CPL.Luke

jackson the net generation of american workers is going to be less educated than the previous. Fewer people (per capita) are going to college.

when you run a fusion reactor you usually use isotopes of hydrogen and get helium as a by-product, you could theoretically continue burning the helium and all the other elements up until iron and still get energy, but after iron you put in more energy than you get out of the reaction, thus if you kept burning the iron and such up until you got to uranium or somethin like tha you would have put in alot more enery than you get out.

hmm I can't tell if thats sarcasm or not, but assuming its not a years salary for an education that will effectively prohibit you from working that year will of course be good for society in the long run.

hmm like the US higher educaion system? look how that turned out. $50,000 a year for some of the schools that run on a free market system.

meh money doesn't solve everything, we would still have the same technical difficulties that we do now, its just that we would build more prototypes, and not neccessarily make improvements.

there are farmers in NYC? I must have missed the vast fields of corn behind the towering skyscrapers last time I visited. The federal government primarily provides funding for education, the states still control the curricullum. I would also appreciate you not inferring that I had good parental involvement, I'm not saying that I didn't, but your construing my story to fit your argument. anyway back to the main topic, Pangloss you seem to be operating under the assumption that there is a lack of peple in the sciences due to a lack of interest, but I can show hard evidence that this is not the case. http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/emp.pdf scroll down to the graph showing physics phd emoployment in various fields, you'll notice that in most fields significantly more people are forced to enter into post-doc positions than permanent jobs. According to a number of peopleon another board people will get stuck in these jobs for 10 years or more, having to move every 2 years and let unable to work on their own projects. the problem is not in the supply, its in the demand.

hmm what level courses are these? 100? I know that at my university most of the 100 level courses are set up so that if you have a pulse and show up for the midterm and final you'll pass. This is the result o the university putting a very large gen ed requirement on students, the courses for you major are good, however the basic ones are crap.

the tests are a good idea, however they aren't being done subject by subject. There is nothing wrong with a national subject test. There is something wrong with national tests that are aplied to everybody. Whats been happening recently is that the tests are being applied to everybody, so people who would normally go on to be mechanics are kicked out of shop and forced to learn algera which won't help them. they don't benefit from the education and they get bored. So they don't do work, so they fail, and because we can't fail more than a certain portion of people we lower the standards. There is nothing wrong with not desiring a higher education, or wanting to just become a mechanic. There used to be big programs inside of companies that would higher people fresh out of high school and after 10 or 15 years have them running their own garages (you can make more money than most people with a college education in this fashion). Some people desire a life like this, and they can be damn good at it. Why force them ito something they don't want? the lowering of the stndards also goes on to effect other students who under normal circumstances would want a college education, they end up thinking they're to smart to do work (which they can be right about in HS), they do poorly and slip through the cracks while others breeze right on through without learning anything. Jackson I did sy that they could go on to college after dropping out. Thats what I did, and for comparison I went from being in the bottom 4 of a class of 400 to being in the top 3 percent of the country on the GED test. To me that shows a fatal flaw in the education system.

also the chinese version of the test, while more difficult, also just contains a bit of visual trickery. th problem is really just two kies overlayed on eachother, and then rotated to hide the natural relationships, the problem is actually very simple and merely requires several applications of the UK analogue, which is typical of chinese education. Western education usually emphasises more conceptual understanding and as such the UK test only wanted to know that you could do the problem. (although perhaps the extra difficulty is required to create a good distribution)

Also speaking from experience the only bright students who clear the system early are the ones who get fed up and drop out, to then go on to college or other bigger and better things. Quite honestly I despise this bill. We need more money for the sciences, however it needs to go to expanding the job market, and opening up new professorships. Right now the main reason that the hard sciences are doing poorly in america is the poor allocation of funds that are destroying them as a carreer path. Take a stroll by physics forums to here jut how difficult it is to find a job as a physics professor/ independant researcher in today's market. We are literally graduating more than two times more phds in physics than there are professorships offered. Also the bill ignores some fundamental aspects of academia and the sciences, namely that its a smarty pants competition. The best people get the recognition, and their work goes on to be remembered and taught to future generations. Science education should be geared with that in mind, creating more oppurtunities for gifted students to excel, if this can' be done in a conventional high school setting, then the magnate school programs should be expanded. The sciences are not a case of training sub-par people to perform well enough to get a job to get by on, you must train the best to be better. (not to say that if more funding is allowed then you can accept more people into these programs, but the funding should always be allocated to the top performers, and hen as more becomes available trickle it down) Also how does a highschool teacher benefit from getting a phd if their intention is to continue teaching highschool? shouldn't those spots be reserved for people who have the intention of using the knowledged gained in post-graduate education to do real work in those fields. (also a post-graduate degree will do nothing for say a highschool physics teacher's ability to teach students, it would only be of actual use if they were working on the side) All this bill means is that people like me will have a harder time distinguishing ourselves in the job market, and that there will be fewer jobs per graduate.

