Recent submissions

Comment · 7 years ago
Heat dumping is done outside the room, of course, but that's a separate airflow, one that's generally disconnected from the room. The cool AC flow itself is usually a closed cycle of some sort. You would be kind of defeating the whole purpose of trying to cool and dehumidify the air if you did otherwise, plus your AC system might have to run continuously in order to get anything done. There will always be some leakage, of course.
Comment · 7 years ago
It would depend on the situation. For a single room system, generally no; for a multi-room system, generally yes if the other rooms are empty or at least relatively less crowded than the one you're in. That is, I wouldn't expect the AC to really remove any CO2; it might redistribute it, though.
Comment · 7 years ago
Conveniently not mentioned is this article is the fact that normal CO2 concentrations in human lungs are about 40,000ppm - or about 100x higher than current background levels, and many times higher than the elevated levels mentioned in this article. And I don't know about you, but when I'm in a crowded room what eventually makes me tired and uncomfortable is the heat and humidity from all those bodies. Turn on the AC (which reduces both heat and humidity) and I will be feeling much better in short order.
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 7 years ago
A couple of questions which need to be asked and answered: When Anchorage hit its previous record of 85F back in 1969, was that a "tipping point" and a sign of impending climate doom? Better yet, when Fort Yukon (which is almost 400 miles NNE of Anchorage, and just a mile from the Arctic Circle) hit its record (and all-time state high) temperature of 100F (!) way back in 1915 (!!), what that a "tipping point" and a sign of impending climate doom? Enquiring minds want to know.
Comment · 7 years ago
It's been pointed out that if these protests hadn't been used as an excuse for skipping school - that if they had generally been held on non-school days - then the turnouts would probably have been much smaller.
Comment · 7 years ago
I did a quick background check of the ones that I could but I don't remember the details; none appeared to have proper training in climate matters, though, that I recall. But just listed in the article itself you've got "sustainable consumption", "marine biology", "carbon management", "cognitive psychologist", etc. (The other day I ran across someone claiming in an online post to be a "climatologist", but in fact his other posts said that he was an oceanographer.) Those fields are at best only tangentially related to matters of climate, and there's probably not a properly trained climatologist in the bunch.

It astounds me that the field of climate science is taken so seriously when it appears to actually mostly just be full of hangers-on, also-rans, and wannabes. And I can think of a few big names in it who have little to no scientific training at all.

Comment · 7 years ago
Merkel’s decision to prematurely shut down Germany's generally safe and successful nuclear power program was quite frankly just stupid.
Comment · 7 years ago
Did you consider remote, on-shore resources? Perhaps work-at-home folks, or those working remotely from other US cities? I ask because I've run into people who would otherwise normally insist that their domestic resources be local and in-house, but then would end up off-shoring stuff instead. WTF?
Comment · 7 years ago
I'm getting quite annoyed now with the number of people who have little to no training in matters of climate getting called "climate scientists" by the press, or representing themselves as such.
Comment · 7 years ago
Cellophane is basically a form of paper but it looks and feels like plastic. It's been around forever and is completely biodegradable. I expect that this packaging is maybe just new form of that.
Comment · 7 years ago
My experience dealing with such folks 10 or 15 years ago was that even if the person presented to you as the "provider" was actually the person doing the work (and not just a frontman for others), you were lucky to be able to hold onto them for a year. I see that others here are saying just six months, though.

Also, promises were made which were broken almost immediately. For example, there was a promise made that all meetings would be conducted on US time as opposed to Indian time. But only two weeks into the contract I noticed that our US outsourcing manager was routinely coming into the office late, where before she was always quite punctual. When I asked about this I was told that it was because she was now having regular 3 AM meetings with the folks in India.

We were also told (all of us) by upper management that if the whole thing didn't work out as planned, then WE would be the ones held responsible for this, not the outsourcing folks. You can imagine how well this went down. It became routine for some people to just lie to their bosses about well how things were actually going, all while looking for other jobs elsewhere because they knew it was going to hit the fan soon enough. In one particular case that I remember, I attended a teleconference with a project manager where folks were laying it on the line and being honest about how badly things were going. Then in an immediately following teleconference (which I also attended) this project manager turned around and flat-out lied to his bosses by telling them that everything was going great! He bailed for another job at another company before he really got caught out on this though.

The company finally got wise and cut loose the outsourcing group after a couple of years. But by that time things were in such bad shape that they were considering just tossing out their custom software (which they'd spent decades developing) and replacing it with some kind of package. I don't know how far along they got with that before the big bankruptcy came, though.

Ever since they emerged from that bankruptcy (and then only barely, after enduring great pain) they've been looking for a buyer, but with no great success. They've finally found one now, though, except that one of the conditions of the buyout is that all of upper management is going to lose their jobs. Oh well!

Comment · 7 years ago
If they survive this experience, there will probably still be good money to be made helping clean up the mess which will no doubt occur here.
Comment · 7 years ago
> We only have two operating systems now Windows and Linux.

That all depends on what platform(s) you're using. For example, IBM still gives you zOS, AIX, the System i OS, and so on. And there are other operating systems for other platforms.

The computing world doesn't begin and end with Wintel, you know; it may seem that way sometimes, though.

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