The Mpemba Effect - <AUTHOR> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mpemba_effect <comment><USER2> Was this ever reproduced properly?

I remember in my first year of physics some people had taken this experiment has class project. No one was able to reproduce that "effect".

<comment><USER3> When I was growing up it was a known phenomenon in my family that hot water pipes would freeze before cold pipes in winter. And that using hot water to de-ice your car would cause it to freeze up again more than cold water.

It's something I've always been meaning to test out properly to see if it was real.

<comment><USER4> Hot water pipes have water running through then less often. Hot water might cause your car windows to fog up, but I doubt the Mpemba effect, even if it's real, could be noticed in that situation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> Maybe this is also why it is recommended by food persona Alton Brown (among others) to thaw a turkey in the sink with running cold water, not warm, to get the fastest results.

<comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that this is to reduce the chance of bacterial growth on the warm raw meat (<http://www.fsis.usda.gov/FactSheets/Big_Thaw/index.asp>)

<comment><USER7> And pre-cooking the meat. Using water that is too hot can tend to start cooking the meat, leading to a tougher, drier end product.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> I'm pretty sure that this Mpemba Effect is folklore. The hot water must necessarily pass through the temperature that the cooler water starts at. In fact if we are to believe this than at some point the initially hot water and the initially cold water must, at some point, be the same (average) temperature. Why then would it start to cool faster?

Options that I can think of 1) initially hot water cools very asymmetrically so some hot portion gives of heat (to the air!) faster 2) more rapid temperature change sets up strong convective currents that, because of momentum, stay around, causing the initially hot water to give up heat faster.

These both seem very unlikely. Fluid water is a very good heat conductor (and air a good insulator) making it unlikely that there would be significant temperature gradients and intuition tells us that freezing water takes much longer than it takes any sort of current to die down. (also note that these two effects would act to cancel each other out)

As for the reasons mentioned in the wikipedia article:

1)Definition of frozen: I suppose that this could account for the effect if you measured the time for cold water to completely freeze and hot water to reach 0 degrees C! But in general as long as you use the same metric this won't matter

2) Evaporation (reducing the volume to be frozen): So an initially hot fluid will evaporate more and I suppose result in a slightly smaller volume to freeze. Since the thermal mass is proportional volume and the heat transfer is proportional to area this is a real effect. However the % change in volume of any reasonable shape of water is so insignificant compared to the difference in energy of hot water and cold water that this effect is almost certainly negligible. (perhaps if the claim was hot water freezes faster than cold water if it is laid out in very very very thin sheets I would buy it because of this.)

3) Convection: see above.

4) Frost: Since the water must pass through the same temperature (0 C) for frost to start to build the frost must grow differently on initially hot water than initially cold. I really see no reason to believe this is the case

5)Super cooling: again, if the convective forces persist for a mush longer time than seems reasonable...

6) Solutes and dissolved gases: I mean if one fluid is a different chemical composition than the other then I suppose all bets are off, but I feel the claim of "warmer water freezes faster than colder water" implies they are both the same substance

However the main reason I believe this to be an Urban Myth is that it makes such a good story. It fits our belief as a culture that there are weird things about science that we don't understand and it challenges our initial intuition in a memorable way. In addition it requires more effort to test than most of us are willing to put forth (including me: I would be very interested if someone would actually do the test recommended in the wikipedia article.) Lastly; hot water freezing faster is a much better story than the other way around. Telling people that hot water freezes faster makes you seem to have some kind of secret knowledge; a spell you can cast over ice cube trays to make them into ice faster.

I bet a reasonable rule for judging truth is that, all else being equal, the better story is less likely to be the true one, because if the truth was also the better story then no one would tell the boring one.

<comment><USER8> _However the % change in volume of any reasonable shape of water is so insignificant compared to the difference in energy of hot water and cold water that this effect is almost certainly negligible._

You underestimate the energy the evaporating water takes away. The evaporation energy is much higher than the specific energy. The amount of water that evaporates is not only significant: it also causes the temperature to drop more sharply than you would expect based on only the larger temperature difference. When they reach the same temperature, there is less of the water that was hotter initially. As such, that body of water will be frozen earlier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> With no other substance involved besides the water, I don't see how this could happen. Say you put a vessel of hot water and a vessel of colder water in the freezer at the same time. If the hot water does indeed reach 32F before the cold water does, then there has to be an earlier point where their temperature versus time slopes cross, at which point their temperatures are equal. Once that point is reached, there's no longer any difference between the "hot" and "cold" water.

Since the point of temperature equality can't be reached in negative time, the hot water can't possibly freeze sooner than the cold water that was placed in the freezer at the same time.

So: given that the effect does, in fact, happen, there's some factor at work other than the water temperature. Some property of the container, perhaps? If the hot container loses its heat at a faster rate than the cold container, perhaps it ends up cooler than the surrounding water, and can continue to accelerate the freezing process beyond the point where the temperature slopes cross each other. That'd be my guess.

<comment><USER10> The requirement for reproducing the result is that the bucket containing the water be a good insulator. A wooden bucket works well, a metal bucket does not.

If you do that then the cooling mostly happens through evaporation. If you start with full buckets of water at different temperatures, at the point where the temperatures cross the bucket that started with hot water has less water in it and therefore is able to freeze faster after that point.</comment></comment>


OpenX Gets Shut Down - <AUTHOR> http://techcrunch.com/2013/02/12/besieged-by-hackers-onramp-the-free-open-source-ad-server-from-openx-gets-shut-down/

<comment><USER2> This is an interesting story, and one which we may see more of in the future. Here is a company which is dependent on open source for a large part of the 'base' engineering load, and they have created an 'attractive nuisance'[1] with it which, true to form, attracted bad actors.

It puts an interesting 'box' around what sort of things you can build with open source and what you can't. Or more precisely how much you can leverage it. So leveraging the Linux kernel in your gizmo is fine, but if your gizmo controls something which crooks would like to control, and you don't keep it patched, you are liable for the crimes that the crooks do with your gizmo. Yuck.

[1] This legal term defines a setup which is something which encourages criminal activity.

<comment><USER3> Indeed -- the point that struck me most was this quote:

"...OpenX lays the blame squarely on the vulnerabilities of open source in a hackers' world..."

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> A bit of a misleading title -- I got really nervous because I have friends who work for OpenX; yet it was the OnRamp service that was shut down and not really the entire company.</comment>


It's time to dispel the myths about nuclear power - <AUTHOR> https://www.theguardian.com/science/blog/2016/apr/11/time-dispel-myths-about-nuclear-power-chernobyl-fukushima <comment><USER3> Fukushima was caused by shoddy planning. From a Carnegie Endowment report[1]:

      "The original design-basis tsunami for Fukushima Daiichi of 3.1
      meters was chosen because a 1960 earthquake off the coast of
      Chile created a tsunami of that height on the Fukushima coast."

Assuming that future tsunamis would be no higher than a recent historical tsunami is already silly. But it's worse:

      "one compilation of historical tsunamis in and around Japan lists
      twelve events since 1498 having a maximum amplitude of more than
      10 meters, six of which had a maximum amplitude of over 20 meters."

In 2002 they already knew the seawater pumps were located too low, but took no action:

      "Fukushima Daiichi's design basis tsunami was estimated to have
      a maximum height of 3.1 meters above mean sea level. Given this,
      TEPCO decided to locate the seawater intake buildings at 4 meters
      above sea level and the main plant buildings at the top of a
      slope 10 meters about sea level"

      "In 2002, on the basis of a new methodology for assessing tsunami
      safety developed by the Japan Society of Civil Engineers, TEPCO
      voluntarily reevaluated the tsunami hazard and adopted a
      revised design-basis tsunami height of 5.7 meters. Yet, NISA
      neither updated the licensing documents to reflect this change
      nor reviewed TEPCO's analysis. Given that the revised
      design-basis tsunami was now 1.4 meters above the seawater pumps,
      such a review should have been conducted."

[1] [http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf](http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf)

<comment><USER4> This is one of those "Therefore, what?" points... (although you may not have intended anything more than sharing some very interesting and relevant information).

But I can see a "therefore, we should not dismiss nuclear power due to some shoddy planning". And, I can see a "therefore, we can expect some degree of shoddy planning in any engineering project, given that it happened even with a nuclear plant, where the risks were well-known ahead of time."

<comment><USER3> To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they did tsunami planning.

Nuclear safety is a multifacted issue and only the news media would take one fact (Fukushima was avoidable) and reach a conclusion (proving that nuclear is completely safe / completely risky).

I'm personally an advocate for fission, because power storage has a long way to go before wind/solar can handle baseload. I especially like the newer designs such a Moltex ([http://www.moltexenergy.com/](http://www.moltexenergy.com/)). But that one fact about Fukushima isn't enough to support that position so I didn't bring that into the discussion.

<comment><USER5> > To net it out for you: the disaster never would have happened if they had > built it on higher ground. And that fact should have been obvious when they > did tsunami planning.

Yes, and the next disaster "will never have happened if (insert other reason)". It's always easy to point out obvious mistakes after the fact.

Nothing is black or white, but Fukushima happened in an advanced country and to me this shows it can happen anywhere. Doesn't mean we should panic and shut down all plants today, but I think in the long term we should try to transition to other more controllable forms of energy.

