theothermkn

> Not human readable...

This refrain just cheeses me right off every time. Nothing is human readable! Everything requires a program to read it, because no human being can read states of charge or states of magnetic polarization directly.

What makes something 'human readable' or not is a software tool. Underlying that tool is a data format that the tool can accept and display. What everyone means when they try to sound smart by saying 'human readable' is just 'plain text.' In other words, they know where to find the dumbest possible reader/editor for it. Text editors are the dumbest possible editors because they cannot constrain edits to conform with the grammar of the interface language; they allow bugs at a point in the development process where it is trivial to disallow bugs, especially considering that interface languages should probably be, at most, regular languages.

I'll step off my soapbox, now.

This may sound a little like trivializing, but don't we have to know what "statistics" are and what "machine learning" is to say anything about the difference(s) between them?

Looking at this through even the lens of multinomial logistic regression, or of econometrics generally, I don't think that "statistics draws population inferences from a sample, while machine learning finds generalizable predictive patterns" even makes sense as a difference. Any prediction is an inference about the population of future events, or of contemporary events not present in the sample. You plug 1000s of events each described by 100 columns into a logistic regression, and you're hoping to get something predictive out of it. Further, as nice as the idea is that you can tease out "factors" from your 100 columns, you don't have to look at "3.3375905e-5 x (spent five years before age 18 in a smoker's home)" for very long to wonder how much 'explanation' you're getting out of the terms in the exponents of your probability functions.

I still can't resist tweaking ML enthusiasts and data scientists: Statistics is what people who know what they're doing are doing. Machine learning is the rest!

GP remembers correctly. From http://longnow.org/seminars/02009/jan/16/climate-change-reca... :

> In other words, the land area dedicated to renewable energy (”Renewistan”) would occupy a space about the size of Australia to keep the carbon dioxide level at 450 ppm. To get to Hanson’s goal of 350 ppm of carbon dioxide, fossil fuel burning would have to be cut to ZERO, which means another 3 terawatts would have to come from renewables, expanding the size of Renewistan further by 26 percent.

Saul Griffith has an old talk entitled "Climate Change Recalculated." The gist is that he converts everyday energy consumption into averaged watts over a day, and then looks at the energy area density of renewables. The resulting picture is rather daunting. If we go 100% renewable--If we even could!--all of our lifestyles would be radically curtailed, and this is after a construction binge of enormous scale.

We absolutely need fission and/or fusion. Of this there is no doubt.

I'm a little dismayed that your first link is, as you note, from the 80s, and that your second link is about ITER, another old design that is orders of magnitude larger than the scheme in the article, a size it must have due to the very same technical limitation that the subjects of the article are working to remove.

But that is hardly the only disappointing thing about your post; It's just fear-mongering. Of course a development reactor isn't going to be "manufactured," but "built." What prototype has ever been manufactured before it was proven? One of the very points of fusion is its low proliferation risk. I don't know why you burden fusion with "extreme safety," either. Bicycles don't have "extreme safety," and we seem to do just fine. The impact of a fusion "disaster" is probably much less than a fall off of a bicycle.

Well, there's kind of a chain of intuitions here that are off by up to orders of magnitude. First, YBCO has a critical temperature of 93K, not 23K or so as you've suggested (albeit not as a value for YBCO). In other words, there have been advances in high temperature superconductors. Second, the magnets will not heat up from having large currents running through them. This is the point of superconductors. So, this estimate of resistivity is high by several orders of magnitude. Third, any estimate of the total energy of the hot plasma that gets us anywhere near verbiage hinting at explosions is too high by several orders of magnitude. You could typically extinguish a burning plasma by blowing gently on it. Finally, the thermal gradients aren't nearly so dire as, you know, 200e6K immediately next to 90K. There is typically over a meter of, in order: near-vacuum; inner wall; flowing lithium blanket; outer wall; and liquid nitrogen or other cryogenic coolant, all between the plasma and the magnets.

This is the farthest thing from a recipe for disaster.

> [T]hose who endorse anti-vaccine views were far more likely to estimate that they knew as much as experts or doctors, when in fact their knowledge level was extremely low.

> Dunning believes that ability to self-assess is also key to the effect.

> As you gain knowledge, this confidence grows.

