Posts by fortran

Techies with Asperger's? Yes, we are a little different...

Re: DSM-5 Book Review

What do you call "real autism"?

There are people who are severely autistic. They will never be able to hold down a job, and will always need to be under someone's care. There are high functioning autistics (who have an IQ (however that is defined) more than 100, more than average), these people should be capable of adding to the value (GDP) of society. And we have the people in between, some of whom can be expected to be capable or working, but really aren't expected to add value to society. But we always get surprises.

I am hopeless at dating (and I despise suggestions that I should consider homosexual relationships because I am hopeless at forming heterosexual relationships), and I am almost hopeless at applying for jobs? Does that make me a "real austitic"? Or are you just being a "real jerk"?

Why Considering Autism is Important

Autism is a social problem. Hiring is a social activity.

HR (semi-skilled industrial psychologists) or not, the hiring process is a patchwork of ideas and processes going back 350 years or more. Ideas at the beginning will have assumed that the properties of mankind are single moded and follow a Gaussian distribution. Trying to follow all the latest "improvements" to the hiring process, what seems to be the norm is to be ever more intrusive and yet still apply the idea that mankind is a single moded distribution. In the last decade, I haven't seen a single improvement proposed by people on the HR side, that would actually benefit people with autism. In general, they would all make things worse.

How can people propose changes to the hiring process, which increase the discrimination on autistics? I have tried to engage the HR industry, I never get replies. Either they think my concerns are wrong (so why not engage in debate?) or they are just interested in profit motive.

Discrimination against "differently coloured" people in the past (and now) was concious. Discrimination against high functioning autistics in technology is still for the most part unconcious. But society needs to realize it is discriminating against autistics, if for no other reason, to stop the presentation of new methods in HR hiring management which just make things worse for autistic applicants.

More Rambling

Someone mentioned suffering from autism (or Asperger's). I don't suffer from Asperger's, I suffer from society.

For the first 18 years of my professional life, a trained professional probably could have easily noticed I was autistic. HR is in a sense, industrial psychology. Why did none of those bozos ever recognize I was different, and on their own treat my application differently? At that time, I never had any badge on my shift saying I was different. I tried just as hard as anyone to find a start to my chosen career, why were the only jobs I found the ones where I was probably the only applicant?

A word which pops up with autism, is savant. About half of the people in the world with Savant Syndrome are neurotypical, and half are autistic. (The last I researched, those were the only groups which displayed Savant Syndrome.) Only about 10% of people with autism are considered high functioning. The high functioning autistic savant or Asperger's savant is just a little more unusual.

What clues a person in about Savant Syndrome? If you have a parent who has something like perfect pitch or photographic memory, you might look for signs of Savant Syndrome.

DSM-5 Book Review

In a few places today, there are reviews of DSM-5.

Everybody has there own set of TLAs, and DSM may not mean anything. DSM is the "bible" the Psychiatry "profession" uses: Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, volume 5. One book report had this quote:

> Above all, psychiatrists need to be more honest with their patients, he believes. “They shouldn’t tell people their illness is caused by a chemical imbalance when there is no evidence this exists. Psychiatry has little knowledge of the underlying processes governing mental health and it should not pretend otherwise.”

The book is: The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry’ by Gary Greenberg is published by Ingram International Inc.

In DSM-5, Asperger's Syndrome has been removed, and it is just some part of ASD (Autistic Spectrum Disorder).

Re: And what about interviews?

I think you probably need to head the start a business route too. Just don't wait as long as I did. Minimum commercial space tends to be 1000 square feet, and finding that small is difficult. Everyone wants long term leases and expensive rents where I live. Trying to gather these resources after a decade without income is harder than just a couple of years out.

Good luck.

Finding Work

There is a company out of Denmark (I believe) that specializes in hiring autistic people for software testing purposes. I believe the owner has an autistic son, and there have been articles in the press about him and this company. One of the more recent articles, was that SAP is going to try to attain a certain fraction of autistic employees, and they are going to use this Danish company as a HR department in that regard.

There is a USA company which often gets military contracts, so being a USA citizen is probably mandatory, which is called Applied Research Associates. Head office is Albuquerque, they have other offices. On their careers page, is a link to allow someone with special conditions (such as autism) to ask for special processing. I think this is something that all companies that might hire high functioning autistics should employ. The problem is, I can also see a part of the population who doesn't need help in finding work, abusing the system. And so I think the companies that employ this, really should run a blacklist of people who seek to abuse this.