<comment><USER6> There's no excuse for obvious mistakes. This wasn't something tricky. There are hundreds of years old stone markers in that area documenting the level which previous Tsunmis have reached - well above the level of the power plant.

The level of paternalism and corruption needed to pull off such an act of planning is actually pretty high - Japan's culture is particularly vulnerable to this. It's the sort of thing which would be very unlikely to happen in other parts of the world, where regulation and oversight is rigorously enforced.

Taking a single incident out of context and generalising about very different cultures and different plant designs is guaranteed to lead you to the wrong conclusion.

<comment><USER7> I think it needs to be said that with nuclear disasters, "fault" is only passingly relevant. Blaming any one thing on the failure is irrelevant to the fact that when nuclear plants fail, they create highly dangerous and difficult to clean up messes. If an freak asteroid punctures a containment facility, it is nobody's fault, and no flaw of design, planning, etc. Yet, we still have radiation and waste to deal with.

Nuclear power is great, but it would be a mistake to ever assume it can be totally safe, and to forget that we have very little recourse when inevitable failures happen.

Net: If a power plant fails, we care a little bit about who/what/why/how, but a lot more about large quantities of lethal radiation and fallout that we have no good method of ameliorating.

<comment><USER8> But do you care the same when a filter in your local coal plant fails? That happens way, way more often and actually releases way more hazardous substances that are even harder to remove. Moreover, any stop/start of the plant likely requires oil burner start which requires the filters to be disabled (or they'd be destroyed).

Specifically, mildly radioactive ash, large amounts of smoke, sulfur and nitrites. These leach into groundwater easily (unlike fallout) and are also biomagnified like fission products.

Only natural gas is comparatively clean and there are major problems with dependency and delivery infrastructure. (Plus it is about just as environmentally friendly to mine as coal.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> If I were to come up to you, and describe the perfectly running software I can build, and show you how there have been problems in the past, but they were door to poor planning, bad design, human error, etc... and show that perfect construction of software is quite possible... would you buy my argument that in the future, problems will not occur?

This is the same thing. Yes, it is possible to do it right and be perfectly safe. It is also possible for someone to not do it right. And if someone does so, the repercussions are severe.

Having worked in the energy industry, the goal is to minimize risk. Saying it is OK for nuclear to have some inherent risk because so does everyone else is true, but over-simplified. The consequence of a nuclear accident is much greater than the consequence of a wind power accident, so the reduction of risk in nuclear power needs to also be greatly reduced vs. other forms of power generation.

I would not describe myself as anti-nuclear, but I do not believe we need it. I believe solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, etc, can provide the power we need in this world. Why take on greater consequences to the risks of power generation unless it truly is needed?

<comment><USER10> Their point is that these risks are overblown. Nobody died from Fukushima. So if the major accident you're concerned about was, in fact, completely due to human error [and even still the number of deaths was relatively small], why are you still so skeptical?

It would be very difficult to change this picture [[http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#production](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#production)] to using only clean energies without ramping up our nuclear.

Finally, when literal millions die per year because of air pollution, you are choosing something significantly more dangerous [and worse for the environment] because of _many fewer_ memorable nuclear power-related deaths.

<comment><USER11> Nobody died but a large region had to be evacuated. How much would it cost to insure against that? Is nuclear power still cost-effective if we include the cost of insuring against having to evacuate?

<comment><USER10> How expensive is air pollution?

You can't tacitly accept the costs of our current means of power while criticizing the costs of nuclear. We need to make this decision explicitly, not implicitly.

When you ask about the costs of nuclear power are you also considering the costs of _not_ using nuclear power? [delays timeline for 100% renewable energy which has climate costs, causes air pollution separate from that which is killing millions annually, etc]

<comment><USER11> I agree. For example a carbon tax would make costs easier to compare.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I was once at a panel at a scifi convention (Dragoncon, for the curious) where they had a few people working in various nuclear power related areas there to discuss and answer questions.

While they were clearly biased, I felt they did a good job addressing the issues directly. I too am biased (I tend to not trust anything that requires maintenance on a time scale so much larger than we can comprehend) and my walk-away conclusions were:

* There are a LOT of safety precautions, backups, and more backups - But I still don't trust those will survive human perversity [Edit: And that makes this point hard to settle - if I just don't trust any precautions would be enough, there's no effective way to add precautions that would change my opinion. ]

* Nuclear Power, with all the risks and detriments, has a very strong argument that the fossil-fuel alternatives we're using now are MORE damaging.

That last point was a huge deal to me. Instead of it being "Nuclear Power: Safe/Unsafe", it became "Nuclear Power vs Fossil Fuels (largely coal): Which is the bigger danger today".

I went from anti-nuclear power to "oh gee, I don't know, that's hard", which I generally take as a sign that I've become somewhat enlightened on a topic.

<comment><USER13> As another commenter has said ([https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483147](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11483147)), we now have nuclear reactor designs that have failsafes that cannot fail because they rely on physical laws. That should address your "survive human perversity" concern.

As one example, look at the Pebble bed reactor ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble- bed_reactor#Safety_feat...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble- bed_reactor#Safety_features)). The way it's designed, as the reactor temperature increases, the reactor power decreases, and this is a completely passive effect (meaning it happens without any human intervention), so in the event of an accident the reactor will end up automatically reducing to safe power levels all by itself.

<comment><USER12> I'm less worried about a reactor going critical than I am the safe storage and management of the waste. Anything from providing materials for a dirty bomb to general pollution to just generating a safe-but-expensive mess to manage for a really, really long time.

<comment><USER14> For your future advantage in these discussions, please know that going critical is a prerequisite for power generation; it is the steady state in which a fission-causing neutron is given off from each fission. A sub-critical reactor requires power input because it is not giving off enough energy to sustain the chain reaction; its population of fission-causing neutrons will exponentially decay, if left alone.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_mass)

<comment><USER12> You are correct, I expressed that poorly. Instead I should say "I'm less worried about a disaster in the reactor itself..."

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I'm by no means anti-nuclear, though watching Fukushima unfold showed me a reality I hadn't fully thought out.

A few days after it all went bad, there was basically nothing we could do to stop it, which is terrifying. No humans could go in there, and there were no robots capable of doing the job.

So we as humans have the ability to build a machine of enormous power and (possibly) radiation, but when things inevitably go bad from time to time, our only course of action is to stand back and say "well, damn".

<comment><USER16> A design from the 50s-60s era of nuclear design should not still be in service for this reason.

We can do way better now. Our process, materials, and engineering have advanced orders of magnitude.

<comment><USER17> There is no terrorism-proof reactor design. We may have new tech but we also have new problems. Besides, we haven't solved the ultimate disposal place issue. It's highly irresponsible to produce waste that is dangerous for thousands of years where noone has figured out how to handle it. Especially considering terrorism, corruption, states collapsing and natural disasters.

<comment><USER18> >It's highly irresponsible to produce waste that is dangerous for thousands of years where noone has figured out how to handle it.

The best part about nuclear waste is rapidly it becomes harmless, unlike every other kind of waste we produce. Unfortunately most of our waste is not nuclear, and therefore will contaminate the biosphere, basically forever.

<comment><USER19> Citation? I thought a lot of the waste products, and what they decay into, are chemically toxic. Hardly "harmless"

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER20> I take issue with the account of Fukushima. Yes, a natural disaster kicked off the chain of events, but it was not completely unforeseeable and stronger safeguards and maintenance would have mitigated the disaster.

The big problem in my mind is not that nuclear power can't be safe but that I don't see anything to give me confidence that it can regulated to ensure that it actually is in practice.

<comment><USER21> The only appreciable release of radiation was a result of the Soviets playing fast and loose with shoddy infrastructure followed by higher ups attempting to rectify the situation by burying their heads in the sand is good enough for me.

Compared to oil spills ("oops, we grounded our tanker") and dam failures ("maintenance, lolwut?") a lot of different things needed to come together for the Chernobyl disaster to happen and the runners up, (3-mile, Fukushima) are downright benign by comparison.

As long as we don't get complacent and half-ass things I have no problem with nuclear power.

<comment><USER22> I'm a strong supporter of nuclear power, but calling Fukushima benign is counter productive. Thousands have lost their homes and there are dangerous amounts of radiation leaking into the ground. The site will remain a money sinkhole of ongoing mitigation measures for a long time. But besides these direct effects, the handling of disaster showed that the responsible parties were trying very hard to cover everything up and thus permanently destroyed any confidence you might have had in them, proving the "human factors make nuclear unsafe" crowd right.

<comment><USER23> Unfortunately the human factor is exactly the problem with these types of systems. I don't think humans can ever be considered to be safe stewards of anything where a seemingly remote cascade event can wipe out life on the planet.

Look at the disaster of Long-Term Capital Management from the financial industry as an example, where a presumed ten sigma event almost wiped out the whole western financial system.

[http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.fi/2007/05/11000000000000...](http://epicureandealmaker.blogspot.fi/2007/05/11000000000000000000000000.html)

These nuclear reactors are built with the same underlying principles and risk- management profiles. There's always the element of human error; you can't over-engineer something you did not foresee. In addition to that you have the enormous profit incentives from running nuclear power. These incentives can overwhelm the incentives for safety, or lead to disregard of warnings where profit potential would be compromised if warnings were attended to.

It's human, therefore it's hard to ever sleep completely sound knowing that these constructions are running on the planet.