> Specifically, narcissistic personality seems to put DK on steroids.

That collection of quotes feeds my suspicion that extreme examples of the DK effect and conspiratorial thinking (For example: vaccine-denial, birtherism, racism as "expertise" on how the outgroup "really is," and so on.) have in common the fact that they give those inflicted a much-needed sense of control over an uncertain universe. Baseball players are known for having superstitious rituals at the mound or the plate, precisely because pitcher and batter are engaged in high-stakes, high-variability activities with unpredictable success rates. Baseball players are hardly traumatized, but imagine if they were playing for their lives, or their senses of self.

I wouldn't be surprised if the fractured way that the world is presented to us after the decline of television and the rise of the internet (with its conflicting narratives) hasn't so traumatized a fraction of the population that the only way they can construct their sense of selves as in control enough to not feel permanently precarious is to habitually steer themselves away from even the hint of dissonance by constantly asserting, "I know. I am in control. This is how it is."

One of the things having one or a few sources of national news possibly did was to give one the plausible belief that their set of beliefs was tenable, stable, and unchallenged by rivals. From a scared monkey perspective, I wonder if we got lucky with broadcast television, if the perception of unity wasn't necessary. Whereas now we seem to be constantly having to defend our perceived in-group.

The point of this ramble is that maybe the psychodynamics of DK are as simple as, 'Feeling confident feels better, and I need that, and I feel rewarded when I engage in thinking that rewards that sense.'

> As with all companies paying workers to do a job, the compensation should reflect the confluence of supply and demand in the market.

The odiousness of the use of the word "should" has been pointed out elsewhere, and I reiterate it, but there is another point to be made about this analysis: It neglects that Amazon is a monopsony or near-monopsony. As Amazon replaces other supply chains, the demand for supply-chain labor is increasingly concentrated in one buyer of labor, Amazon. We should reasonably expect a distortion in the market to occur wherein Amazon leverages their power to either reduce wages or demand more labor for the equivalent wage.

In effect, the market conditions to which the OP appeals are eroded away by Amazon's cornering of this sector of the labor market. $15/hr may be good PR, but it's not a "fair" or "market" wage if Amazon can just burn through employees with adverse working conditions (ostensibly valued at a higher rate in a real market) because of their position as the sole buyer of labor.

If we're going to apply market theory to this, we have to go all the way, and not just stop when it suits our purposes.

What a sophomoric article. For example:

> At first, the state just puts random names on the streets. This helps some, but the residents still colloquially go by the old terms they know, which causes problems for dispatch. Moreover, most of those alleys are still too narrow for ambulances to get through. The state decides on a more radical project: it’s going to plow through what it can and build new, ordered streets based on a grid. While they’re at it, they decide to make one commercial district and one residential district – it’s just a better system.

Just count the absurdities. "[T]he state just puts random names on the streets." Ludicrous. I mean, we can't even talk about this because we've lumped so many different things into the term, "state." To even begin thinking about this, we have to assume, as I'll do, a first-world democracy, for the sake of having something to talk about. I'd give even odds that in no first world democracy has "the state just [put] random names" on streets, especially where the residents have "old terms they know." Even if they did, how likely is it that no dispatcher would be, or know, a resident? How likely is complete ignorance on their part.

Then, we have: "The state decides on a more radical project: it’s going to plow through what it can and build new, ordered streets based on a grid." What? Here we can go quite a ways down the scale from "enlightened democracy" down toward "tin pot dictatorship" and we still strain credulity to think of a public welfare project where "the state" whimsically decides to "plow through what they can" and rebuild "based on a grid." (As evidenced, I suppose, by all the recently reordered neighborhoods on Google Maps, and by the news stories of the brand new kind of urban displacement that would entail.)

And they just "decide," "while they're at it," to rezone? Unlikely to the point of making one angry. It shocks the intellect.

The article is pablum, meant to rehearse a mushy market ideology so that a pathetic kind of know-it-all can feel better about their vaguely held lazy beliefs.

I think the real reason that airdropping information into North Korea won't help is that it's a slave state held hostage by a ruling family that secures aid for itself with the threat of nuclear Armageddon and the immediate shelling of Seoul. But this is also the reason that the sophistication or lack thereof of their political belief systems is irrelevant: These are not participatory governments.

