Preface This article is about me and a couple of mates and our expedition into one of the three remaining Degree Confluence points on land in New Zealand. These confluence points are where lines of latitude (aka parallels) intersect with lines of longitude. There are 29 points altogether in New Zealand, and the project has been running for some time, so the low-hanging fruit has already been plucked - including all the points in the mainland United States.
So, you have a script which is slow, perhaps because you are using a whole collection of modern perl features, which aren’t necessarily terribly fast yet. You can’t wait for the runtime to implement the features natively and hence run quickly, but there is another solution. For instance, the XML::SRS distribution on CPAN makes use of some fairly advanced features of Moose, such as meta-attribute meta-roles. These are a win from a coding and maintenance point of view, as they allow a single attribute declaration to give you a Perl class which has XML marshalling as well as type constraints.
Remember the days of squeezing TSRs into high memory? C:\>mem Memory Type Total Used Free ---------------- -------- -------- -------- Conventional 638K 59K 579K Upper 0K 0K 0K Reserved 386K 386K 0K Extended (XMS) 3,627,654K 30,373K 3,597,281K ---------------- -------- -------- -------- Total memory 3,628,678K 30,818K 3,597,860K Total under 1 MB 638K 59K 579K Largest executable program size 578K (591,856 bytes) FreeDOS is resident in the high memory area. C:\> If you want to access that 3GB of XMS, you’ll have to page it in and out in 64K chunks.
Not a huge amount of progress… it’s January and of course New Zealand basically shuts down this time of year. But here’s another photo of the RepRap. It’s now got a top frame and I’ve soldered together some of the boards. This is shaping up to be one of those “month of Sundays” projects…
Full Sized Image I spent today following much of these instructions for building a RepRap - in short, it’s a 3D printer printer. It can squirt out little lines of plastic and slowly make shapes, including parts for itself. Of course doesn’t print absolutely everything it needs - I had to buy a whole lot of steel rod, which I found from suppliers in Petone and Lower Hutt, and today I found various fastenings suppliers in Te Aro for the nuts and bolts.
Comment to Act’s Dump the ETS release. There is no evidence that CO2 drives climate or that industrialisation is warming the world. Incorrect, the case for this has been built up since 1859, and the science has been tested against all of the best available evidence since then. Go look at the history. A statement like this betrays a complete ignorance of the facts. When I started out as an environmentalist the fear was global cooling.
cue applause Many that have talked with me about Climate Change, will be familiar with my position as a skeptic. Initially, like everyone else, accepting “happily” that climate change was real, at some point I got indoctrinated into the field of skeptics. I listened to a lot of arguments to see the holes in the theory. And I’m still skeptical. However, my skepticism has been narrowed down over the time I’ve investigated the topic.
Well, the third roll of this die (no doubt my critics will use the fact I’m using a 41-sided die in concert with symmetry theory to prove I’m a flatlander), I get 17. Looks like I lucked out somewhat - that’s landed in the “Believe global warming is primarily caused by natural processes” section again. This time, it’s actually a climatologist, what luck! George Kukla, retired Professor of Climatology at Columbia University and Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory (LDEO), said in an interview: “What I think is this: Man is responsible for a PART of global warming.
The second roll was 41 - is this die weighted? This time we’re in the “warming will be beneficial to humanity” section of the list. Patrick Michaels, part-time research professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia: “scientists know quite precisely how much the planet will warm in the foreseeable future, a modest three-quarters of a degree (Celsius), plus or minus a mere quarter-degree…a modest warming is a likely benefit.
Over at Hot Topic, I was challenged to: Pick three of the “dissidents” from that list at random (roll a dice or summat). Read who they are - is this really an expert on the climate? Then read what they say. Read it carefully and critically, and if they give numbers cross-check them, and then check for rebuttals. If you tackle any of their work with the level of skepticism you’ve shown here you’ll find it illuminating.