Fukushima didn't just happen because one mistake was made either. It happened because a long string of mistakes and disregard of safety happened. Want to bet it doesn't happen again? It's hard to bet against human nature...

[http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf](http://carnegieendowment.org/files/fukushima.pdf)

<comment><USER24> >presumed ten sigma event

How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?

I remember seeing a recent article here on HN about a guy that lost a ton of (someone else's) money playing with oil contracts. He went on about how he diligently planned for "huge" failures, such as a drop of _up to 30 percent_ in the price of oil.

I don't think it's fair to bring in finance. Natural disasters and nuclear reactors are far more well behaved and understood.

<comment><USER25> > How are financial people even calculating that kind of rarity?

They don't properly, and that is the problem. A lot of it had to do with creating models that do not reflect reality. They worked fine until extraordinary circumstances occur under which they break down. A well known mistake is assuming a normal distribution for financial returns. In reality this greatly underestimates the likelihood and magnitude of extreme moves that can cause catastrophic losses. Nassim Nicholas Taleb's book "The Black Swan" discusses this in great detail. The bottom line is essentially that a move more extreme than what you anticipated is going to happen eventually.

LTCM made the mistake of neglecting the impact of changing correlations. The thought they had outsmarted the market by eliminating risk from their portfolio. But in times of financial turmoil, correlations of risky assets tend to increase. If your carefully constructed and hedged portfolio does not take this into account, you may be exposed to much more risk than you intended. This is precisely what happend to them. The fund was bailed out by a group of large banks, and their bets did eventually pay off, but the temporary losses were far beyond what their models had anticipated.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> I had the interesting experience of working in a startup under a VP of Engineering who was a Nuclear Scientist and was part of the team the US sent to Chernobyl's sister site - exact same plans, basically - to ensure its' safety.

He told me that overwhelmingly what went wrong at Chernobyl is that the head of the plant consistently ignored all of the alarms and monitoring in place, because he was overconfident at what the results of his test would be. He apparently died in the control room.

Interestingly, one thing the Russians did notably different was to have a big guy, I want to think at the sister site his name was Sergei, basically live in a hut next to the cooling lake, which was uphill from the plant. In the event of a disaster, he had a humongous mallet he would use to slam open the valve, draining the lake.

... or maybe this was all made up, I couldn't tell you tbh, but it sounded legit to me. ;)

<comment><USER27> _He told me that overwhelmingly what went wrong at Chernobyl is that the head of the plant consistently ignored all of the alarms_

You may consider this an excuse of the kind "but that's not nuclear power's fault" and you'd be right-ish, but I simply don't care who exactly is at fault for whole regions to become uninhabitable in case of disaster.

That is connected to nuclear power in my risk assessment, even if you can make a rational argument that it shouldn't be. And I'm very risk-averse when the magnitude of consequences is that big.

Same with Fukushima: yes, everything was safe. Unconnected to the reactor per se they made huge planning errors, underestimating a tsunami. Again, I don't care.

It may be a bias or even a fallacy that Kahnemann has already described, but it's a _useful_ and _correct_ fallacy, I would argue.

<comment><USER10> > for whole regions to become uninhabitable

Chernobyl has a 30km exclusion zone, and that's unnecessarily large.

> Same with Fukushima

Literally nobody died in Fukushima. It was just a memorable piece of destruction caused by a natural disaster that killed 16,000 people.

<comment><USER27> And you can mathematically prove that no possible future disaster could possibly affect a larger area?

No? Okay, my point stands. I simply don't care about probability-weighted outcomes there.

<comment><USER10> That's not how this works. We're not dealing in absolutes because this is real life. We're dealing with probabilities and expected values. If nuclear power provides a net good, we should consider using it, not blindly reject it.

Saying you "don't care about probability-weighted outcomes" means you aren't willing to objectively value nuclear power. Why not? Why are you afraid of nuclear power?

The point this article makes is that nuclear power is an incredibly safe technology, and the concerns about it are exaggerated.

<comment><USER28> It would be good if these risks were objectively valued, for example by insuring the plant against meltdown costs.

Total economic loss estimates for the Fukushima meltdown are 250-500 bn USD[1]. And if the wind had been slightly different those numbers would be a lot higher, as Tokyo real estate would be affected.

And that insurance should also cover human error, terrorism, natural disasters. Won't be cheap is my guess.

Which brings us to the biggest myth of all, that nuclear power is cheap when you don't externalise so many costs.

[1] [http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental- heal...](http://www.psr.org/environment-and-health/environmental-health- policy-institute/responses/costs-and-consequences-of-fukushima.html)

<comment><USER10> Yeah, it'll make sense to do that when you start insuring other power plants for the environmental damage they cause.

We're not charging a carbon tax on coal plants. We're not charging drivers for the air pollution they cause in cities. If you believe the WHO when they say 7 million people die prematurely from air pollution, are you going to start making air-polluters pay for that? ([http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air- pollut...](http://www.who.int/mediacentre/news/releases/2014/air- pollution/en/)) Are you insuring dams against the floods they would cause if they break?

It'd be great to do those things, but it's unreasonable to unfairly punish nuclear when you're not willing to charge other power plant technology for their expected negative externalities.

If you're going to start enacting "reasonable taxes" on negative externalities, start by getting us off of dirty energy, not by preventing us from using reusable energy.

<comment><USER28> It would be great if externalities were insured by everybody, yes. But externalities are real, why would you ignore them "out of fairness"? The sane thing to do is to consider them for all kinds of power generation, and then make the best choice. Nuclear just has huge unconsidered negative externalities, we haven't even yet talked about cost of storing and guarding waste for centuries.

Thankfully there are only a few more years until wind & solar will have solved this once and for all by being cheaper, externalities considered or not.

<comment><USER10> You can't reject one form of power [as worse than existing power] because of externalities if you aren't considering the negative externalities of the existing power. It's not out of fairness, it's out of minimizing future damage.

If you aren't accurately considering the environmental damage of oil/coal/gas, then you can't say they're superior to nuclear just because you are considering its negatives.

I agree -- I look forward to a future of clean renewables, but even still wind and solar are inconsistent. Our storage systems aren't good enough to "just use batteries."[1]

We need a dependable, renewable form of energy that can bridge the gap for 80 years until our storage is good enough.

[1] [http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving- storage](http://worrydream.com/ClimateChange/#moving-storage)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> If the risk/reward calculus of nuclear power is really favorable, then the industry should accept full liability for damages. Repeal Price-Anderson ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price%E2%80%93Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act)). Let them bear the market price of insuring against civil liability.

<comment><USER30> Right after coal bears the true price of air pollution?

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Fukushima had a meltdown because all reactors of the General Electric Mark I reactor design will melt down if they lose cooling pump power for 12-18 hours. They have an undersized containment vessel. This was known as early as 1972. Peach Bottom, in Pennsylvania, has the same reactor design, as do some other US reactors.

We also need to stop storing used fuel rods at reactor sites. Yucca Mountain may not be perfect, but it's so isolated that even if something goes badly wrong, there's nobody around to be affected. The area was previously used for outdoor nuclear weapons testing, after all.

Even if everybody evacuates after a disaster and it doesn't kill many people, you don't get your city back.

</comment><comment><USER32> In nuclear, there are many myths like "decomissioning costs are covered" or "we know how to store the waste". And there are some blatant truths like "risks like that cannot be insured against". But that's usually just accepted as a given so I guess it's fine if the article doesn't mention that one.

I think the biggest myth in the article is the one where they assume that it will have to be either fission or coal burning, pick one.

<comment><USER33> oh yes, toxic waste production and safe storage facility. Those are definitely the main point of contend against civil nuclear. Not even France with its 75% energy generation hasn't found a way to recycle nuclear waste or at the very least reduce their lifespan significantly.

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> This seems to have ignored the 1600 people who died during Fukushima evacuation, and it didn't mention the possible thyroid cancer cases in children around Fukushima.

It also didn't mention link between spent nuclear fuel and nuclear weapons. Seems to me that's a good reason to avoid it. (Yes, it might be possible to separate these two, but it seems to me it's still a few years down the road.)

There's a pretty good summary of the negative effects here: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEYbgyL5n1g](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HEYbgyL5n1g)

<comment><USER35> The 1600 people who died in the evacuation were being evacuated during a natural disaster that was far more devastating.

Not mentioning increased rates of thyroid cancer could be attributed to journalistic integrity. There is no evidence of higher incidences of any cancer in any group of residents and it's not expected that there will be. [http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1022.full](http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6277/1022.full)

The plutonium in spent nuclear fuel is very difficult to purify to weapons grade. If you're not satisfied with inspections of purifying facilities then taking the waste off the hands of problem countries for free has been discussed. Unfortunately, Uranium isn't that rare or hard for countries to come by. If they really want nuclear weapons then a normal breeding program is the simplest way to do it.

That video you linked to was hilarious. Reprocessing is a great idea. There's no harm in waiting a hundred years for a method of getting rid of your spare plutonium when it means you get to reduce the total amount of radioactive waste anyway.

Also, while we may wail and gnash our teeth at having nowhere to store our nuclear waste the truth is that governments overwhelmingly deal with the very quite simple problem of storage in a competent manner. Certainly more competently managed than our storage of the products of coal power generation in our atmosphere has been.

