Jim DiGriz

I'm using 13.10 right now, although I don't use Unity and I'm running cinnamon on top of a Lubuntu install. And yes, its very easy compared to decades past, but the first piece of advise I would have to give someone is to crack open a terminal window and add the xorg-edgers PPA to get the nvidia-331 driver -- which I'm finding very stable and fast -- but if never opening a "cmd script" and doing everything from the GUI is a requirement, then really, no, stick with windows. There are still issues you can hit where there's no GUI button to press to fix the problem, and you have to type.

I was more WWIVnet and DragCit.

You should forget Linux then. Its really not that painful, but you'll have to crack open a terminal session to get it done.

Generally as a dev you're damned if you do and damned if you don't. If you don't ship the bleeding edge Right Nowz then you get beat up by people wondering why it takes you so long, while if you skip your Q/A and acceptance cycle and ship something early then you wind up breaking in edge conditions you skipped testing and users come at you with pitchforks because you busted all the things. Revving our internal Q/A to be as complicated as what some of our customers are doing with our product is a constant challenge. Not surprised they're just working on getting 4.2 out the door as 4.3 is getting released, that's actually really not too bad...

Yes... when learning docking this was that thing that I kept going "why don't they just... *this*"

And we didn't because of the success of regulations banning CFCs worldwide.

The heating of the stratosphere is dominated by the UV absorption by ozone, which is why it has an inverted temperature with height. As you increase CO2 you affect its ability to radiate in the LW IR while not significantly affecting its ability to gain heat, hence it cools. That "not significantly affecting its ability to gain heat" is important for layers below it. For those layers, the stratosphere does not provide any significant thermal blanketing effect for outgoing IR radiation as we increase CO2 and we have to look at the relative balance between the increase in ability to absorb and radiate and the answer cannot be worked out in a toy model and must be integrated. The answer is that you get a greenhouse effect.

You can go argue with what Pierrehumbert writes in this article and in the comments section here: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2007/06/a-saturated-gassy-argument He literally wrote the book on the subject. They're imbalanced by a tiny enough fraction that we're warming up. It cools the stratosphere, it does not cool the planet. Again, see comments by Pierrehumbert.

Special Relativity is very deeply 'baked in' to QM. So QM doesn't get you out of SR, it actually requires it. If it weren't that way, we'd be accelerating protons to FTL in the LHC.

Okay, lets say that we look at the bigger picture and say that Higgs field is part of a Grand Unified Field Theory. Lets also assume that there are X and Y bosons out there waiting to be found which violate baryon conservation and mediate proton decay. If we could harness a strong enough beam of those, maybe we could learn to catalyze proton decay, liberating a total mass conversion drive for a nuclear photonic rocket. Not quite as sexy as an Alcubierre drive, but nuclear energy currently only liberates about 0.1% of the mass-energy of the fuel, while this would be ideally 100% energy conversion with an Isp of light speed -- but that is with perfect collimation and if some of the energy escapes as neutrinos or other weakly interacting massive particles then there would be inefficiencies. If you look at some of the jets coming from black holes those are radiating energy at something like 60%(?) of the infalling matter, so approaching total conversion is something that does exist in the universe, we just haven't figured out how to harness it yet. If I was writing a science fiction story, the massive amounts of supersymmetric particles that it sprays out in all directions would radiate as a shockwave of information travelling at light speed through the Universe announcing that we had achieved interstellar travel and detectors on other planets would pick this up, and that's when the warring alien races look our way... As the number of systems that information hits would increase geometrically with time/distance, it would only be a relatively short matter of time before first contact. The Higgs alone wouldn't get us there, but it'd be a step in that direction...

Yeah, big +1 on this. I think you should get big immediate payoffs for bringing samples back, and that there should be a continuous trickle of passive science collection from bases and probes (that are appropriately equipped). The goo and the science container should probably only be for sample collection -- the other instruments should only be for passive. Sample collection should probably be one-shot-per-biome/level so you don't have to grind through sample collection. EVA and crew reports should also be one-shot and not grind, maybe you allow crew reports to transmit back, while EVAs they need to return or something -- well, not sure that makes sense... But, for passive science collection an unmanned probe should really trickle slowly, while a manned base with some really heavy piece of science-oriented gear should trickle a lot faster. Presence of Kerbals doing the collection should be a big bonus over unmanned missions.