solve the first one as two different differential equations. for the second one what level is this at, I assume no boundary conditions/ fourier knowledge is known? if so than say that the solution is a product phi(x) psi(y) then try and get all the parts of the equation that depend on y on one side, and all of the ones that depend on x on the other. than you can claim that both sides have to be equal to a constant and thus you are solving two ode's that you should know how to do.

the light should have induced a slight current, and may have resulted in the initial imbalance, from there I'd imagine it would be exponential.

actually you can theoretically create warp drives, its just thatat his time nobody could imagine how to build a device that would accomplish this. For instance the Alcubierre metric shows that it is possible. It is also theoretically possible to fold space time and create worm holes and such, but again nobody knows how to make it happen.

also one thing that a number of students in foreign countries miss is that in America there are several dozen schools that would be considered top notch, with the "best" depending greatly on the person and on what major they are looking for. For instance in the technical fields several schools come to mind princeton, MIT, georgia tech, UVA, uchicago, caltech,UCSB,UCLA,UC stanford, RIT,U wisconson, Rutgers, U Minnesota, Brandeis, Northeastern, BU, Carnegie Melon... although caltech only has about 800 students and tends to specialize in the sciences rather than in engineering. Also yale and Harvard are very good but I don't know about there engineering programs (however they are considered among THE BEST schools in the US)

despite the blatant heresay "oil is said to be $20 a barrel" the point of bringing up copper was just an example of where production of a resource will be very accurately modeled through the use of a peak theory. it wa never my intention to indicate that there would be a crisis from the lack of copper or anything like that, like you said there are a million alternatives. The question is does the same exist for oil/fossil fuels?

meh, you could get just as destructive oscillations from high amplitude waves, the energy would be the same and you wouldstill have constructive interference, albeit with far more amoshperic drag. as for leaving the cable untethered that would lead to a base end that flys around wildly at even the slightest gust, I would not want to be on such a cable, also the point of the elevator is to reduce energy costs, making it so that it has to be raised and lowered constantly would lead to the whole thing being useless. remember in order for this thing to make dollars and cents sense it wuold have to bring the cost of launching down by a factor of 10-100

but thats just the rhetoric, this isn't really a war in the traditional sense of the word.

20000 newtons is the sam as 2000 kilograms resting on top of the post, which is equivalent to about 4000 lbs resting on top of the post, should be sufficient however its hard to say how fast it would be driven in.

POM I do agree with pangloss that another thread should be created to discuss certain specifics, if a thread gets over 5 pages it loses readers, and eventually will be flooded with new people who read up to page 2 or 3, and then posted something that has already been adressed. Or they go and read the lat few pages and do the same thing. think of this thread more as one on the existence of a peak, and this discussion has settled the matter of whether it exists or not as much as is likely to happen. Starting a new thread on say the reporting methods or something like that will lead to new discussion and keep each one individually focused/

Jackson personally I feel that the free market/ minor government intervention (once the peak becomes readily apparent) will mitigate any major recession, in the graph I posted with inflation adjusted oil prices there were a number of highlighted areas where the economy had gone into recession. an apparent pattern is that the recessions started when the oil price rose dramatically, and then after a year or so end as the economy adapts. I would never underestimate the free market, however some prudence is always warrented when it comes to a fundamental sector of the economy. Pangloss, and Jackson: if you look back in the thread, I have never once said when peak oil will occur, just that it will. My oppinion on how when it will occur from the charts presented would lend me to think that it will occur sometime between 2015 and 2030 although I am slowly beginning to think it will be sooner. I would very much disagree with you pangloss on your interpretation of events here. My last post did not just label my oppinion as being mathematically correct, I layed out the argument on how peak theories for any resource are developed, and that the only way to disagree with the conclusions of said theories are to show that the assumptions don't match the problem at hand, if I were to go to any one of my professors and try to prove or disprove a solution to a problem without using one of these arguments I would get laughed at. One example where peak theories haven't worked very well would be fisheries. Due to te fact that fish can have good years and produce a large number of new fish, it is hard to say whether or not you are harvesting more than are produced. Similarly when some fish species are theatened in a given area they tend o migrate to others, andthen return the next year. There are a million reasons why you can' apply peak predictions to some types of fish. However for a resource like copper, we can be relatively certain that there is no way for copper to be reproduced, and we can also calculate how much copper there is on the entire planet, and about where it should be in the mantle from newtonian mechanics. We can then deduce how fast this resource will peak and be depleted from available information. this would be an area where peak theories are very important and very relevant. When you look at peak oil you have to decide whether or not the peak theory can be applied, and the only way for it not to be applicable is for there to be a stream of oil coming in to replenish all of our old supplies, as no evidence for this has been presented ever in the hundred year history of oil harvesting, it is safe to say no such mechanism exists (you could debate me on this as it is a matter of oppinion on whether the lack of evidence for this rules out its existence). In the absence of such a mechanism which provides more oil than we consume peak oil is an incontrevertable fact. Like Jackson has said we may not know the exact date of oil peak, and the unknowns may be very large and thus make it almost impossible to give a date with any sort of certainty for peak oil. I anyone here made that argument my oppinion would differ from theres, and again at the end of the day I would just say that we don't agree. but to say that the whole of peak oil is wrong without providing any sort of argument to show that peak theory doesn't apply to it (or that the theory itself is incorrect), is plane and simply wrong. If you said that to any mathematician he would laugh at you.