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> I remember being about 14 (in 1991; 25 years ago) and learning about the effects of CO2 emissions on climate change in school. It seemed blatantly obvious - the only remotely feasible chance the planet had was to replace coal/oil with nuclear. The risk calculation was trivial. (Even after seeing the effects of Chernobyl in the years after 1986 in southern Sweden - <USER2> couldn't pick berries and mushroom in the forest for a while and moose meat was contaminated iirc.)

I'm so sad that we're still having this debate 25 years later and nothing has changed.

</comment><comment><USER37> what bugs me is the possibility that one disaster, however unlikely, when it happens may render a wider area uninhabitable for a longer period of time. is this not the case?

and then, perhaps a bigger issue, waste management. just look at Germany [1], supposedly a role model country. please note that the New Scientist text is mostly about light waste, "just" 1000 years storage time. there's a committee trying to plan storage of highly radioactive waste - for 1 million years! we are a species of idiots. none of the plants generating that waste is going to give us a million years of power.

as others have mentioned, Fukushima could have been prevented. and Japan has also had accidents and cover-ups before [2]. all in all, it seems too risky.

and finally, what happened to Thorium plants? aren't they much much safer? or the breeder reactors, how are those coming along?

[1] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075615-radioactive- was...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/2075615-radioactive-waste-dogs- germany-despite-abandoning-nuclear-power/) [2] [https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20263-japans- record-o...](https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20263-japans-record-of- nuclear-cover-ups-and-accidents/)

</comment><comment><USER38> I'm a voting member of that Australian Greens (representing ~10% of voting public on a good day).

The green movement has yet to take responsibility for the disastrous effect our rabid anti-nuclear narrative has had on the health of this planet. For a movement that prides itself on conscientious reflection and progressive evidence based policy our track record on this matter is truly dismal.

Green Party policy on nuclear power is a massive failure.

</comment><comment><USER39> I'm surprised to see this much advocacy of solar and wind here.

I do agree that we need way more of that, but what's the required size of a solar power plant that's feeding an aluminum plant?

Get a few (modern) nuclear reactors for baseline load, fill the rest with renewables. And shutdown the damned coal plants, those things spew radiation.

</comment><comment><USER40> Sadly, the article doesn't do the problems - of both a nuclear future and a non-nuclear one - much justice. It relies on facts and figures, which even taken at face value, will not spur many people to action.

Part of the problem is that in general, and particularly with expensive / unattractive projects such as nuclear power plants, those who benefit the most (power company execs, building contractors) assume the least amount of risk - e.g. nearby residents and taxpayers. Same for jails and landfills - same game with a different name.

As other commenters have suggested, those who believe in nuclear should consider making a bold gesture. A petition drive might be interesting, but expect a lot of doors slammed into one's face. But to me it still sounds too conventional. Crowdfunding, anyone?

</comment><comment><USER41> For anyone interested in this topic, I can really recommend "Radiation: What It Is, What You Need to Know" (by Robert Peter Gale and Eric Lax)[1] which includes some very thorough discussion on Chernobyl and Fukushima. An interesting point they raise about Chernobyl is the psychological fallout of people thinking they were exposed: there was a notable rise in abortions and quite a few plant workers drank themselves to death after the accident. It's all very fascinating.

[1] [http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiation-What-You-Need-Know- ebook/d...](http://www.amazon.co.uk/Radiation-What-You-Need-Know- ebook/dp/B008TSBYLY/ref=sr_1_2?s=digital- text&ie=UTF8&qid=1460470306&sr=1-2&keywords=Radiation)

</comment><comment><USER42> Nuclear power is safe and clean in the abstract, where ideal safety procedures are always followed and mistakes are never made.

But in the real world, human error always causes problems. The problem with nuclear power is that the results of these problems are enormous and long lived. That's why I am against nuclear power.

We have much, much safer alternatives in wind, solar, geothermal and hydro electric. (Yes dam disasters have killed many, many people, I am not in favor of building any more dams where that kind of risk is a possibility.) In my mind there's no need for the risk that comes with nuclear power, we can build out our power infrastructure with safer, renewable sources of energy.

<comment><USER26> Even though disasters with dams are terrifying, it is still just nature reclaiming its' territory. There is no ecological fallout from a dam breaking. Water's gonna water.

I'm still with you on trying to avoid this risk, but don't feel it's at all comparable to the risk of a nuclear power plant.

</comment></comment><comment><USER43> Well, I am not sure but from my point of view, this article misses quite a few arguments against nuclear power. Some may be excusable but not mentioning waste storage (or even regeneration, though I want to see it before I believe it) at all. It does not tell about the destruction cost of nuclear plants (that will never be covered by waste regeneration). It does not talk about terrorist attacks on nuclear plants or just someone stealing radioactiv material to make a dirty bomb. I understand that some arguments against nuclear power are just nonsense but there are some quite tricky ones, picking some that you are able to refute is rediculous.

Edit: and a broken dam in a (at the time) third world country that kills >80% of 170.000 people later through famine and epidemics is nothing that translates to the first world. I agree that hydro-electric power has some big down-sides (like mentioned terrorist attacks) but still you should give things in context. Fukushima happening in Angola would have been a different story than in Japan.

</comment><comment><USER44> This article is deliberately misleading. It's wearing its biases on its sleeve by admitting to only the direct deaths of Chernobyl (43) and saying that the WHO's projected tally of 4000 deaths merely "might suffer some ill effects". Death is certainly a pretty serious ill effect.

> The World Health Organization (WHO) suggests it could reach 4,000 civilian > deaths, a figure which does not include military clean-up worker casualties.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nuclear_and_radiation_accidents_by_death_toll#Chernobyl_disaster)

</comment><comment><USER45> Nuclear plants are being shut down often because of safety concerns. Planning a new nuke plant is a 30+ year prospect. Therefore while nuclear power has potential, one wonders if a 30-year lead time _itself_ makes nuclear a risky bet.

[http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-22/nuclear-reactor- closin...](http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-11-22/nuclear-reactor-closings-us- continue-roil-energy-industry)

</comment><comment><USER46> The problem of what to do with radioactive wastewater have not been solved.

Nuclear power is not economical. It actually works really well on the small scale, but not for city power generation.

Nuclear power is simply the worlds most expensive way to boil water. There are cheaper ways to boil water! [http://www.nea.is/geothermal/electricity- generation/](http://www.nea.is/geothermal/electricity-generation/)

<comment><USER47> You do know that most places don't have the geothermal energy close enough to the surface to make that happen? Also you'll need to provide a source to show that nuclear is "not economical" and "the worlds most expensive way to boil water". All the evidence indicates some of the renewables are it [1]. About 77% of France's energy is nuclear, so I'm not sure what you mean it doesn't work on a large scale...[2]

Fun fact a lot of aluminium is made in Iceland because of the cheap energy [3]

[1] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_electricity_by_source)

[2] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_France)

[3] [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland#Aluminium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Iceland#Aluminium)

<comment><USER46> The Geothermal plants in Iceland are amazing to see. The tech is still quite new though. There are many improvements that will make them more efficient. Regardless, they are really really cheap to run.

I would imagine that drilling deeper will would allow for Geothermal plants in more places in the world.

Here is some background info on the poor economics of nuclear power:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_pla...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economics_of_nuclear_power_plants#Recent_trends)

[http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear- power](http://www.ucsusa.org/nuclear-power/cost-nuclear-power)

<comment><USER48> They're so cheap they might run a cable from Iceland to the UK to supply power.

That would be a cable 30 cm in diametre and about 5600 km long.

[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075pxg8](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b075pxg8)

> The Ice Link interconnector would link Iceland's cheap and carbon free > electricity from hydro and geothermal to the UK. It could provide the > equivalent power of a medium sized power plant through a copper cable laid > under the sea between the two countries. Crucially the power would be > reliable and available when other renewable sources such as wind and solar > are not. However, as Tom Heap discovers when he visits the land of fire and > ice, environmental campaigners like Bjork fear that this green solution for > UK homes could create a need to develop into the pristine wilderness of > Iceland's Highlands. Should we pursue our global climate goals even if it > has the potential to affect untouched and fragile landscape elsewhere? Tough > decisions for Iceland and for us all. Producer: Helen Lennard.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER49> Be careful when someone speaks about ideology if they were free of it.

"In the wake of Fukushima, Germany acquiesced to demands from lobby groups to shut down its nuclear sector, building heavily polluting fossil-fuel plants in their stead."

This is probably the worst part in this article, because coal is also decreasing in Germany. Not as fast as nuclear but nuclear was always the smaller than coal.

My main issue is, that again, someone believes that nuclear power is a way of solving the climate change crisis. It isn't for that nuclear power never had a big enough market share to begin with. Even the current plants which are being build won't change that.

Also nuclear power is extremely expensive. The ones currently being build in Finland and France are 3x over budget and are lagging behind years. Those two plants will supply 1600 Watts for the grid.

You can get that from renewable energies in less than a year.

And yesterday I read that Chinese researchers developed a solar panel which can even use also rain.

Why do people want a an energy source, which comes with so many unsolved issues and only promises to solve them later. In the last 50 years none of the issues could be solved. None! (I'm not talking about safety!)

