human populations, and that there were few chances to increase that productivity -- until 1938. So he was right for all of history before 1798 plus 140 years. Actually he is still right, it is just that with cheap unlimited nitrogen, and scientific crop breeding, and pesticides (to a lesser extent) we have not hit a new ceiling yet.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm kinda wondering, considering how Indian cars and trucks are made, if wood will be one of the construction materials in their space vehicles?
The nose fairing of the Trident II D5 SLBM, the United States most powerful ballistic missile, uses Sitka spruce.
So if India knows what it is doing, it very well may.
Space travel is 10% science and 90% demonstrating that you can lob a nuke around the earth. But, hey, it's that 90% that pays for the science.
I think you're projecting Cold War history on everyone else. India doesn't have any particular need for ICBMs, if they're going to start a shooting war with anyone it'll probably be Pakistan and they're right next door.
So why are they testing the Agni 5, with an 8,000 kilometer range?
The answer is that they want to deter China, which they fought a war with in 1962 (China attacked them). There are also outstanding territorial disputes with China holding territory claimed by India (and held by India before being taken from them by force), and then there are India's sharp disagreements about Chinese policy in Tibet. And the general dislike most major nations have about other nations holding the threat of nuclear firepower over their heads without a way to respond.
The assumption that India is "going to start a shooting war" is unwarranted.
I think that is offensive to cryptkeepers everywhere.
Any government service that isn't privatized or going to contractors will be cut in the near future.
If you're well connected to the political organs of our neo-consevative (and neo-liberal) empire, you can expect a fat paycheck from John Q. Taxpayer.
Anyone against globalization. Against austerity. Or against the currently administration has been clearly identified as an enemy of the state. Your execution papers are in the mail.
Right - if the NIST offered to privatize this, and have a company transmit the signal, with the same budget (or maybe higher, for that private sector profit incentive) then the Republicans would be fine with it. And the CEO of the company would of course kick back part of his salary from the venture to the party, just to show his appreciation. That's how it works with prisons.
If it's so useful, it should be able to be self funding.
Like police and the military. They are useful, so maybe they should be self-funding too.
You really do not want to go there.
Worse still, since until now they didn't have to provide a justification to access the database some of those accesses were likely cases of spying on love interests. It happens with every secret investigative system. Even when there are good controls to prevent it, some people do it anyway and get snagged. Its called LOVEINT in the spy world.
Are you sure it isn't an even bazillion? Y'know, while we are just making stuff up.
Of course there was plenty of money to give a big tax cut to the rich and cash heavy corporations back in December.
A fair number of people riding the Metro take auxiliary transportation modes with them - bikes, scooter (powered and unpowered), and skateboards all which are large metal containing objects, in addition to various other cargos. Subways aren't planes - people take them to go shopping, and there is no "cargo hold" or a place to "check baggage" - people carry everything they are taking on their person. Also people are often moving pretty fast to make it from one line to the next in their commute. What happens when one of these monitors triggers? Though they do have Metro Cops, they have never had enough to have them posted routinely at every Metro entrance or transfer point. How is this really going to work?
And does the "mass casualty" standard make any sense? Two of the worst mass shootings in the U.S. history - the Luby's (24 dead) and Virginia Tech (33 dead) massacres - were done with hand guns - both of them polymer frame Glocks that have less metal than standard handgun designs.
More on Teicholz's errors, plagiarism and fraud.
Sorry but Nina Teicholz is a fraudster, who has been successful in building an empire pushing dangerous nonsense. This site (thescienceofnutrition.wordpress.com) provides excellent detailed exposures of her BS. What is come down to is that essentially nothing in her magnum opus "The Big Fat Surprise" is true, and the attacks an Ancel Keys are without merit. Teicholz is not mistaken, she is engaging in deliberate deception.
Don't believe me? Go to the site, read what Seth Yoder reveals about Teicholz's lies (and plagiarism) and then look up the references he decides and compare. I did this for a whole raft of his citations, and every single one of them checked out.
A typical undercounter fridge is around 60w, and has start-up spikes over 1kw - but you're correct they should be able to run a fridge. I live off solar in northern Europe so how the hell they can't live off solar in Australian is a mystery. I can only assume they don't know what they are doing and charging a pathetic leisure battery
A 1 kW spike seems high, I am looking an actual refrigerator spec that says the peak, worst case draw is 6.5 A in the US (780 watts), but with a battery backing it they should have no trouble with the very short surge.
Boaters deal with these issues too. I've got to think that a solution also exists in the boating community.
But watts over the course of hours is energy, the product of power and time. Try again.
Take a look at the houses in the story. Nice circular doorways, round rooms. They could use some sprucing up of the paneling and such, but it looks like a Hobbit burrow.
That means no fridge running all day and night.