I have been trying to get my engineering association to come up with a policy with respect to companies hiring "learning disabled" people. Who knows if they will? I think employers need to be pushed into being more proactive on the issue of hiring people with autism, and probably other traits such as dyslexia. I am unsure about dyslexia, as most people I have talked to about this that have dyslexia, have not felt that they have had problems in finding work.

Rambling

I had never heard of autism or Asperger's Syndrome before December of 2000. Then slashdot had a thread commenting on a Wired article which got into the cost of social services in high tech places like silicon valley. It seems a lot of high functioning men and women on the spectrum end up in such places, marry and have children. And the odds (from the article) of any given child being severely autistic was something like 60%. I don't remember if the source of that statistic was referenced or not. But, the article and the slashdot comments sure rung a bell with me.

I immediately took a disliking to how a diagnosis was made, it was all the opinion of some person. What is the probability of this person's diagnosis being negative (not on the spectrum) when it should be positive? And it is likely that this probability is not a constant. If the person doing the diagnosing did not get their morning coffee, they might have a greater probability of making certain kinds of errors. Genetic tests and function MRI seem much more reasonable to me. I was never tested, but I tick far too many boxes.

A year or so after learning of autism, a downturn in the economy ended my job. I was working for a branch of the government doing something technical, but not what I was trained for. I asked the HR department about what to do with my new found knowledge of autism. They said I should keep it secret. By some measures, I had been trying my best to find engineering employment for 18 years at that point and keeping it secret because I didn't know. I tried for 5 years to find work without mentioning it, and seen no difference in the interest from employers. And the more I thought about it, it is silly to keep it secret. If we ever get to an interview, we are pretty much screwed if the interviewer doesn't know we are autistic. Being ignorant does not always work in an effort to be fair, and with autism I don't think it works very often.

I have eye contact problems, but it seems to be tied in to light intensity and quality in some way. I see people as having two emotions, happy and something else. The something else varies from person to person. Because I recognize happy (upwards parabola), I have developed a persistent sense of humour. One researcher I wrote to, thought that excessive honesty in the autistic is likely the result of just being exceptionally bad at lying. A common example about autistic children is the parent asking the child "You want a cookie?" and the child replying "You want a cookie.". The researcher explains the autistic child is mixing up pronouns. The child doesn't know the difference between a pro noun and an amateur noun, the child thinks that one of his (or her) names is "You". There seems to be a huge lack of information as to what is a principle symptom of autism, and was is a learned reaction when some set of principle symptoms is present.

Engineering is a career that often draws in the high functioning autistic. But it seems likely, that not all kinds of engineering are equally attractive. Mechanical and civil engineering are nominally defined by F=ma. Electrical engineering is nominally defined by V=iR. And those are the 3 largest branches of engineering. I can imagine some going into chemical engineering, where the rules are nominally book-keeping (the sum of the atoms in equals the sum of the atoms out) at steady state. Most people are familiar with those rules in high school, to choose one of those branches of engineering makes sense. The rules for materials science and engineering (MSE) can overlap chemical engineering, but really the rules of MSE are quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics. And I suspect even today, most B.Sc. graduates of MSE don't have the theoretical background to understand the rules.

It looks like I am being forced down the open your own business track. Doing so without resources isn't easy. Everything is too expensive. And if a person becomes successful, how do you manage employees?

500 MEELLION PCs still run Windows XP. How did we get here?

I'm still looking for the good HOWTO, about moving the XP half of a dual boot to running under an open VM under Linux. No upgrades to XP happening here.

Thorium and inefficient solar power? That's good enough for me

Th cycle, and economic models

As pointed out above, Thorium can be used in CANDU. Th-232 absorbs a neutron to become Th-233, which decays to Pa-233, which decays to U-233. It is U-233 which is fissile, and can under go fission. U-232 gets into the Th fuel cycle via a (n,2n) on the U-233 daughter. Some neutron captures of U-233 lead to the production of U-234 and not fission. Also, Pa-233 can capture a neutron, to become Pa-234. Both paths lead towards producing heavier and heavier actinides. The longish (about 1 month) half life of Pa-233 is what I dislike. Others in the comments recognized U-232 as being a source of problem.

I think some of the problems society has with uranium, thorium and by association, the rare earths, is the idea that they can be owned. If a person stumbles across (what is conventionally) a uranium ore, there will be some thorium present and almost always there are rare earths. If you stumble across a thorium ore, there may be uranium present, and almost always there are rare earths. If you stumble across a rare earth "ore", usually thorium is present and sometimes uranium is present.