<comment><USER22> If you can read German, here [1] is a study that says shutting off nuclear in Germany causes 63 million tons of additional CO2 emission per year. It's from BDI, an industry group, so take it with a grain of salt, but as the power we used to produce in nuclear plants has to come from somewhere, it makes sense that we produce a lot more CO2 to replace them. You can't just crank up wind and solar to account for the difference, you have to burn more fossil fuels.

[1] [http://www.r2b-energy.com/uploads/media/Kurzfassung_Ausstieg...](http://www.r2b-energy.com/uploads/media/Kurzfassung_Ausstieg2017.pdf)

<comment><USER43> Well, but we should also not forget that one of the reasons we have not left coal yet are the many jobs that depend on it. Just this weekend, there were massive protest again from the coal and steel workers union against european environment legislation.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER50> > it is important to note that they operate on very different principles.

High fissile vs low fissile equates to different principals? What a load of FUD in an article claims to show some insight on the matter.

</comment><comment><USER51> I agree (sort of) with the premise of this article but I'm not sure I believe all of its facts.

Specifically, the analysis of the negative effects of each respective meltdown, Chernobyl and Fukushima.

I personally believe there's reason to distrust any study on Chernobyl because of the blatant cover-up mentioned and the interference of the Soviet government, so it doesn't really work well as a citation to convince skeptics of the safety of nuclear energy. Likewise, I don't know that we've seen the full effects of Fukushima yet.

Here is one article that shows some of the milder social effects on residents: [http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/life- in...](http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2014/03/10/national/life-indoors- exacts-toll-on-koriyama-children/#.VgGiGpcvaDl)

"Some of the smallest children in Koriyama, a short drive from the ruined Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant, barely know what it's like to play outside — fear of radiation has kept them indoors for much of their short lives."

I lived at one point in time relatively near the Fukushima plant (100 km away) at about 2 months after the disaster and I did follow pretty closely at that time the pattern of fallout, but since returning to the USA it is not something I have followed as closely as I should.

For me, the hardest part is seeing the impact on people I met and their friends and families. But I also saw many people doing well even in the hardship.

I did live somewhere (a university campus) with continual radiation level monitoring, with levels somewhere below 0.12 uSv/hour or maybe twice the background radiation of Rome, and I also took Iodine pills in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. For that reason, maybe somewhat selfishly, and because of all of the obvious reasons, I do believe that nuclear energy is essential.

Side note: Fukushima Prefecture has the University of Aizu, which is the only public, graduate-level university in Japan dedicated to computer science and engineering.

</comment><comment><USER52> Even if we completely ignore most of the risks and hidden costs, nuclear power is still unattractive in its centralized form - large, expensive power plants that require safety measures, usually a lot of water and huge overhead power lines and need to keep operating or millions will be without electricity. On top of that, the consumer is affected by (international) market price fluctuations all the time.

I much prefer being self-sufficient with solar panels on my roof and some far away plant as backup. Once nuclear power is safe, I'll happily put a small reactor in my basement as backup too.

<comment><USER53> I agree the water usage is a huge concern. However, don't modern designs not require massive amounts of water for cooling? I honestly don't know.

To be fair, I think the cost would go down if we started constructing a large number of plants again.

We can not go 100% renewable without nuclear. Here's a great talk on the reality of going 100% renewable:

[https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_re...](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_mackay_a_reality_check_on_renewables?language=en)

<comment><USER54> Thanks for linking that - really terrific back of the envelope estimates.

If anything, I found it to be quite encouraging. If we could just get people behind some of those...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER55> Too late. In 5 years it will make little sense to start a nuclear power plant instead of a solar power facility with batteries.

</comment><comment><USER56> Sure, as long as the nuclear reactor is literally in your backyard and nowhere close to me, I'm ok with nuclear power.

</comment><comment><USER57> The actual mortality rate from both Chernobyl and Fukushima are so low, I'm not even sure what are we talking about half the time. Fear? Fear of a fear? People store yellow cake at home just for fun, and it's perfectly legal and OK. Yet at other times, just mentioning the word nuclear gives half of the community brain cancer.

</comment><comment><USER58> there are less than 500 nuclear reactors in the world. So less than 300 power plants for the 50 years. There have been 2 major catastrophes- i.e. 1 per 13000 reactor/year (or 1 per 8000 power plant/year). Compare that to drunk driving (which almost everybody agrees is unsafe) - 112 million alcohol- impaired driving episodes in US per year produce 13,365 deaths ([http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pub...](http://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/by_the_numbers/drunk_driving/index.html#_ftn1)), ie. 1 death per 8000 drunk driving episodes.

</comment><comment><USER59> Cost of electricity by source.

1\. Natural gas

2\. Hydro

3\. Coal

4\. Nuclear

5\. Solar

6\. Wind

<comment><USER60> Onshore wind is quite a bit cheaper than nuclear at this point. It is politically difficult for aesthetic reasons though.

<comment><USER61> Yet for some reason giant mounds of stinking garbage are aesthetically and politically acceptable...

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER62> It's time to dispel the myth that the problems of nuclear are technical in nature and have technical solutions.

The book to read in this context is Charles Perrow's _Normal Accidents_.

[http://www.ohio.edu/people/piccard/entropy/perrow.html](http://www.ohio.edu/people/piccard/entropy/perrow.html)

Humans have had roughly 50 years' commercial generating experience with nuclear power. It took 25 years from first criticality to come up with passibly useful and safe reactors. Of the fewer than 500 commercial reactors which have been built, three have experienced significant core failures, and, _despite design deficiencies in each_ , the _core_ failings in _all_ of these cases, as well as numerous other non-reactor or non-core failures, have been _organisational_.

Bad management. Bad design. Bad emergency response. _A continuous underappreciation of the seriousness of what 's at hand when you decide to start splitting atoms._

Fukushima was infiltrated by the Japanese mob. Future Gen IV and Gen V reactor designs, other than _not being currently proven_ , raise risks of proliferation and novel chemistry experiments (600C highly radioactive florine salts -- what could possibly go wrong?) with a long-tail horizon of tens of thousands to millions of years.

We don't have _any_ human institutions that are of comparable longevity. Our companies, governmentals structures, even major religions and languages are nowhere near that old. This is a mucking with things at scales we're nowhere near capable of handling. Hell, the smartest minds in Silicon Valley can't deliver cat gifs without stuffing browser exploits into the accompanying ads networks.

Human and organisational problems _don 't_ have technical solutions. The scale at which nuclear energy would need to be extended to replace existing fossil fueled systems is on the order of 15,000 reactors, worldwide. At _present_ levels of energy consumption. Uranium itself won't deliver the energy we need (proven resources are good for about 8 decades at present levels of nuclear energy, _six years_ if all present energy were nuclear sourced). At present rates of one core failure per roughly 100 reactor years, we'd see a meltdown per century. How much safer are future designs, _organisations_ , and _people_ going to be? 10x? 100x? 1000x? Is creating a new radioactive wasteland only once a century, until forever, acceptable?

Solar, wind, geothermal, and biomass have issues. Leaving glowing holes in the ground, or nondiscretionary slightly mutagenic wildlife preserves, isn't one of them.

The bigger lesson is that humans need to embrace limits. There are far too many of us, consuming far too much, and ignoring for far too long the warnings that we're exceeding any rational sustainable bounds.

Nuclear energy isn't going to address any of those issues. Facing reality might.

<comment><USER63> Most car accidents are caused by human drivers, but purely technical solutions have still drastically reduced death rates.

<comment><USER62> Creating an urban landscape which doesn't require use of automobiles would decrease them further.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> we should invest in fossil fuel backed intermittent renewables like wind and solar because hydroelectric is bad for environments, nuclear means there could be a mushroom cloud blowin' up my neighborhood, and coal pollutes. Or at least that's what my brochure from my local n̶a̶t̶u̶r̶a̶l̶ ̶g̶a̶s̶ ̶s̶u̶p̶p̶l̶i̶e̶r̶ greenpeace tells me.

</comment><comment><USER65> Nuclear is a prime example for Black Swan instances.

All fine until it blows - but when it blows, the catastrophe is really big.

If a windmill fails catastrophically, the area around it does not become uninhabitable for at least decades.

<comment><USER66> That's true in the abstract, but the big picture is that we're trying to avoid a much larger disaster with climate change. If wind+solar could fill the world's energy needs now, that is what we would be doing. But that is far, far off into the future, if it's possible at all.

Burning coal is causing damage to the environment now, killing people from air pollution now, and potentially driving us towards climate change that will kill and displace many millions of people. Nuclear has its downsides but it is not going to raise sea level by 2 or 3 feet in the next century nor cause widespread disruptions in crop growing, or cause devastating extreme weather.

A nuclear accident could result in an exclusion zone of a 2 or 3 dozen miles. Climate change could cause global consequences that would be irreversible with our current technology.

</comment></comment><comment><USER67> Maybe it's time to recognize investing in renewable energies is better than in the dying nuclear power.

Nuclear is a fossil fuel too (uranium has to be extracted and is limited), costs a tremendous amount of money in power-plant building and dismantling costs, and concentrate the production of energy in a few remote places (which makes transport costs higher).

Meanwhile, the number of places running on 100% renewable energies is surprisingly high ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy#Places...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/100%25_renewable_energy#Places_with_around_100.25_renewable_electricity)). Why would we need nuclear again?

<comment><USER22> Uranium being limited is a red herring. Breeder reactors and Thorium can provide us with power for hundreds of years.