I would highly recommend The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita and Alastair Smith for a reset of one's political expectations, especially for countries with resource extraction economies. The mechanics of selectorate theory can be very, very brutal.

> but in order to talk about it you need to be clear about what you're actually talking about.

We absolutely do need to know what we're talking about. For example, the seize-or-purchase dichotomy is a false one. The article mentions, for example:

> But although tree planting on such a colossal scale faces significant challenges (not least identifying who owns the land in question, and securing the rights to plant and maintain trees there), widespread efforts are already underway. [Italics mine.]

In other words, the government doesn't have to seize or purchase the land. They are after a specific right, which we could even imaging being structured, where appropriate, as a subsidized service that owners of degraded land might clamor to receive.

We could almost even suppose that the people who are presenting these figures have take these things into account, at least tentatively.

A sibling post mentioned Deming, the American who's WWII work on bomber production formed the basis for "The Toyota Way," and not in some indirect way, either. Deming went to Japan at the behest of the US to help them rebuild their economy after WWII.

As an aside, when you're reading the article and you stumble across the link to a description of how lift works, do yourself a favor and skip it. Instead, check out https://youtu.be/QKCK4lJLQHU?t=803 . Almost no matter how sophisticated or simple your theory of lift is, it's almost certainly significantly at odds with observed physical phenomenon.

You might like Matt Risinger's YouTube channel, https://www.youtube.com/user/MattRisinger . He's a builder in the Austin area who does very energy efficient homes. He uses (a variation of?) this thing called a "100-year wall" system, the gist of which is that the entire envelope of the house is sheathed and sealed, basically turning the frame of the house into "furniture," in that it's in a conditioned space. The big insight is that the vapor-barrier-on-the-inside scheme came about in climates that were mostly dry outside, and mostly moister inside, whereas large areas of Texas (and tropical and subtropical areas) are the reverse.

Wow. Three non sequiturs in three sentences.

There are sites that suggest any number of things. Unspecified "sites" have little bearing on the actual facts.

I'm not sure that Milankovitch Cycles imply the dumping of CO2.

> Hopefully we can find a way to turn that into fuel.

This is the silliest and most thermodynamically backward thing I've read in a year. CO2 is burnt carbon. It's burnt. Burnt stuff ain't fuel; it's burnt.

> I'm going to be unpopular and say I still can't see why the metrics being listed here rate higher consideration than all the threats that could reasonably be imagined over the next 40 years. The risk of running out of fossil fuels without being prepared is much more threatening than the statistics listed.

While it's unfortunate that you can't see the danger, it's comforting that that view is increasingly "unpopular."

Let's take the "risk of running out of fossil fuels without being prepared" as an example. Absolute tripe. A fiction bordering on incoherence. First of all, there is no "risk" of the scenario you have described, in the sense that the probability of "running out without being prepared" are indistinguishable from 0. Fossil fuel prices will climb. Transportation and energy prices will climb to the point that some forms of transport and some uses of energy will either become unaffordable or change to the second-best option (relative to now). This is already happening with hybrid and electric vehicles and wind and solar energy. It will just continue. We won't "run out" in the sense that we've mined the last lump of coal or pumped the last drop of oil. Rather, the costs of extraction will climb until it's no longer feasible to extract. This takes time, and one of the mechanisms that drives that time scale is cost. On this matter, we can breathe a sigh of relief.

On the other hand, the collapse of the ecosystem, or it's (or large parts of it's) sudden transition into a new dynamic regime, is not at all unlikely on the face of it. Mussel shells are an example of a large change due to ocean acidification over the last 50 years: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/mussel-shells-much-thinner-5... . Whole sardine fisheries have collapsed. (It'll be interesting to see if the increase in microplastics will build to a threshold that leads to a sudden die-off of plankton-feeding whales. It's not difficult to imagine a system with that much lag building to an irrevocable state.) The bread basket of the United States is a happy coincidence of wind-blown silt from the Rockies and weather. That good weather is moving north into Canada. These all represent signals from gigantic systems that are careening out of whack. Here, we can only cross our fingers. And hold our breath.

"Running out of fossil fuels" is not the problem. The problem is quitting them before we destroy the systems that keep us alive.

