All of us benefit from being the heirs of the industrial revolution. Even the poorest of us have better health and nutrition than before. We all have better health care than the mightiest king did 300 years ago. Yet for the average person who lived during the industrial revolution life was poor hell. Craftsmen and herders were sent into Dickensian factories and mines. I hope we can live long enough for the majority of citizens to see a benefit from our present computer revolution.

Posted previously Jan 23, 2013

Of particular interest to casual users, from the list of changes in 7.0: "Debian wheezy comes with full-featured libav (formerly ffmpeg) libraries and frontends, including e.g. mplayer, mencoder, vlc and transcode. Additional codec support is provided e.g. through lame for MP3 audio encoding, xvidcore for MPEG-4 ASP video encoding, x264 for H.264/MPEG-4 AVC video encoding, vo-aacenc for AAC audio encoding and opencore-amr and vo-amrwbenc for Adaptive Multi-Rate Narrowband and Wideband encoding and decoding, respectively.

Find me a "casual user" who can comprehend the above paragraph.

The Trisops machine at the University of Miami.

Trisops was an experimental machine for the study of magnetic confinement of plasmas with the ultimate goal of producing fusion power. The configuration was a variation of a compact toroid, a toroidal (doughnut-shaped) structure of plasma and magnetic fields with no coils penetrating the center. It lost funding in its original form in 1978.
The configuration was produced by combining two individual toroids produced by two conical pinch guns, located at either end of a length of Pyrex pipe with a constant magnetic guide field. The toroidal currents in the toroids were in opposite directions, so that they repelled each other. After coming to an equilibrium, they were adiabatically compressed by increasing the external field.

Disclosure: I am one of the authors of the cited paper in the article and the author of the above Wikipedia article

I suspect that the Net saves energy. Someone using Netflix ( whose major energy consumption is from the TV, not the Internet) is not driving several miles to the theater. In the last few years miles driven per person has been decreasing, especially for the youngest drivers. Some of this comes from a bad economy, but some probably comes from substituting hanging out at Facebook, rather than a the mall.

A trip to the movies, say 20 miles, one gallon of gasoline in a typical car contains about 33KWH. By any measure this is much much greater than any concievable use for watching a flick at home. Add to that shopping online rather than driving to the mall, you have a net savings

There is lot of confusion, since the term "geothermal" is used for two different technologies. The first is digging deep to hot rocks and using water to extract the heat and doing something with it. This has been used for over a century, but has a lot of problems with it.

The other is going a few feet down to use the ground as a heat source or sink for a heat pump/air conditioner. The latter is what is used now. The problem is that the cost of digging and laying the pipes sometimes cancels out the energy savings.

For more see this comment

Ron Paul cannot get elected to dog catcher on the national scene.

We denigrate politicians because they lie, but candidates who tell the truth don't get elected.

City by Clifford Simak ( reviews here) tells an opposite tale. Here are the opening lines.

‘These are the stories that the Dogs tell when the fires burn high and the wind is from the north. Then each family circle gathers at the hearthstone and the pups sit silently and listen and when the story’s done they ask many questions:

“What is Man?” they’ll ask.

Or perhaps: “What is a city?”

Or: “What is a war?” ‘ (Page 1.)

The book was first published in 1952, and has won some awards. I read it as a kid, and still remember the impact it had on me.

Most mammals live for a billion (10^9) heartbeats, humans live about 60 years, twice as long. One theory is the Grandmother Effect. That is having older women share the burden of childrearing aided in the children's survival.

In the 1980s, Kristen Hawkes and James O'Connell spent time with Hadza hunter-gatherers. They noticed that the older women in the society spent their days collecting tubers and other food for their grandchildren. That was the proverbial fallen apple that sparked Hawkes' interest in the Grandmother Theory, which says that humans evolved to live so long because grandmothers were around to help take care of the young'uns.

Even better, string them along and give them a fake credit card number (The first 4 digits must be from a real number). When that fails, give them another fake number. When that fails express surprise that they keep calling back in spite of giving fake numbers on previous calls.

All of us benefit from being the heirs of the industrial revolution. Even the poorest of us have better health and nutrition than before. We all have better health care than the mightiest king did 300 years ago. Yet for the average person who lived during the industrial revolution life was poor hell. Craftsmen and herders were sent into Dickensian factories and mines. I hope we can live long enough for the majority of citizens to see a benefit from our present computer revolution.

We denigrate politicians because they lie, but candidates who tell the truth do not get elected.

From the IEEE spectrum's article Chernobyl's Stressful After-Effects

Perhaps most widespread are psychosomatic illnesses--even in not-too-contaminated areas, there has been a large upswing in stress-related physical ailments, notably stomach and autoimmune disorders. In fact, morbidity and mortality due to such disorders may well in the end exceed sicknesses and deaths caused by radiation.

Also see the book Toxic Turmoil (one review here)for more discussion of the role of stress in disasters.

We should note the Chernobyl's radiation release was an order of magnitude greater than Fukashima's .

Every time the homicide rate goes up or down, we all cast about for causes. The usual suspects, the economy, policing, and number of prisoners, do not work out. The changes are usually national, while policing and prison policies differ over the country. Crime rates were low in the Depression, are low now, in our deep recession and were high during the prosperous 80's.

The historian David Hackett Fischer, in his book "The Great Wave" (one review here ) using over 700 years of British records shows that the homicide rate and inflation are closely correlated. High inflation, high crime, low inflation low crime. It certainly holds for the examples above. Fisher himself concedes that correlation is not causation, but it rules out the usual explanations.