Similarly, renewables are also fairly concentrated (optimal conditions for wind power or solar are not evenly distributed) and need excellent transmission networks because production is fluctuating.

<comment><USER62> Hundreds of years isn't a long time.

<comment><USER8> Enough to figure out properly working fusion if trends keep up.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python - <AUTHOR> http://fernandoi.cl/blog/posts/altair/ <comment><USER2> I'm partial to plotnine ([https://github.com/has2k1/plotnine](https://github.com/has2k1/plotnine)). It is an implementation of grammar of graphics in python (like ggplot2).

It provides a stateless layer like interface which feels intuitive, and avoids bugs due to global state.

But, it is built on top of matplotlib. So, if plotnine cannot do something, you can go back to the matplotlib way of doing things and take advantage of the large number of blogs, example, tutorials, and stackoverflow answers.

Performance wise, it can handle more data than altair. But less than matplotlib, if you use the built in data manipulation features.

<comment><USER3> Altair builds on Vega-Lite but if you cannot do something in Vega-Lite, you can do it in Vega.

Performance is a huge concern for us and we are working on some improvements in that area. We will first focus on pushing computation and aggregation down into the Python kernel.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> The problem with all these nice new visualization libraries for Python, is that they all (at least the shinny nice ones) fail totally short when it comes to do B&W graphics for journal publications. Things like filling patterns, line patterns etc, are mostly missing.

I still use Matplotlib and I can make it look beautiful and exactly how I want... it's just a lot more work to get the shinny bits.

<comment><USER5> The underlying vega library supports overriding styles for color and line properties - it may not be as difficult as you imagine to generate B&W graph outputs for print.

<comment><USER6> Once you have a web / javascript output, there are a bunch of possibilities:

[https://observablehq.com/search?query=stippling](https://observablehq.com/search?query=stippling)

[https://observablehq.com/search?query=dithering](https://observablehq.com/search?query=dithering)

[https://observablehq.com/search?query=halftone](https://observablehq.com/search?query=halftone)

[https://observablehq.com/search?query=crosshatch](https://observablehq.com/search?query=crosshatch)

(Or go out and look around github or the broader web to find many more options.)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> This talk from PyCon 2019 is related and may be of interest: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTingdk_pVM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vTingdk_pVM)

<comment><USER8> His earlier talk is great too to get the lay of the land...

Jake VanderPlas The Python Visualization Landscape PyCon 2017

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FytuB8nFHPQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FytuB8nFHPQ)

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> > Not great statistical support. I still rely on Seaborn for quick > visualization that needs to fit a linear regression.

Why does a plotting library need support for statistical analysis? I always think of manipulating data and visualizing it as orthogonal disciplines.

</comment><comment><USER10> In the grand scheme of things it's a minor gripe, but I really dislike APIs that encourage chaining of calls like `alt.Chart(data).mark_circle(size=200).encode(...)` from the article. This is found in many other libraries, especially JavaScript ones like e.g. jQuery. I know it's compact, but it makes it harder to see what's going on and hides the fact that all of the operations are actually being applied to the leftmost object.

<comment><USER11> SmallTalk has the correct answer here, with its method chaining operator `;`, I feel. For cases like this where you build complex state on an object via method calls, it gives some pretty nice code. And since it's a separate construct, the individual method calls can have return values that make sense too, as opposed to this style of interface where the methods all have to return the object again for chaining.

</comment></comment><comment><USER12> Altair is incredible until you realise your plots are bigger than your data. It's annoying, but overall still very good.

<comment><USER13> Can you speak more about this? Are you saying that Altair's speed scales poorly with dataset size?

<comment><USER12> It throws an error if you try to plot more than 5000 datapoints by default, internally altair produces a JSON representation (vega-lite) that is larger than the data you plot (because it contains the data you plot, plus formatting information). If you save this output, for example in an ipython notebook, it gets phat pretty quickly.

Altair is still great though, but this issue makes it occasionally annoying.

<comment><AUTHOR> Just in case, you can plot datasets larger than 5000. A quick fix is using "alt.data_transformers.enable('json')"

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> Anyone figured out how to use Altair with VSCode to plot in a separate window ? If I use matplotlib, I can use the show() method to plot in a separate window. I would love to have a similar thing for Altair. I'm fine if there's a working method in Spyder as an alternative.

</comment><comment><USER15> Me and my team are big tableau users, so now that we are testing Python vega and altair are the natural approach. I am having my struggles to make altair work on jupyterlab (while ipyvega works so I could start playing), but I think it's worth the effort. The Altair guys are extremely nice and responsive on github which is great too. For those looking for side projects, I think a nice altair gui that works in jupyterlab would be great. Anyway, why this approach is superior? Because once you get it you'll be amazed the stuff you can do and how easily, also how easy is to train new analysts on this, this is important and matplotlib falls short. But don't take my word, grab a trial copy of Tableau and see it for yourself.

</comment><comment><USER16> Plotly Express ([https://plotly.express/](https://plotly.express/)) is a new high-level wrapper on top of Plotly.py which gives a similar API to Altair in a lot of ways.

Under the hood it works the same way: Plotly.py generates JSON figure descriptions which are passed to Plotly.js for rendering.

The whole thing is, of course, free and open-source and well-documented :)

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> What visualization library are you using in Python?

<comment><USER17> Bokeh is my choice. [http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/docs/user_guide.html](http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/docs/user_guide.html)

</comment></comment><comment> happy-go-lucky As part of our work, we create data dashboards. We use NumPy and Pandas to analyze data, either Flask or Django as a framework, and HighCharts for interactive charts. The JS charting library has a variety of charts to meet our needs. Our input stored either as SQL or CSV is dynamic data.

I am beginning to wonder if HighCharts is replaceable with a fully open-source charting library.

<comment><USER18> Have you checked out the dash library by plotly?

It's pretty awesome and i use it for a similar purpose. MY dashhboards/charts are pretty basic but there seems to be good support for interactivity and callbacks.

[https://dash.plot.ly/gallery](https://dash.plot.ly/gallery)

[https://plot.ly/python/](https://plot.ly/python/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER19> > Sadly, in Python, we do not have a ggplot2.

[https://github.com/sirrice/pygg](https://github.com/sirrice/pygg) provides the ggplot2 syntax in Python as a wrapper around Wickham's R implementation. It is useful if you 1) want the R syntax, 2) program in Python, 3) just want static plots.

</comment><comment><USER20> These python tools are slowly approaching the quality of gnuplot. In a few years they will be almost there.

</comment><comment><USER21> I'm looking for an interactive visualization tool that I could have site visitors access via a github blog page. Does Altair manage client-side processing? I'm still pretty new in the search but like Altair's adoption of Vega-lite.

<comment><USER3> Yes, you can save an Altair chart as an HTML page. See [https://altair- viz.github.io/user_guide/saving_charts.html#h...](https://altair- viz.github.io/user_guide/saving_charts.html#html-format). You can also just get the Vega-Lite JSON form Altair and embed it in a web page with Vega-Embed.

<comment><USER21> I'll dig in -- thanks! Looking for the interactivity -- surely that's not supportable in native HTML, right? Has to use JS or CSS? (I'm not a web-dev of any sort, only very superficial understanding, data scientist by day)

EDIT: Ohhhh, this looks nice!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> How is Altair on 3D data? I see no examples of this. Matplotlib is decent here (apart from all the same disadvantages the author lays out), but the default options look kinda fugly.

<comment><USER23> Reading the article would help with this question.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> Expected some interface to an Altair computer and blinking lights.

People don't care anymore how they name their projects. :-(

<comment><USER16> Altair here is a play on the underlying library called Vega. They're both stars in the "Summer Triangle" [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Triangle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summer_Triangle)

<comment><USER24> People don't call their programs IBM or Apple.

How about a JavaScript library to extract the second to last character of a string and call in Commodore Amiga 3000?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> One question:

Does it work in jupyter notebooks/labs?

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Forgot to mention that... [https://altair- viz.github.io/getting_started/installation.ht...](https://altair- viz.github.io/getting_started/installation.html)

</comment></comment><comment><USER26> Pretty cool.

> Sadly, in Python, we do not have a ggplot2.

I've got to ask, though: why is that the case?

<comment><USER27> Isnt there a ggplot2 like library out there. I remember coming accross one at some point.

<comment><USER28> There are several libraries inspired by the grammar of graphics and ggplot, and there has even been something like a port (although its now abandoned):

[https://github.com/yhat/ggpy](https://github.com/yhat/ggpy)

What I think the author means is that there is no ggplot in the sense that there's no One Ring To Rule Them All -- ggplot2 basically killed off lattice and base R graphics for about 90% of users. The Python graphics ecosystem is more Balkanized.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Excellent visualizations!

Could you share the code used to create your last sample chart?

<comment><AUTHOR> This example gives you the main structure: [https://altair- viz.github.io/gallery/ranged_dot_plot.html](https://altair- viz.github.io/gallery/ranged_dot_plot.html). Let me know if you need the specific code for that visualization, happy to share it.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> Does anyone have a mirror?

<comment><AUTHOR> It should be working now!

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Altair doesn't seem to have quiver plots though. :(

<comment><USER3> I think you might be able to build one based on this Vega version [https://vega.github.io/vega/examples/wind- vectors/](https://vega.github.io/vega/examples/wind-vectors/)

</comment></comment><comment><USER32> Anyone here tried/like metrics-graphics?