It's probably more complex than that, with more geopolitical factors involved. Right now, for example, Russia's political economy is limited by access to year-round deep water ports. China's relationship to Tibet is shaped by the fact that Tibet is basically China's watershed. The bread basket of the United States is just a bunch of fertile soil, blown off the Rockies, that happens to have landed underneath fantastic weather for corn, or wheat, or what have you. When any of those change, we're all going to become much more intimately familiar with the phrase "balance of power."

It's not going to be a case of moving near fresh water. It's going to be a case of getting tolerable living conditions subject to the political apparatuses and distribution networks that develop in response to the power structures that develop as the planet changes underneath the map and the map changes underneath our feet.

Good luck!

A quibble:

The point about meltdowns is cute, but probably wrong; the insurance against meltdown is a negative thermal coefficient of reactivity, if I understand correctly. In other words, the thermal expansion drives the fuel out into the piping as the reaction heats up, away from the compact reacting core, and also reduces the density in the core, allowing more neutrons to escape.

The article’s premise is that Li-ion can’t be disrupted because of the amount of current infrastructure built to produce them. I can’t help but hear a little desperation in this line of argumentation. I’m no expert, but isn’t this actually the kind of thing that we imagine vested interests in every entrenched industry saying just before they’re disrupted?

For example, if flow batteries take less capital to produce. Or, if they take different equipment, maybe their capital would be cheaper, given a lack of demand?

> Instead of trying to further complicate those laws to outlaw a few arcane tax strategies (likely in vain; more complexity likely leads to more arcane loopholes) we should be simplifying our laws.

The issue is that the complexity of the tax laws are a feature, not a bug. Each of those subsidies, exceptions, tweaks, hiccups, and exemptions is a payout to the members of the winning coalition in our electoral system. “Simple” tax laws would indicate an unresponsiveness by the government to the interests of the governed, by virtue of the fact that the governed have complex interests. Analyses that start and stop at “simple or complex” are thus doomed to be fruitless.

While it's easy to complain that this number is "wrong" in that the radial difference is what we always, or mostly, care about, it's worth pointing out that it does accurately represent radio communication lag times. In other words, messages sent to Mercury will get there, on average, in less time than they would take to get to Venus.

Thank you! Fixed!

> This won't ever take off once the media finds that the machine learning is biased towards some specific sex or race (particularly if such demographics are normative historically for the country at large).

I'm not sure I understand. If it is discovered, or "found" (by the media, I guess), that "these systems" are biased, I suppose that should result in them, being fixed, even at the expense of them "tak[ing] off." In your view, is that a good thing or a bad thing? Is it better or worse that "the media" find it? Also, by "normative historically," did you mean "representative?" In other words, do you mean a mathematical norm, as in an average? Or an ethical norm, as in a rule? (Hetero-normative, normative ethics, and so on.) Surely we're not talking about "correct biases?" It's just that my impression is that the language of "normative" in this context, a context which reads as sociological, is most often associated with societal, cultural, or ethical "norms," which are things that are viewed as correct in an "ought" sense.

> Just look at the contentions of prison reform automated systems and the like.

Can you elaborate? Because I think very few of us have looked at these examples. Which "prison reform automated systems and the like" have failed to "take off" due to a discovery of bias by "the media?"

Sorry for all the scare quotes. I'm just trying to piece it together and am having no luck.

Your most recent comment that is not a reply to something I've written is, in its entirety:

> "Your math is a conspiracy of the patriarchy!"

So, while I identified a tactic of the alt-right, without outright accusing you of being in the alt-right, I have to say that I'm not encouraged by this "coincidence," scare quotes deliberate. Well, I'm encouraged that I seem to be spot on in finding these rhetorical techniques. I'm discouraged at its prevalence.

This may come as a news flash, but there is a long, long history of racist scholarship in the West. And not the covert, "Well, there seem to be differences but we can all sorta be equal anyways" kind, but exactly the kind of, "Gosh, these inferior Polynesians did something better than we Caucasians. Ha! I got it! They're secret Caucasians! I knew it! See, if we go to the Sanskrit, we can see right where these inferior foreigners diverged and began their decline, holding on only to the True Scotsman, I mean, True Navigation Technique!"