There is nothing wrong (in theory) to someone "owning" rare earths, the problem is this idea of owning uranium or thorium. A uranium mine want to only remove uranium, and leave everything else behind. The problem for me, is now all the decay chain of the leftovers is being supported by the Th-230 (half life 75,400 years). The leftovers are nominally 70+% of the activity of the parent ore body. But the original ore body was probably mostly competent rock, and after processing we are left with powdered rock. The surface area to volume ratio has gone from near zero to a huge number. Soluble species are more easily removed, and radon has almost no problem escaping. Refined thorium immediately after processing, is not much of a problem. But refined thorium has a small amount of Th-228 (at almost 2 year half life) in it, and its daughters all quickly come into equilibrium. And there is significant surface hazard right at the end of the Th-232 decay chain, with a 5 MeV beta and a 9 or 10 MeV alpha.

Thorium has some useful metallurgical applications, the problem is these daughters coming back quite quickly (and sort of temporarily), and then everything getting resupported by Th-232. If people could only "rent" thorium and they had to return it when they were done with it, we could avoid a lot of the radiation hazard by continuously reprocessing radium upon return. If uranium processing was required to capture most of the thorium as well, the long term hazard of tailings would go down significantly. But a person has to attach those ideas to rare earth mining, in that every rare earth mine must recover most of the uranium and thorium copresent, and either store it properly or forward it to an agency which will.

Torvalds shoots down call to yank 'backdoored' Intel RdRand in Linux crypto

"Linus is wrong", worst case scenario (router/plug computer)

Routers and plug computers don't have hardware RNG, regardless of what particular mechanism is involved. There is no keyboard or mouse. The only randomness they have is timing of the requests (packets) that come in, and something about the requests themselves.

The computer caches some amount of "random data", so that it has something to start from on the next reboot. During operation, it receives some amount of new random data. A person generates a Poisson devitate based on how much random data has been received since booting. This is an estimate of how much of our previous cache of random data to delete. We can't delete all of it, and there may be reasons to restrict it to less than that (force the router to reboot over and over). But, we delete some amount of previous data with some amount of new data. And on a reboot, we use the time as a seed to shuffle the data we have.

There is no sense visiting random.org for data, as the DNS may be poisonned and all you get back is zeros. Even using a bad RNG, a person can generate random dot quads to ping (ignoring the reserved networks). And all you want to know is the time to respond to a single ping. DNS isn't involved, so hopefully nothing interfers with that. But, pinging (a single ping) to known sites, and comparing that to previous pings would be useful.

I am not a crypto professional, and no desire to be one. I do want to be able to do Monte Carlo studies (and similar) properly.

Whether you call it blending, or something else, it seems reasonable to not trust a single source of randomness. For things like routers and plug computers, I think they are our best environments to try and produce good random numbers (via /dev/random). If what we do for these computers works well, they probably are not a problem for computers which have active user inputs.

Some hardware RNG can make use of radioactive sources. A radioactive source emits with Poisson statistics. But, not all radioactive substances have a half life independent of external conditions. Best example, a nuclei which decays by electron capture, cannot decay if there are no electrons present (deep space). If your hardware RNG has uranium in it, the spontaneous fission of U-238 is influenced by the concentration of muons.

I seen someone talking about diodes sensitive to UV, I think this is great. UV doesn't penetrate matter very far (not like things like muons or neutrinos), and if one can produce a RNG whose output can be mapped to the uniform 0-1 accurately, I am all for that.

Just don't use /dev/random for user programs, except possibly to get a seed value.

drivers/char/andom.c (T.F.M.Reader)

What I learned of numerically intensive computing, is if your code needs random numbers, you go find a RNG that suites your needs. If your RNG needs a random seed in starting, you can call /dev/random once for that seed. But making a string from process id, the time, free space on partitions, and what not, and running that through something like MD5 for your seed is probably about as good. But you don't use /dev/random for general user programming. And look at the source for your RNG, to make sure it isn't using /dev/random in some way.

Google goes dark for 2 minutes, kills 40% of world's net traffic

Re: Upgrade Complete

I agree. This length of time is probably about the time required for a skilled spook to install new hardware at Google.

If you have a choice between buying a product or service from the USA and somewhere else of comparable quality, choose somewhere else. Hitting the entire USA in the wallet is the only way to stop this crap.

'Liberator': Proof that you can't make a working gun in a 3D printer

Lost Wax?

Perhaps even the manufacturer is using the wrong material in the 3D printer? Use PLA in a manner similar to the lost wax method, and cast metal parts. I suspect the design might need to change if the object is changed to allowing someone to cast a metal gun at home via lost wax method, than to produce a plastic gun which is used as is.