</comment><comment><USER33> lol, looks like we broke the site :|

Bandwidth Limit Exceeded

<comment><AUTHOR> Up again!

</comment></comment><comment><USER34> That post is the only thing on the entire site.

<comment><AUTHOR> Yes! Just created this blog and this is my first post.

</comment></comment><comment><USER35> I came in here expecting to see one hell of a rationalization for using a 44 year old computer to do visualizations. :)

<comment><USER36> Haha I came here expecting to see the dude from Assassin's Creed drawing all kinds of graphs :'-) Or better, imagining.

<comment> xkcd-sucks A literal assassin killing me would be better than working with anything based on matplotlib; fortunately altair does away with it.</comment></comment></comment>


RethinkDB internals: making coroutines fast - <AUTHOR> http://www.rethinkdb.com/blog/2010/12/making-coroutines-fast/ <comment><USER2> Great stuff, good catch on the syscall! I've been tinkering with C coroutines as well recently but since our critical code runs in kernel space they ended up being more hassle than they're worth. I'm still using them in our (user space) testing sandbox.

As you mention malloc()ing stacks: you might want to allocate them using mmap() and MAP_ANONYMOUS instead. You can map the adjacent memory pages with appropriate protection to prevent stack overflows and as a result, memory corruption. I'm not aware of any drawbacks (malloc itself typically uses mmap above a certain size) but it certainly beats hoping your stacks are big enough. Less of an issue on 64-bit environments of course.

<comment><USER3> Thanks for the suggestion! I'm actually looking into doing something like that right now.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> So, coroutine are as fast as callbacks and easier to program with... so, why aren't available is all language?

I understand that it is difficult to change JavaScript, yet, when you create a whole new framework, say, nodejs, why not providing coroutines?

Does it need a language construct to be efficient? Maybe, then have a look the Icon programming language, where coroutines rule,

<comment><USER5> Personally, I view node.JS as a step backwards: it's great to provide the idea of a single thread holding multiple connections, with high-performance non- blocking I/O within each thread; problem is, in their case, there's also a single thread per UNIX process with no primitives for communications between processes (unlike e.g., Erlang/OTP): if you'd want good performance, you want an event loop per logical core.; completely independent processes may be acceptable for simple, stateless web apps, but with most anything else you risk losing a great deal of efficiency without correct primitives. For example, if you have on-disk state, unless the threads are able to share memory (either by running within the same process or using UNIX shm) you're risking a situation where threads are competing for resources like OS page cache (provided you're not doing your own in-process caching and direct I/O, but even in this case, you've now lost the ability share a resource between any two connections without copying).

Some e.g., Asana have added fibers to Javascript (in their case V8): <http://asana.com/blog/?p=49>

The previous post from RethinkDB is quite interesting in terms of motivation for coroutines: to me, this superficially seems like SEDA. Here, instead of stages in the pipeline (thread pool per stage, first stage being processing events from epoll/kqueue, thread per core in each pool, each thread holding state machines, communication between threads via a queue) you are using coroutines for clearer code.

<comment><USER6> I don't think you want an event loop per core, that's back into the realm of concurrent madness, and I don't think that's how Erlang works (Erlang folk: correct me if I'm wrong on that).

It's not a bad thing that data has to be copied to be shared between Erlang- style processes. That is part of the reason why things "just work" when you move that process to another machine, or data centre. If the implementation can be smart and "cheat" by sharing data in the same process that's fine, but it is an implementation detail and not a property of the system.

The way Erlang works is that you have a single event loop and threads are spawned to handle i/o and such (the n:m threading model, N green threads are mapped onto M OS threads). When a process blocks its execution is suspended.

Node employs an n:m threading model as well except "processes" in node are just functions. One big difference is that if you make a blocking call in node the whole process is blocked. There's only an event loop, no scheduler or anything that OS-like involved. The Erlang model is clearly superior imo, but Node is _far_ more accessible (for better and worse).

<comment><USER5> > I don't think you want an event loop per core, that's back into the realm of > concurrent madness, and I don't think that's how Erlang works (Erlang folk: > correct me if I'm wrong on that).

If you don't care about performance, sure (there's nothing wrong with not caring about performance e.g.,: low volume web applications, where server side Javascript can shine, IMO). However, I can give you a command line you can run which will plot a very nice graph of throughput vs. number of selector threads in a specific system that I've been working on.

Yes, it will bring you back to "concurrent madness". What you _want_ is having primitives that make it possible to deal with this madness, not handwave it away. In Erlang they're actors themselves, optimized for efficient delivery of message within a single node and remotely, supervision of processes that fail, ETS, mnesia; in Java they're Doug Lea's beautiful concurrent collections (java.util.concurrent). You're assuming multi threading pthreads or synchronized/notify/wait (Java before java.util.concurrent).

Note that there are two models for this: one is Erlang's as well as traditional UNIX IPC -- message passing; the other is shared memory multi- threading with concurrent and lock free collections (Java), which also goes nicely with the idea of minimizing mutable state (Haskell, Clojure, Scala). One is good for one kinds of applications which optimize for worst case latency (Erlang shines there), the other is good for another, which optimize for average throughput (JVM shines there).

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> I prefer Grand Central Dispatch, which fixes the callback model by providing closures and anonymous functions as an extension to the C language.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Central_Dispatch#Examples>

</comment><comment><USER8> This looks really cool. I have been messing around with coroutines a lot lately as well, testing libtask (<http://swtch.com/libtask/>) as well as libcoroutine. Is the source for the changes to libcoroutine available? I didn't see a link from the article.

<comment><AUTHOR> We'd like to. The difficulty is that in order to get the performance improvements we had to integrate three different components: a few patches to libcoroutine, a patch to glibc, and pooling code that's tightly integrated with our asynchronous IO layer. A compelling patch would span three different licenses, involve patches to two libraries and re-engineering of the integrated piece to make it usable by the outside world. We'd like to do it, but for now this would be too much of a distraction.

</comment></comment><comment><USER9> I've blogged about co-routines before, and this post inspired me to write a little bit that contrasts RethinkDB with my own special-purpose DB that my startup uses.

<http://formlis.wordpress.com/2010/12/24/co-routines/>

</comment><comment><USER10> Sounds great, and I love the idea that RethinkDB is following.

I don't know a lot about them though, and having an extra benchmark against a similar SSD installation of MySQL or Postgres with the same select query that achieved 1.5 million QPS would be pretty interesting.</comment>


Goldman to dump Facebook shares on IPO - <AUTHOR> http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-05-17/goldman-to-cash-out-1-billion-of-facebook-holding-in-ipo.html

<comment><USER2> The people who will make money of Facebook going public are making it right now... The idea of having shares in Facebook scares the bejeezus out of me</comment>


LoopBack - a private, open source mBaaS based on Node.js - <AUTHOR> http://strongloop.com/strongblog/announcing-loopback-an-open-source-mobile-backend-as-a-service-based-on-node-js/

<comment><USER2> Link to github repo and docs:

[https://github.com/strongloop/loopback](https://github.com/strongloop/loopback)

[http://docs.strongloop.com/loopback/](http://docs.strongloop.com/loopback/)

FWIW, I'm really trying to figure out what this is exactly. Is it something that can be used standalone or does it need to be used only as part of StrongLoop Suite? The marketing speak all over the place is so palpable that it obfuscates.

<comment><USER3> LoopBack is open source. The repos are public and the node modules have been published to NPM registry. As a Node developer, you can definitely use/hack it as usual.

LoopBack is part of the StrongLoop suite distribution too. That's where you will get an integrated solution (with StrongNode & StrongOps) and commercial supports.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I have been using OpenShift for my application development and would like to try this out. Does anyone know if they are a cartridge for OpenShift?

<comment><USER5> Looks like it: [http://docs.strongloop.com/#openshift- cartridge](http://docs.strongloop.com/#openshift-cartridge)

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> Sad to see the NodeFly Logo die out. But great to see the product become part of a larger offering. Visibility into node.js event loop has been mission critical for our team. Way to go Strong loop and their mission!

</comment><comment><USER7> How does this compare to something like Parse?

<comment><USER8> LoopBack is open source. It's way too easy (IMNSHO) to outgrow what Parse has to offer, and I'm never a fan of these black-box, hosted solutions.

I can make changes as I need, and I own the whole server application from the bottom up.

<comment><USER9> Exactly - Loopback = "Parse in an open source box" versus a black-box.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> gshipley, yes StrongLoop does have cartridge for OpenShift - [http://docs.strongloop.com/#openshift- cartridge](http://docs.strongloop.com/#openshift-cartridge)

</comment><comment><USER11> This is huge. NodeJS enters into the enterprise!

</comment><comment><USER12> Great work StrongLoop!

</comment><comment><USER13> Good to see more mBaaS solutions in the open source arena. Particular using Node.JS which is a great fit for mobile backends.