> [The article] didn't need to slander folks from the past who tried to figure things out with "hurr, durr, cuz white people all racist".

I am, I suppose, as concerned as the next guy with the reputation of Professor A. H. Keane, quoted in the article describing Polynesians as "one of the finest races of mankind, Caucasian in all essentials; distinguished by their symmetrical proportions, tall stature...and handsome features," as thorough as he is do remove the Polynesians from the vast morass of ethnic inferiors. However, I still think that I'll just risk the accusation of deliberate racism against Keane, no matter how slanderous it turns out to be. I mean, gosh, first they came for the late 18th-Century scholars, and I'm doing nothing, because I'm not a white identitarian. Cats and dogs living together!

Look, if you're not on the alt-right, or if you are but you're just "concerned about some things" and not in it to win it with the Charlottesville-marching unholy dreck, then I have some bad news for you: You're a tool for some very awful people with a very retrograde, and ultimately self-destructive, agenda. Take a deep breath, because your rhetoric is their rhetoric, and you're accomplishing their ends.

> They have to stick that in along with the ole racist European trope.

Ostensibly, by "that," you are referring to the spiritual aspects of navigation noted in the article. But the "ole racist European trope" may better be classified as a plain acknowledgement of the facts on the ground. For example, the article states:

"To show that Polynesians descended from Europeans, Abraham Fornander in Hawai‘i, and Edward Tregear and J. Macmillan Brown in New Zealand, built the case at the end of the 19th century using the emerging science of linguistics to trace Polynesian languages back to Sanskrit and to European languages."

and:

"Ethnologist S. Percy Smith was one of several scholars who praised the Polynesians’ “intelligence, their charming personalities, and—one likes to think—their common source with ourselves from the Caucasian branch of humanity."

We could probably look up Fornander, Tregear, and Brown in the literature and gauge their relevance in their field. Ditto for Percy. Maybe it really is a liberal conspiracy to undermine the meritocracy. From the 1930s. Before we do that, though, maybe we should do a search on that tool of the left wing, Google, which turns up https://teara.govt.nz/en/ideas-of-maori-origins/page-2 among the top results for "aryan polynesian theory."

I think the quotes above more lend support to the idea that the article mentions in passing an accounting of the history of the (at least) sometimes racist scholarship in this area, rather than a trope. It's certainly possible that there are "factual tropes," I suppose. Nazis were, after all, pretty bad, no matter how many times we say it. (I have to say that I do think it's cowardly of people to hide behind the connotation of "fiction" in the word "trope." Like, they can't say "lie" or "propaganda" without revealing their racism, so they use "trope." Cheap.) However, calling something a "trope" in order to dismiss it as, I dunno, SJW tears or whatever, is a bit disingenuous. One might even call this common tactic an actual "trope," and a counterfactual one, of the alt-right.

> We fret every day about consumption, waste, and energy,...

I'm afraid we have to keep fretting. In the Numberphile video about the number of particles in the Universe (https://youtu.be/lpj0E0a0mlU?t=378), they take an interesting diversion to ask "How long until every particle in the Universe is inside a human being?" In other words, when will we reach the ultimate limit to growth? Well, at the current annualized population growth, it's less than 9000 years! And that scenario involves every human being at that future time floating around naked in the vacuum of space. There is no food to eat, water to drink, nor air to breathe left over.

Practically, this means a couple of things that are less than obvious. First, the best case is that we will reach a point where the growth in volume of the space we occupy will exceed the speed of light. In other words, "long" before 9000 years from now, we will either establish some sort of equilibrium, or we will run up against a hard Malthusian limit. We will absolutely be concerned about "consumption, waste, and energy" in a way that is far more focused than it is now. (The only economic models that are permitted to work are zero-growth models, practically speaking.) Second, to give you an idea of how soon this is coming, the Universe is much larger than 9000 light-years across. That is to say, even if we could manage the resource usage of our 1.011% growth rate optimally, we could never actually fill the Universe in that time frame, as it would take about 15 billion years or so if we were all flinging ourselves outward at very near the speed of light. (n retrospect, these two are restatements of the same idea.)