The average energy drain of modern refrigerator is 25-40 watts. Actual power drain while the compressor is running is 100-150 watts. If they have any power at all on a 24 hour basis they should be able to run a refrigerator, though perhaps not open the door for part of the day to keep the compressor from kicking on. Since they do have power part of the day for sure, a 0.5 kWh battery should cover the refrigerator nicely.
Rated "troll" but I thought is was funny!
Good satire!
Not "spread around the ship", they are all in the same section, next to the turbines to which they provided steam.
They are still in the ship, awaiting removal. They have been defueled, but the reactors are still there. Deciding how to do that is a large part of the question.
The TFA says one option is:
The Navy would allow industry to scrap the non-nuclear parts of the ship but preserve a 27,000-ton propulsion space containing the reactors. The propulsion space would then be transported to Puget Sound Naval Base, where the reactors would be removed and sent to Hanford.
only Linux filesystem supported for storage of the Dropbox sync folder starting the 7th of November will be on a clean ext4 file system. This basically means Dropbox drops Linux support completely, as almost all Linux distributions have other file systems
As i happens I do have Dropbox on an ext4 partition - but I didn't think that made me a freak.
The gauntlet has been thrown down! We need a poll to survey /. readers for the file system they have on their Linux machine (you "other people" don't get to vote on this).
Woo woo - 100% free renewable power! But no mention of up-front capital costs. Given that batteries wear out and have to be replaced, some discussion of life-cycle cost would be interesting.
The summary links to a poor quality, ad-filled site, but this seems par for the course for /. these days. Even a tiny bit of effort Googling brings up more data though.
The entire project cost $8.8 million to install 13.5 MWh of storage, or $650/kWh, which is pretty good. The NREL (National Renewable Energy Laboratory) estimates the lifetime of a grid battery at 10 years. Estimates of swapping out new for old runs $250 kWh (the infrastructure and controllers are still in place, old batteries are recycled) so the average annual replacement cost runs $350,000, or about 3.8% of the original capital cost.
Pretty darn good! Woo hoo!
Better for two reasons, it actually provides some data about the battery installation (it is 13.2 MWh of storage) and the site isn't packed with auto-play unstoppable video ad force-feeding like the FastCompany site.
But American Samoa, the U.S. territory, got Tesla batteries two years ago. This installation is 6 MWh, but since the population is much smaller (55,000 vs 195,000 for Samoa) it is enough to run the main island (Tutuila) for three days without needing any power production, and is nearly 100% renewable powered now.
... is exactly why humans values these stones so highly. Sure, they're hard, but thats a pretty niche use. Apparently they look pretty. To me they just look like bits of glass which also doesn't tarnish. I honestly don't get why our species craves this stone so much.
This one is really easy.
Marketing.
At one time diamonds really were rare, or at least humans had not found the abundant sources of them (diamond pipes scattered over three continents). And nothing else on Earth was known that was hard as the diamond or, when free of inclusions, had such a high chromatic dispersion (that "fire" in cut stones). They were rare and very remarkable.
But then the diamond pipes of South Africa were discovered in 1870 and they were not rare any more, they threatened to be demoted to "semi-precious".
But never fear, monopoly capitalism to the rescue! Cecil Rhodes began acquiring and consolidating mining claims on the largest pipes, using "persuasion" at times to get the reluctant to sell (just like George Hearst and the Comstock Lode) and established control over the supply, and could limit production and sales as he saw fit.
Then DeBeers, as the company Rhodes founded was called, began one of the world's longest running and most successful advertising campaigns. Convincing women the world over that their prospective spouses did not love them unless they spent big bucks on cartel price controlled diamonds. Before the Twentieth Century there was no tradition anywhere of giving diamond engagement or wedding rings. It was impossible before the South Africa discoveries, they were too rare. But after the African strikes, suddenly this rare thing, while still claimed to be "rare", was so common that every woman in the world could have several.
It was only around the time that the Baby Boomers started being born, after WWII, that diamond engagement rings became common in the first nation to adopt this very modern "tradition" -- the United States. Before the 1940s the fraction of marriages involving such rings was in the single digit percentages (and even that was due to post turn-of-the-century marketing campaigns). But DeBeers founded a marketing organization, the"American Gem Society" (sounds very professional and unbiased) in 1934, and aggressively promoted the love=diamonds equation through the 1930s and 1940s.
And then in the 1950s some of the other unique qualities that of diamonds became "less unique". Synthetic gemstones where manufactured that exceed the chromatic dispersion of diamond -- cubic zirconia and silicon carbide -- it not longer held the record for fire (of course the American Gem Society held that such stones were "too fiery", only diamonds had "just the right amount"). Things got a little more complicated when deposits of natural silicon carbide gemstones, called moissanite, were discovered. Suddenly the ultra-fiery silicon carbide was a real gemstone after all, but only if they were mined in Africa and sold by a "gemologist" (a label making the profession gemstone purveyor sound like a scientist), cheaper synthetics ones were still "fake" (though exactly the same material).