That is at sea level. You're raising an argument that is over 100 years old. Arrhenius first postulated that CO2 increases could lead to a warming climate in 1896, and Angstrom in 1900 raised the problem that you cite here that water vapor saturates the IR spectra and that increasing CO2 will not result in any change in emissivity. The problem is the CO2 is well mixed in the atmosphere from the surface high into the stratosphere and in the 1950s studies by the USAF and meteorological studies found that the stratosphere was very dry. At that level, increasing CO2 will block IR, and if you block IR at any level of the atmosphere you create a thermal blanket effect which warms the levels below it. See the entire discussion here on the history of the CO2 greenhouse effect, and its references: http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm We can also use satellites to measure both incoming and outgoing radiation and we can see that its not in balance so can observe the greenhouse effect, and we can use satellites to watch the IR lines for CO2 get wider as CO2 levels increase. eg: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v410/n6826/abs/410355a0.html We know from the ice age records, though, that there's positive feedback loops running between temperature and CO2, though, and that the biosphere doesn't stabilize CO2 like that. We're also chopping down the Amazon and causing massive peat fires, so we're actively reducing any effect of the biosphere to mediate our CO2 release. Assuming the crops aren't wiped out by massive weather disasters. Those are some wildly confident assertions with nothing to back them up.

A lower bounds on the magnitude is pretty easy to get to from looking at the feedback loops that are required to explain the ice ages. We know they're driven by Milankovich cycles driven by orbital variations, precession, etc in the Earth, but the effects on solar insolation alone don't give enough of a response to cause the observed temperature shifts in the ice age temperature record. The lower limit isn't up for much debate. There is always the chance that we melt methane clathrites in the Ocean and cause a PETM-type event in which case you have a (geologically) sudden and massive positive feedback loop, so the upper bound on feedback are fairly unlimited.

CCS is expensive, a chunk of the energy the plant produces needs to go back into capturing the CO2 and would roughly double the cost of electricity generation in the US, plus you have to ensure that CCS really sequesters it and it will not leak, there's the same risk of causing earthquakes as fraking (which probably means insurance costs gets interesting), and then it hasn't been demonstrated on a commercial scale yet. If all the problems were sorted out with it, it'd be great, but none of that looks very appealing right now.

Need an over-40 club and also a senior citizens subforum... =)

Yes, but speaking as a software developer, since 4.3 only came out a week ago, I'd be a bit surprised to see this in the next release of KSP. They might have been anticipating the release and already working on prereleases of 4.3, but generally you don't slot things like this into a release cycle that is already underway.

I'm turning 42 in a bit over a month...

Do something about the inverse relationship between hot girls and sanity?