Pangloss, if you look back a number of threads you will see that I have disagreed with POM a number of times, I've seen him argue points like this over and over again, and the only thing that he has ever claimed as fact is that oil will peak and then decline. That is an incontrivertable mathematical fact for any resource which is consumed at a rate greater than the rate at which it is produced. I personally don't see how you can say POM has been waging a war of attrition on this one, on almost every new post some new pieces of evidence has emerged that casts doubt on your point of view. And yet you simply say that you don't feel the evidence is a valid indicator, and post your argument about how companies stopped drilling new wells at some point even though the price was skyrocketing, you challenged whether oil wells have ever actually peaked, and we produced evidence that had shown they had. Peak oil is a mathematical fact, the only thing that would prevent this from being true is if there was some vast oil producing mechanism in the earth that continually resupplied the earth with oil at a rate greater than or equal to the rate at which it was extracted, as there has never been any evidence for such a mechanism, and plenty of evidence against it we can assume it doesn't exist. You can have an oppinion on anything in the world except a mathematical truth, as a mathematical truth is by definition a logically proven concept, and there is no way around it. You can have an oppinion on just about everything else in the world other than that however, and you could easily make the argument that such a mechanism like the one I mentioned above does exist and possibly provide evidence in that direction. I suppose the source of my frustration in this thread is that you are arguing against a mathematical theorem, and when debating such a topic there is necessarily a right and a wrong answer, as the math will always produce the same answer using the same inputs, and the same approximations. The only way to have a valid oppinion on why something mathematical is not true, is to show that one of its assumptions is fundamentally incorrect, or that the math was done in an incorrect way. In the case of a peak theory you have one fundamental assumption 1. that the resource is being used at a rate greater than that at which it is produced If you were to argue that this scenario is not the case with oil I would still respect your right to your oppinion, but as this is not the case, and instead you are arguing against peak in a way reminiscent of poster's arguing that Relativity is wrong, or that Quantum Mechanics is wrong. I have a hard time leaving with that same respect for your oppinion.

Pangloss at this point in he discussion I'm afraid that enough evidence has been shown to demonstrate that your oppinion is wrong as to bring this discussion to the point of requesting direct reciepts and radar reports for the appolo landings in order to accept that they occured. thus in a normal line of discourse this would be the time when you should be showing us some evidence that says that your oppinion/interpretation is correct. otherwise if you refuse to get involved in backing yourself up we should then agree to shake hands and walk away. I simply don't see why only one side of this debate has had to present all the evidence, all the projections, and all of the cited claims. And the other side gets to sit back and say I don't agree, thats not the right interpretation etc.

pangloss pom just posted a case where an oil fiel had peaked in 92 nnow they are pulling 1% oil and 99% water out of each well. Also while oil prices are high somebody is going to get permits to drill oil wells, it doesn't matter if some other company can get a higher marin by importing it, there's sti a margin to be made by pumping the domestic stuff. And if prices going up nearly 5 times wasn't enough to bring production up what will 20x? 50x? 100x? I personally think that if prices ever get that high were already screwed and oil would be to expensive to use anyway. also take a look at the curve hubbert made with the one that actually happened http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Hubbert_US_high.svg

pangloss thepoint is that the price rose dramatically between 1970 and 1980 and then began to decline to argue that US production peaked in 1971 due to it not being economical to pump the oil out anymore is ludicrous, the price sky-rocketed to almost 5 times what it was when production began to decline, why in god's name would production decline during a time of all time high prices, and the prices didn't return to their normal level until 1985 or so.

Pangloss you're pricing timeline is way off, take a look at the timeline for inflation adjusted prices, and then look at US oil production. http://www.wtrg.com/oil_graphs/oilprice1947.gif actually it looks like that graph had its peak cut off around 1980 where prices hit $90 per barrel, heres what appears to be a better graph from a worse source http://trendlines.ca/price%20per%20barrel%20infl%20adj%201970-2005%20cotd.gif ^note that the graph originates from chartoftheday.com