Finally, and most dismally, the analogous calculation for the Solar System (an infinitely more reasonable calculation to perform) must be abysmally worse and monumentally more urgent. To give you an idea, the current doubling time of human population is something like 60 years. That means, for example, that if we were to anticipate that we'd run out of meaningful room on Earth in 60 years' time, we'd have to start working on our "second home" now, to have it ready. Once it was ready, we'd have to be working on two more. Then four, and so on. Good luck with that!

(Note: After we have consumed the Earth and converted it to habitats, we will have to consume Jupiter in a similar way in about 500 years. This gets out of hand very quickly.)

EDIT: El-oh-el at the few people who's fee-fees were hurt enough by this back-of-the-envelope analysis of growth rates and resource use to downvote it. Keep fighting the good fight, no matter how lonely!

> Do you ever wonder how people felt when they say Magellan or Captain Cook set off? Or, when they watched the Apollo missions happen?

Yeah, I do wonder: https://youtu.be/goh2x_G0ct4?t=24

I think how they feel probably depends on their perspective, their financial situation, their susceptibility to public relations, and so on. Let's say everything goes "great," and there are a million people living on Mars in 50 years. Will it matter to people dying in a war, or ailing next to an open sewer, or what-have-you back on Earth that there's some depressed Martians trapped in smelly cans and covered in perchlorate- and iron-laden dust 4 to 12 light minutes away? I don't think it will.

I think that when many of us "wonder" or "imagine" what people felt like when they watched or participated in these events, what we're really doing is projecting the relief and and other pleasant emotions that we experience when we imagine them, when we use imagining them as an escape fantasy to cope with our own anxieties, to that imagined audience.

Frank Borman actually went to the Moon, and his feelings about it, are definitely situated inside of his own perspective: https://www.thisamericanlife.org/655/the-not-so-great-unknow...

It's probably important for us to face this phenomenon square on, to check in with what's really going on with our "dreams of space" or sense of Solar "manifest destiny." There's a reason that space-age propaganda seems so successful, both in its own time, where its object was removed from us only by the impassable gulf of 10 km/s, and now, when it is behind the second impassable gulf of nearly 60 years. If that reason is escapism, we should possibly check in with what it is we think we're escaping from, what we actually, really, fear. If our hope is in a fantasy, perhaps it indicates that we feel our reality is hopeless.

Only in the most general terms, and from first principles: Composite structures will have a higher stiffness per unit mass, which will cause the fundamental frequencies to be higher both for the pure structural modes and the control surface interaction modes. It's therefore likely that you'd only begin to encounter these aeroelastic modes at higher speeds. In other words, if you take the driving frequency as something like the inverse of the time it takes for air to pass over the wing, that may match the metal wing more closely than the composite wing. Modeling that stuff in a wind tunnel is very tricky, and you used to end up with these not-at-all-realistic-looking models that, nonetheless, captured some aspect of the full-scale aircraft being modeled.

Don't die. Stay in the envelope. Flutter is only the quickest way to ruin your airframe and day, not the only one.

In practical terms, flutter due to approaching transonic conditions is probably pretty rare. That kind of flutter is (mostly or most often) due to the interaction of normal shocks with the control surfaces, or coupling with an elastic mode of the wing or tail surface.

The flutter in the first video is occurring at very much subsonic speeds, and looks to be either the result of flying a purposely underdesigned tail surface, or flying a properly built one beyond its rated flight envelope. The second video contains a wide variety of flutter instances, some of them aeroelastic, some of them transonic, and so on.

One way to get into a transonic flutter, however, is to be a hotshot business jet pilot who flies higher and higher and faster and faster. The higher you go, the lower the density, so your minimum speed increases. Also, the temperature goes down, so the speed of sound decreases. Where these two meet is called "coffin corner," and you don't always have to fly yourself into it by increasing your speed and altitude; you can fly close to coffin corner, and then fly into colder air or less dense air. No matter how you get there, you're stuck. Slow down, and the wings stall, the nose drops, you pick up speed, and hit transonic flutter. Speed up to stay in the air, by dropping the nose, and you hit transonic flutter directly.

> [The speed of sound] is affected by the density of the air (which is a combination of the air pressure and temperature)...

This is incorrect. The speed of sound in an ideal gas is a function of temperature only, and not its density. Namely, it is sqrt(gamma x R x T), where R and gamma are unchanging properties of the gas.