Best thing to do is to largely get off of the Internet, get away from the politics and start reading about climatology. A good start is here: http://www.amazon.com/Earths-Climate-William-F-Ruddiman/dp/0716784904 That's a completely accessible undergrad-level introduction. If you want to get aggressive the graduate level text is here: http://www.amazon.com/Paleoclimatology-Third-Edition-Reconstructing-Quaternary/dp/0123869137 You probably don't want to read this one, but for atmospheric physics and modelling: http://www.amazon.com/Principles-Planetary-Climate-Raymond-Pierrehumbert/dp/0521865565 Then look for primary literature and published studies. For example, if you want to know about the relative strengths of man-made CO2 forcing vs solar activity, volcanism, aerosols, etc you can start here with a 2004 paper: http://www.cgd.ucar.edu/ccr/publications/meehl_additivity.pdf If you want to read what climate scientists say who are engaged in the political debate go to http://www.realclimate.org/ That site is bloggy and has a political bent, but if there's some global warming news that gets splashed all over Fox News, wait a few days and go see how real climate scientists tear apart the bad science. If you have a particular "but what about argument X against global warming in mind?" you can probably start here: http://www.skepticalscience.com/argument.php Again, that site is necessarily more political, but the 'advanced' answers are typically well-referenced. If you want hard statistical science with an unapologetic political edge to it go here: http://tamino.wordpress.com/ There was a really good online book about climatology that walked through the whole history of climatology from Arrhenius in 1896 to the present, but i had a bookmark catastrophe awhile back and haven't re-found that one... And there's a whole subject of "geoengineeering" around what we could do if we assume that we're going to have rising CO2 levels and we have to meet that problem with some way to extract CO2 out of the atmosphere or to cool the planet via changing some other variable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering Most of those strategies are impractical, or the side-effects make them kinda sketchy. The most plausible way to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere would be to dump iron in the ocean and cause massive plankton blooms and rather than artificially doing photosynthesis, just use the oceans to do it (leading to jellyfish explosions and causing a total collapse of the world's fisheries?). One guy has already started to try this as a bit of a geonengineering guerrilla: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_George

You're also completely missing time dilation and length contraction. You're looking at the 5000kg increasing, but the 10m/s is also not constant -- the meters change and the seconds change as well. Honestly, I did this stuff 20 years ago (I'm old) and I've forgotten how to do that. I have sat in a sophomore college physics class and showed that physics still works when you apply all three of the changes to the problem correctly, but its a bit tedious. The rocket explanation in the sci.physics FAQ is entirely correctly but also uses hyperbolic trig functions (sinh, cosh, tanh) which makes the problem easier but is probably not very familiar. If you want to learn more about SR, by far the best intro book is: http://www.amazon.com/Spacetime-Physics-Edwin-F-Taylor/dp/0716723271 If you read that, when you come back to that FAQ answer, it'll make more sense.

There is quite a lot of coal in the ground, over 1000 GtC. CO2 response in ppm CO2 is roughly half of that value -- 500ppm CO2 just by burning all the coal. Pre-industrial CO2 levels were 275 ppm, we're now around 400ppm. That would kick it up to around 1000ppm CO2. You're correct that CO2 has a half-life of around 50 years in the atmosphere so it depends on how fast we burn it all up, but if you assume we are unrestrained in our acceleration of fossil fuel burning we can do that on the order of 50-ish years, and throw in oil and nat gas (and lets not talk about methane release from fraking nat gas) and 1000ppm CO2 is probably conservative. From paleoclimatology, the last time the Earth saw levels that high was roughly 40 million years ago -- and the Antarctic had melted. Once you put the poles melting on the table, you get ice-albedo-feedback for one since the ice caps at the poles reflect radiation back into space, and that leads to further warning, so that even if you decrease the CO2 levels you have to take the time to re-freeze the whole Antarctica. There's also a feedback between high temperature as a cause and higher CO2 as an effect -- so that once temperature changes have taken hold, the biosphere actually produces more CO2 and doesn't wash it out as effectively, so you can't consider just the half life of CO2 without considering that you're bumping the equilibrium up to higher values all along the way. There are a whole lot of feedback loops that occur which make it likely that if we hit 1000ppm that the Himalayas will melt in 300 years or so, and Antarctica will be gone (probably on a longer timeframe like 1000 years, which is still a blink of a geological eye). So, it will return, but it took 15 million years from the Eocene maximum until the Antarctica reglaciated. And the globe was clearly habitable the whole time. We're not going to sterilize the planet through CO2 by any means. The problem is what kind of issues we cause ourselves in the meantime and what the cost is. Humanity will also survive (assuming we don't kill ourselves through strife and nuclear war or secondary effects like that). But far from having to worry about the Antarctic melting, we already are likely to have an ice-free Arctic in the summer months. There's evidence, and a strong reason to believe, that this is already changing weather patterns, and leading to very strong atmospheric blocking and a series of heat waves and (seemingly paradoxially) cold snaps, leading to a rapid rise in the number of billion-dollar weather disasters per year (more than can be accounted for just by land usage and inflation). You also dump more heat in the atmosphere and you energize weather systems. You have more moisture in the atmosphere so that rainfall is on average heavier -- and even snowstorms are on average heavier (they'll still occur and when they do they'll be more energetic). And then sealevel rise and inundation is terrible for communities living close to the sea (lots of them being very poor and not having any ability to mitigate the problem).

