| General > General Technical Chat |
| Was Don Lancaster really a "guru"? |
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| T3sl4co1l:
Agreed, CO2 and H2O are not toxic -- you'll gladly sit in a chamber consisting of a pure atmosphere of both, right? ;) The dose makes the poison; so it is with biology, so too the atmosphere. Tim |
| rhb:
--- Quote from: T3sl4co1l on February 18, 2019, 12:55:28 am ---Agreed, CO2 and H2O are not toxic -- you'll gladly sit in a chamber consisting of a pure atmosphere of both, right? ;) --- End quote --- So in your mind drowning, asphyxiation and poisoning are all synonymous? --- Quote --- The dose makes the poison; so it is with biology, so too the atmosphere. Tim --- End quote --- This is nonsensical. I'd have expected a more intelligent statement from you. Without CO2 & H20 plants die. Without water people die. Since we produce CO2 we are able to tolerate it to some degree, but our bodies are very sensitive to excessive levels. The atmosphere has become highly toxic many times in the past in the vicinity of major volcanic events. Not that it matters much in the case of a caldera collapse as everything will already be dead from the white hot rock fragments raining down in the area affected by the release of H2S. At greater distances where the ash has had time to cool will kill everything out to a range of 1000 miles or more. The ash kills the plants by blocking the sunlight; the herbivores die for lack of food followed shortly after by the carnivores. The problem is not just limited to the area of the ash fall. So much superfine ash is injected into the stratosphere that large expanses of the planet are covered with snow year around. But after a few years the ash eventually settles out and it warms up. The eruption of Mt. Tambora in 1815 resulted in what is referred to as "The Year Without a Summer" in 1816. Carl Sagan's nuclear winter was based on that. Mt. Tambora was big, but by no means the largest such event. The releases of H2S accompanying the great basalt floods such as the Deccan traps would have been much larger than releases related to a caldera collapse. There is a lot of H2s associated with a million cubic kilometer volcanic eruption and it is quite toxic if you are downwind of it. All of human history is the blink of an eye in geological terms. And the death toll in mass extinction events is truly astonishing, almost everything big enough to die does. Many years of effort have gone into trying to understand what happened. The earth is a *very* violent place. Organisms either adapt to the change or they die. The list of extinct organisms is *much* longer than the list of living organisms and vast numbers of organisms leave no fossil record other than some burrowing marks in the sediment. The melting of the polar ice caps over the last 15,000 years raised sea level by about 600 ft. That is an *average* sea level rise of 1/2" every year for 15,000 years. We are now at about average historical sea level high stand. Sea level has been around 100 ft higher at times. So given that our reference is mean global high stand this rise might continue at about 1/2" per year for a while longer. All of that water came from melting huge sheets of ice which had accumulated. That melting was the result of thousands of years of global warming which made it possible for the the small number of humans to move to higher latitudes. The Gulf stream brought a great deal of heat energy to Europe and making it especially hospitable. There certainly is coastal flooding caused by humans. But it's been caused by pumping oil and water out of the ground. Venice is particularly affected by ground water pumping. While sea level has been over 1000 ft below current MSL, it's unclear how much of that is the result of the addition of surface water from the release of H2O during volcanic eruptions and how much is the result of the continental plates moving around. In all of recorded history there have only been a few large geological events and *no* major events. All of this was fairly well known long before "paleoclimate studies" got rebranded as "climatology". All of this is well documented. The available data is freely accessible and various details hotly debated in the geological community in open discussions in which anyone who has an informed opinion may participate. It *is* science, so you *are* expected to know the facts and be able to justify your opinion with a logical argument which accounts for *all* the known facts. But there is no secret data and no one is going around proposing that those who disagree be put in prison. So I suggest a bit of critical thinking might be in order. I have not been significantly involved in geology for 35 years, so this is just what I remember from school. I got into reflection seismology and got entranced by all the digital signal processing involved. Any good PhD level geologist, which I am not, my geology studies ended with my MS, can cite far more issues that Mann et al ignore or misrepresent. |
| EEVblog:
Let's please stop the climate change talk, this forum and this thread are not the places for it. |
| Simon:
i have temporarily banned rhb as he started a "critical thinking" thread in general chat which was another way of saying lets disprove climate change. Hopefully he has got the message. |
| kd4ttc:
Yes he was. Back then the 7400 series of ICs had come out and they seemed a bear to use. What Don did in his TTL cookbook was to distill out the essential design prindiples that were needed to successfully use TTL ICs. Back then getting datasheets was not easy. No internet back then. One didn't really know all the ICs that were available in the series. After Don described the design principles he then came up with a very consistent way to describe the pinouts of the chips in the series. It was a breakthrough book for engineering. Turned out TTL was pretty eash to use, which the engineers knew, as long as you had a good power supply, used enough decoupling capacitors, and paid attention to fan-out. Once the concepts were in place he then went on a survey of very useful digital techniques. After the TTL cookbook CMOS became available, and the CMOS cookbook came out, very similar to TTL cookbook and also chock full of practical design recommendations. The CMOS is also full of great circuit ideas. Back then the folks at Birginia tech published a series of books called the Bugbooks. For bugs cuz the ICs looked like bugs and it was cute. The Bugbook I through The Bugbook VI. These came out after the TTL cookbook, but advanced the idea of outboards for prototype design. Bugbooks were college textbooks. The TTL cookbook was written for the engineer maybe moving into digital and giving advice gained from years of design wisdom. Thing is, after reading the TTL cookbook reading anything TI put out on their superb literature was completely accessible. As to Postscript, turns out there are a number of very sophisticated things you can do with it. It is really a functional language with the power of LISP but none of the safety. Don had discovered that PostScript is a general programming language with some very advanced features. Don used postscript to create the graphics in his books/ It seems that the language was so effective at creating generalized graphics which could be programmatically driven that he wanted to share his discovery. I've been pleased to follow his advice. I have a form for my business that I've updated multiple times. What you can do is create a form expressed a program. So you can change the positioning of an element and automatically have all the fonts change size, the number of rules on a form are drawn precisely and don't go of the page. The parts of a form can be moved and the right rargin of all the rules end at the right place. I had a complex schecule I had to draw. Postscript let me write a program that drew the schedule graphically, allowing me to revise it by changeng a few parameters and all the graphics go redrawn. I can't do this justice with these descriptions, but learing PostScript will let you draw arbitrary graphs with ease, but which can be changed in useulf ways with just easy parameter changes. If your learn it be sure to explore dictionaries, which let you easily send postsript functions with arguments like you would invoke functions with arguments in traditional computer languages. Go get a copy of the TTL cookbook and the CMOS cookbook. After reading them then just grab a data sheet of one of the newer families of MSI logic and you will know exactly how to use the whole family. The books are very conceptual while being superbly practical. You will have the ability to glue together any high level IC (which of course is the whole point, amazing functinality is available nowadays) with addtional parts and Analog ICs to create any electronics you need. Amazing. It's like 2-3 years of college engineering courses. |
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