The hardness record however diamond still holds. Other materials nearly as hard have been found, and there are theoretical predictions of harder materials, and when dealing with super-hard materials problems of defining and measuring hardness arise, but diamond is still the unqualified record holder. But now we can make them much cheaper than market-controlled selling price, even in gem quality versions. This fall DeBeers, which gave up its cartel control 20 years ago, is going to start underselling natural diamonds with its own line of synthetics. Up until now the synthetic diamond makers had been participating in the de facto cartel that still exists, refusing to undersell. I knew someone would break this line some day, and thought maybe it would be wild cat Chinese producers. But that DeBeers itself decided to capture this market makes perfect sense.
Cars aren't about strength. They're about safety.
And beyond a certain point, the strength of the vehicle -- or lack thereof -- does compromise safety.
Beyond a certain point anything is a reductio ad absurdum fallacy.
Safety really isn't about strength. A very strong, very stiff body might be fine in a crash, but the occupants would be dead as they suffered an extremely high deceleration when the strong, rigid body came to a very sudden halt. Modern cars are safer because they collapse in a controlled manner in a front or rear end crash, reducing the forces that the occupants experience.
Non-rich person says that rich people do not pay enough in taxes.
Ideological Troll says: "You are just envious of the rich! You could never get rich yourself! You just want OTHER PEOPLE to pay more taxes!"
Very, very rich person says that rich people do no pay enough in taxes.
Ideological Troll says: "Then why don't you just pay more yourself?"
To Ideological Troll no one ever has standing to say rich people should pay more in taxes. But oddly, anyone has standing to say they should pay less.
I, for one, welcome our new tardigradian overlords!
Claiming that Malthus "has been wrong for 120 years" shows you have no idea what you are talking about (for one thing I believe you want to say "220 years" since "An Essay on the Principle of Population" was written in 1798).
Malthus was describing the actual state of affairs of the world in which he lived, and which included all of human history up to that time, and remained correct for the next 140 years everywhere, and then was still correct for another 15 years for most of the world.
Agricultural productivity increase, the topic about which he was writing, remained had advanced very slowly something like 0.01% a year for thousands of years. Growth in population (to the extent it occurred) was mostly from bringing more land under agricultural use. After the start of the Industrial Revolution helped this increase to about 0.4% a year, mostly by the industrial importing of nitrates from finite natural deposits, and by the broad extension of agriculture - especially in the New World (the old process, but extended to a new area, which artificially inflates the world average productivity increase). So from Mathus time to 1925 - 125 years - the world population doubled once, one billion to two billion, with 1/8 of that increase due simply due to the expansion of farming area in North America, and much of the rest in bringing backward areas up to the productivity level of efficient 1800 (or for that matter ancient) farmers, and the increase in farming of more productive natural crops (such as potatoes). All of these factors were limited in what they could accomplish - there is a finite amount of arable land, only so many backward farmers to bring up to best practice standards, only potatoes are potatoes. And only rich countries could afford to mine (and exhaust) guano deposits.
During all the ages before Malthus, and for well over a century afterward, populations the world over remained bound by the nearly fixed productivity of the land, exactly as Malthus said.
But something happened in 1938 in the United States. Agricultural productivity in the U.S. (yield per acre) had been increasing at rate of about 0.0% a year (that's right, no measurabl increase) extending back as far as records go in the 19th century. But in 1938 the rate suddenly switch to 3% a year. This was the start of the Green Revolution, which has not stopped yet. Agricultural productivity began doubling every 25 years.
Part of the explanation for this can be attributed to one single industrial process - the Haber process for fixing nitrogen. Starting about 1920 this process began flooding the world with cheap fixed nitrogen, inexhaustible as long as energy supplies are around to fuel it. Currently 2/3 of world's population is alive because of the Haber process, its nitrogen output exceeds all natural nitrogen fixation processes on land. Without it the world population would have plateaued around at little more than 2 billion. Half of the nitrogen in bodies of human's world wide is was fixed by Haber nitrogen, rising to maybe 3/4 in the U.S.
The development agriculture, and crop varieties, that depend on heavy nitrogen application is a large part of the Green Revolution.
In summary, Malthus was always right that agricultural productivity limited human populations, and that there were few chances to increase that productivity -- until 1938. So he was right for all of history before 1798 plus 140 years. Actually he is still right, it is just that with cheap unlimited nitrogen, and scientific crop breeding, and pesticides (to a lesser extent) we have not hit a new ceiling yet.