Sounds like you might have hit the issue I hit somewhere 2-3 years into college where all the Math classes were too detached from physical examples for me, and were just pushing symbols around on paper and I had a hard time learning from the Math profs (there was something almost 'linguistic' about their approach to Math and the pure symbol manipulation), while the Physics profs were just unbelievably sloppy at teaching Math and either assumed too much or explained too little and took all kinds of short cuts. I managed to find some good Applied Math profs and some Physicists who taught some really good Mathematical Physics courses and connected up the Math to the underlying Reality of it. I'm not sure what to do if you hit this wall at the stage of doing advanced algebra though. At that point it was pretty obvious to me what the applications were. Trig and Geometry are obviously critical. You can't really understand Newtonian Gravity like in KSP without physics and derivatives and integrals and infinitesimal distances. Parts of Algebra are a bit more ponderous, but you need it to get to Calculus.

"The engine is fueled by mass, so as mass increases, so does its fuel supply" that's your problem right there. there's a principle in relativistic physics that all physics is local, which means you have to look at the picture of what is going on with the object you're considering, in the reference frame of the object. as an aside, this is why black hole singularities at the event horizon aren't really singularities. it looks like a singularity to an outside observer, but that isn't local physics. when you look at the reference frame of something falling into the black hole the singularity at the event horizon disappears and physics works fine, and you fall through the event horizon (assuming a large enough black hole you don't get ripped apart by tidal forces first). what is important here is to consider "what does the map of the universe look like to a given observer?". to an observer well outside the black hole in flat space somewhere, their 'map' has a singularity at the event horizon of a black hole. when you look at and observer falling into the black hole their 'map' does not contain the singularity at the event horizon. its the same universe, but you have to apply a change of reference frame to switch between the two views... getting back to the mass problem... from the perspective of an observer in the rocket, its mass does not increase. time flows normally. lengths are measured with a ruler normally. the rocket drains its fuel and pretty much works just like it does in KSP. its the outside observer who sees the mass of the rocket increase. the problem there is that the mass of the exhaust also increases and the mass of the propellant increases, etc. you can do a translation to show that physics still works even if you do the math in the reference frame of the outside observer, but its more difficult to keep it all straight at first -- you have to increase the mass of everything in the problem, then shrink the lengths, then apply time dilation. its much easier to realize that to the kerbal in the rocket the mass will decrease exactly like it does non-relativisitically -- there is no mass increase in the reference frame travelling with the rocket. the kerbal on the rocket will step on a scale (a magical scale with a g-force of 9.8m/s that you can use in space) and measure their weight to be the same as their weight back on kerbin.

FWIW, I just upgraded to 13.10 and installed the nvidia-331 drivers from xedgers and already have the GL_THREADED_OPTIMIZATIONS turned on, and noticed a significant improvement. I think the latest ISA MapSat has been blowing out my RAM and the upgrades seem to have reduced memory pressure. (I haven't tried 64-bit yet, but after installing MechJeb it seems like ship transitions are getting slow again, so may need 64-bit to solve the 4GB problems...) nvidia-331 drivers are here: https://launchpad.net/~xorg-edgers/+archive/ppa BTW, I'm searching this thread for information on hotkeys interacting with plugin windows... With MechJeb or Kerbal Alarm Clock or whatever, when I type in the windows I'm also getting the action translated through to the space ship which is kinda problematic. Entering numbers will cause the warp to change. On the map view it bounces around a bunch. I assume if I ever needed to hit the spacebar in a window while looking at a ship that it'll do an unwanted stage separation which gets into catastrophic mission issue... Is there a fix somewhere for this? I'm sort of assuming its Linux behavior...