I'm actually a bit surprised that no one ever talks about using grid-connected electric cars as distributed storage. It would cut everyone's range down by a bit, but as more and more pluggable electrics and hybrids are manufactured, the ability to set the last 10 or 20% charge as on-demand storage seems like it might be viable.

It would require some pretty smart grid tech, but we are working on that anyway.

The problem with load balancing is real, though. In Alberta, they have already capped the fraction of supply from wind because basically all the wind in the province is in one fairly small area, and if it supplies more than about 3% of the total they have a lot of issues when the wind drops.

Why, exactly, would you consider the papers that don't talk about a topic when considering whether there is a consensus of support for that topic or not? If you were seeking to see if a dog would make a good pet, how many books about orangutans would you read? Also, the Cook paper also clearly states what percentage of the papers took a position on climate change (32.6%) in the abstract.

According to your logic, we can lower the support level for any topic by simply including more papers that don't take a position on the topic. It doesn't even have to be climate change. Why not gravity, the round-earth hypothesis, or religion. Hey, if we include enough irrelevant papers we can get the consensus level down to 0.0001% for anything.

Following methodology of Legates (geographer), Soon (astrophysicist), Briggs (statistician), Monckton (public speaker), I can prove that gravity is a lie since only 0.01% of papers in the category of science specifically affirm that the force is real and affecting us. That's what they did to get only a 0.3% endorsement of the consensus view of climate change, they included papers that have nothing to do with global climate change to dilute the results. The Cook paper found that 97% of the papers that took a position favoured the consensus view.

Because, as we all know, an ideologically Libertarian political "think tank" funded by gas and coal owners is clearly the most reliable source of information on the effects of pollution released by the gas and coal industries and whether that pollution requires government intervention. There is absolutely no bias, no politics and no conflict of interest there.

Frankly, it seems par for the course that you rarely understand what you are reading when it concerns climate change.

See this? This is why you come off as a lunatic nutjob with a paranoid obsession about feminists.

You have repeatedly lied and distorted the truth, and when confronted with your paranoid delusional twisting of facts, you focus on one tiny aspect of the commentary so you can ignore the substance of the argument. It is not me who is lying here, friend. It is you. Frankly, it looks like you need serious psychiatric help. Go get some.

>You can detect single bit errors with a simple parity bit

You can detect (2^32-1)/(2^32) of every possible failure pattern with a CRC. With a combination of a multiple bit error correction algorithm (with most correction schemes n bits can be corrected with 2n redundant error correction bits) and then the CRC can be used to tell if you correctly corrected the data.

If you're so smart, why aren't you advocating using BCH codes or Reed Solomon codes or some form of forward error correction code over code and data stored in flash so random bit errors in flash won't affect the code that is stored in the flash? What is your super clever alternative?
 

They didn't do any ECC on the flash memory? I thought these people were rocket scientists.

There are (almost) no muons produced by fission. Fission events produce energies of around 200 MeV. Muons have a mass of just over 100 MeV. The phase space available for muon production is essentially nil because so much energy is almost always carried away by the fission products. Basically, to make a muon you have to have everything else stand still. The production rate isn't quite zero, but is close enough to it to not matter.

The technology they are using in this case is to look at cosmic ray muons passing through the reactor core. Similar technology was used to look for undiscovered chambers in Egyptian pyramids in the 80's, if memory serves: cosmic ray muons have ridiculous amounts of energy (they are the bane of neutrino physicists because no matter how deep the lab the muon signal is still appreciable, even under a kilometer or rock. SNO, which is one of the deepest labs in the world, is 2 km down and muons are still detectable, although only at rates of a few per day if memory serves.

None. However, a few will be killed by C++ programmers. I say this as someone who has written code to guide surgeons, but my mantra was: "The surgeon is in control", and I have in fact seen surgeons over-ride the guidance information the software gives them.

Driverless cars are actually less likely than humans to screw up, I think, but it'll take another decade to prove that. Software engineering is still a nascent field, but in another generation or three it will be at a point where we can be somewhat confident in most critical code. Unfortunately, it will still be dependent on hacked-together operating systems and heuristically designed hardware...

We are having a bit of a moment with some wack-jobs in the "Conservative" Party of Canada at the moment, which is actually a radical populist party that is opposed to everything conservatism in this country has ever stood for (fiscal probity, institutional stability, Westminsterian democracy...)

A few of the loonier tunes, like Justice Minister Peter McKay, seem to believe that women have no agency (or at least that's what one infers from his attempts to push a "Swedish model" prostitution law through the system) and I believe former party leader [*] Stockwell Day is on record for a Young Earth.

This has more to do with the wonderful (and I do mean that seriously) randomness of our electoral system, which is capable of electing a majority government with 35% of the vote, as well as the institutional disarray of the Liberal Party in the past decade. We're reasonably likely to throw the bastards out next year, although the Liberals have more than a few loonies of their own.

[*] The history of the CPC is complex, but Day was the leader of one of it's fore-runners about ten years ago.

The report says nothing of the kind. Did you read it? GMOs and nuclear power are mentioned as divisive issues, but there is no data on the ranking of people against them.

The Globe and Mail article says, "Canadians also expressed the lowest level of reservation about science and its impacts. Compared with the U.S., Europe and Japan, far fewer Canadians said that they thought science is making our way of life change too fast."

Sounds about right.

Canadians are generally very aware that our lives would be miserable if it weren't for science and technology keeping us safe and warm and fed. We have our tree-hugging reactionaries, of course, but they have far less influence than you might think despite the vast amounts of noise (and I do mean "noise" in the information theoretic sense) they generate.

It is if the person you're pointing out is not a hate-monger, isn't it?

You're like that guy who denounced Tinky-Winky for being gay. Delusional and convinced of your righteous ways.

Sure I am. Go ahead and tell yourself whatever it takes to justify your actions and to dismiss any and all criticism.