</comment><comment><USER14> Loopback is the middleware api glue for making rich mobile apps enterprise grade. This should enable us to build apps which can actually access data locked in enterprise data stores very quickly</comment>


Testim – stable, self healing, end-to-end test automation via machine learning - <AUTHOR> https://www.testim.io <comment><AUTHOR> Just got to know this, I have not tried it personally. It looks to be addressing a key pain point for test automation - the maintenance of existing test set to stay relevant to changing interfaces / identifiers etc. The part I really hate about test automation is the maintenance to always stay up to date with changes in the underlying webapp.</comment>


Beam Me Out Of This Death Trap, Scotty (1980) - <AUTHOR> http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/8004.easterbrook-fulltext.html <comment><USER2> It's interesting that nearly everything that was wrong with the Space Shuttle was accurately predicted in this article. Both catastrophic breakups were essentially predicted (a booster failing and tile damage from falling fuel tank ice), as well as the huge cost overruns and performance shortfalls. I wonder what author Gregg Easterbrook thinks as he looks back on the Shuttle era? Having a quick glance at his article on Wikipedia, it seems he's written or said a bit more about space policy since the shuttle; I'll have to read up.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_Easterbrook](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gregg_Easterbrook)

<comment><USER3> Unfortunately, Easterbrook is coasting on the reputation he built up from this one magazine piece from 34 years ago. It's basically impossible to read anything he writes nowadays without finding something either wrong or infuriatingly contrary-for-the-sake-of-contrariness.

<comment><AUTHOR> The article I'd really like to read is about the "whistleblower" (or more of them) who gave Easterbrook all the info for that 1980 article. It would be very fitting to today's world.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> It's great realizing, when reading a 35 year old polemic, that the chief issue with its criticisms was that it allocated WAY too little probability space to the outcome "worse than even we think it will be." For example, the debate in the article is between optimists who think the shuttle will hit 70 flights a year and pessimists who said 20. Nobody had their money on "four."

The article also describes Challenger and Columbia in chilling detail in advance. Quote: "The plan is, you die."

</comment><comment><USER5> I've thought for 30 years that the shuttle design was terribly misguided.

The terrible problem with space flight is weight. Weight, weight, weight. It takes an enormous amount of fuel and rocket to push any kind of weight into orbit.

But the shuttle is not optimized for getting useful weight into orbit (i.e. payload, with the emphasis on pay). It's optimized for returning the rocket to earth. I.e. it has landing gear, wings, rudder, etc. All this is heavy, and therefore terribly expensive.

Step back a moment, and look at what we really need to bring back from orbit - it's the astronauts. Nothing else. All we actually need is a tiny capsule to bring the astronauts back, i.e. a heat shield and parachute. The rest can just be left in orbit.

Getting rid of all that weight then means the rocket can either be far cheaper, or it can launch much bigger PAY loads.

As for reliability, likely the most cost effective solution is to build a smaller, highly reliable rocket just for pushing astronauts up into orbit. Use another rocket, a big, heavy, unmanned one, and one that needn't be so reliable, to push up the stuff the astronauts need to do their mission.

<comment><USER4> The deeper problem with the shuttle is that we need to bring the astronauts back because we sent them to space, and we sent them to space to do a mission, and that mission is to go to space. There is absolutely nothing a human can do in space that a machine can't do better, except die.

<comment><USER6> > _There is absolutely nothing a human can do in space that a machine can 't > do better, except die_

I would love to hear you explain how to perform, for example, research on the effects of long-term zero-gravity on humans using only machines.

Or to take another example: I suppose it would have been possible to develop robots to repair the Hubble, but the cost of developing said robots to a point at which they can perform without failure is going to be equal - if not greater - than the cost of actually sending someone up to do the repair work in the first place.

<comment><USER7> It would have been cheaper to build another Hubble and launch the replacement on a disposable rocket.

<comment><USER8> Would it really? Hubble ended up costing over $2.5bn [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope) by launch day while a Shuttle launch cost around $450m [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle) . Probably a rebuilt Hubble would have cost less, but how much less?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> For reference, the amortized cost of a shuttle launch ended up being $1.45 billion ($196 billion / 135), with the recurring (per-launch) cost as $450 million of that (?). For comparing with the article's figures, $1.00 (1975) = $1.53 (1980) = $4.18 (2011). _(So you could compare, e.g. the $22.4 million 1975 estimate with either $108 M or $347 M)._

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget)

ftp://ftp.bls.gov/pub/special.requests/cpi/cpiai.txt

<comment><USER10> You're linking to the BLS's CPI data, but you really don't want to deflate currency figures for the Space Shuttle using the CPI. Use something like the percentage of GDP: [http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/](http://www.measuringworth.com/uscompare/)

"Putting a man on the moon: [...] How much would that be today? If we used the CPI, it would be $160 billion, but this would not be a very good measure since the CPI does not reflect the cost of rockets and launch pads. ... [as] a way to consider the "opportunity cost" to society, the best measure might be the cost as a percent of GDP, and that number would be $453 billion. "

<comment><USER11> Using percent of GDP as an answer to the question of "How much would that be today?" is absurd, because our economy today is not only larger but more efficient at converting raw materials and manpower into working spacecraft. The question it really answers is something like "How daunting of an investment was that, in terms of today's economy?", though even that doesn't properly convey that such an investment made today would accomplish far more.

<comment><USER10> Okay. To some extent that's fair, but on the other hand "opportunity cost to society" is just a fancy way of saying the same thing as "how daunting of an investment was that" so the quoted statement is hardly in disagreement per se :)

Of course, there are also plenty of alternative measures available at the linked site which could be better than either percent-of-GDP or CPI. (I'm leaving their use as an exercise to the reader...)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><AUTHOR> The most interesting discovery for me was to compare: "cost projections: The analysts assumed that the shuttle fleet would stage at least 50 flights a year" with now known 135 launches in 30 years total which gives less than 5 per year.

The article is fantastically well researched and written.

</comment><comment><USER12> It's curious how little is written about the X-37B that seems to be a successful reusable space vehicle.

It's unmanned, very much smaller than the Shuttle but seems to be of use for the US Air Force for something. It also stays in orbit for over a year at a time.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37)

</comment><comment><USER13> [http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm](http://idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm) is a nice overview as well.

</comment><comment><USER14> Required watching [1], straight from Dale D. Myers (Deputy NASA administrator 86-89) himself. An extremely fascinating tale regarding the importance of engineering constraints in mission critical designs.

1\. [http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and- astronautics/16-8...](http://ocw.mit.edu/courses/aeronautics-and- astronautics/16-885j-aircraft-systems-engineering-fall-2005/video- lectures/lecture-1/)

</comment><comment><USER5> I hadn't known the Spruce Goose was damaged by its flight. That explains a lot.

</comment><comment><USER15> Great read. I wonder if the author realized the madness will continue for 30 more years before someone makes a rational decision.

</comment><comment><USER16> I don't get it. The Shuttle project included a lot of things that had never been done before. So things didn't quite go to plan and some people died? But in the mean time, it performed useful tasks.

Predicting failure is easy, because something will always go wrong. There hasn't been a perfect anything built yet.

What is also surprising about these dredged up past articles, is that they all invariable criticize the engine (SSMB/SSME), even though the engine was never a major issue. Yes, the rebuilds between flights took longer than expected, but it was the first ever re-usable engine and is still an amazing achievement.

<comment><USER17> Feynman explains the problems with the main engines in the report about the Challenger disaster. They were a good candidate for the 3rd deadly accident if the shuttle program had continued.

Current discussion: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7201645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7201645) (125 points, 1 day ago, 79 comments)

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The shuttle is representative of a class of problems that occur in almost every software project: uncontrolled complexity. It's easier to fix the symptoms in software than in other fields, so this issue runs rampant throughout all of IT.

</comment><comment><USER10> This is why we can't have nice space-things.</comment>


6 productivity tips from positive psychologist Kim Perkins - <AUTHOR> http://otelic.tv/interviews/2

<comment><USER2> Here are the 6 tips:

1\. Let people deploy their strengths, instead of trying to train their weaknesses

2\. Set clear goals and hire specialists with the skills needed to meet those goals.

3\. Make sure the goals are anchored in reality. Don't set arbitrary goals.

4\. Give immediate feedback

5\. In addition to structuring work around your strengths, also try to focus on the things you enjoy

6\. To help assess your strengths, ask people to write a "reflected best self letter"</comment>


Daggerfall: Now available for free - <AUTHOR> http://www.bethblog.com/index.php/2009/07/09/daggerfall-now-available-for-free/

<comment><USER2> If by "now" you mean July of 2009 - check the URL.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oops, didn't realize how old this was. I saw a link posted in the Amazon forums for Skyrim and thought I'd share it here.</comment></comment>


Carrier IQ Technical Response - Understanding Carrier IQ Technology [pdf] - <AUTHOR> http://carrieriq.com/company/PR.20111212.pdf

<comment><USER2> tl;dr: there's an SMS-activated backdoor and they do in fact collect URLs. They blame Trevor Eckhart's observations on the handset manufacturer who allegedly shipped debug code. They deny logging keystrokes or text messages. No explanation why they are hiding the app.

</comment><comment><USER3> Relevant text:

For example, let's look at a situation where a consumer makes a call to the Network Operator's customer service center. In order to respond, the customer service center needs the device data so the Carrier IQ software automatically passes the hardware serial number and the subscriber serial number (e.g. IMEI/IMSI) to the Network Operator who can then match to their customer records. Carrier IQ provides the Network Operator with a summary of the user's experience which can include network performance, battery life, ability and speed to access a website (also known as "throughput"), and the usage, performance and stability of an application.

Σ: unique IDs transmitted with urls</comment>