New nuke could POWER WORLD UNTIL 2083

Re: Thorium Cycle

Or, maybe a person has to impact a comet on the Moon in order to get a supply of deuterium (and organics)?

Re: Flash-boiling

While zirconium has some wonderful nuclear properties, it has some annoying chemical properties.

If a nuclear accident results in molten zirconium, and some processes have reduced the oxygen content in containment, we still have another potential problem. Zirconium (titanium and hafnium, and some other metals) are all more than happy to undergo combustion by nitrogen. The lack of available oxygen does not necessarily indicate a lack of chemical heat generation potential with zirconium. On Earth, we have lots of nitrogen, on the Moon, it is rare.

Re: Thorium Cycle

I'm thinking of the situation where industry on the Moon is developing, and power is needed on the Moon. Yes, solar power is available. But, having a backup (gee, that last asteroid wiped out the transmission line) is useful. And being thermal, waste heat could be useful.

The idea of 9 hours, is to operate in circumstances where Xe-135 is less than equilibrium. No sense having a parasitic neutron reaction if you can avoid it. A person has to have too much fuel inventory to have 300 days out of core, but there is almost infinite real estate up there.

I know pebble designs on earth involve carbides and pyrolitic carbon, and carbon is in short supply on the Moon. Some other kind of pebble system would be needed. There is some deuterium in the solar wind, and many people have written about He-3 in the regolith. Is there enough deuterium in the regolith to make heavy water for a thermal reactor? Once you have a reactor, some neutrons will be absorbed by light hydrogen to make deuterium (and some absorbed by deuterium to make tritium).

On the Moon, access is less of a problem than here. It is also a much different kind of access. Political input to pebble design will be different.

I suspect you are talking about getting rid of waste heat in terms of a challenge. The same challenge is present just for mining. You need engines to run drills, dozers, .... They all make waste heat, but are smaller in scale.

Pumping waste heat into the ground might work, if you can find processes that can use that for a heat source.

Thorium Cycle

@Andydaws and others?

My experience with nukes is a smal onel, a SLOWPOKE. But, one of the things I've spent a little time thinking about, is how one might build a reactor someplace where there LOTS of real estate and no problems with water or neighbours (who don't want a nuke in their backyard). The Moon. If a person made a lot of "pebbles" with thorium in them, and only had a fraction of them in the core at any given time, the rest of the time they are in a disadvantageous geometry, allowing the Th-233/Pa-233/U-233 to run to somewhat to completion. Something like 9 hours in core, and 45 days out of core, before the cycle repeats. Any opinion as to whether that makes the thermal breeder for Th/U-233 work?

Wigner

@AndyDaws

I would prefer to say that many of the carbon atoms are now occupying interstitial sites. I come from materials science, not physics. :-) You seen where the operating temperature was to be 700C?

Looks like an update to me, not new

Not much information available (yet). They (CEO) are guessing 2 years to get benchtop data, 5-8 years to get through to prototype stage.

ThoriumMSR has a URL on this http://thoriummsr.com/q-and-a-with-russell-wilcox-of-transatomic-power/

I would guess the 3% efficiency number presented, is the typical efficiency of USA light water designs.

This design is expected to work with thorium or uranium, but will start with uranium. While the design produces much less waste (they think), it is not likely to be qualified to burn existing waste. So, we still need to deal with that, for probably at least another 20 years.

Another thread mentions that nitrate salts break down at 565 C, and the above thread says the reactor will like operate at 700C. So, it isn't likely to be nitrate salts. A question in the above thread had an answer that it isn't likely to be chloride salts. Another question about fuel, is that for new uranium fuel, the input is likely to be gaseous UF6, which suggests to me they are talking fluoride salts.

They aren't willing to say if this is thermal, fast or something else.

Someone in a thread somewhere, mentioned lithium. I'm not a big believer in lithium or beryllium, as they both undergo fission of a sort. Be-9 can absorb a gamma over 1.6 MeV, emit a photoneutron, and then decay into 2 He-4 nuclei, which looks a lot like fission. Li-6 can absorb a neutron and essentially split into H-3 and He-4. Li-7 doesn't have a big absorption cross section, but Li-8 beta decays to Be-8 with a short half life, and we get those 2 He-4 particles again (another essentially fission reaction).

They are calling it intrinsically safe, and yet it is supposed to have a graphite core. Graphite can store energy when used as a moderator, and annealing the graphite to release this energy becomes part of reactor operation. And the release of that energy in a large mass of graphite, can be a problem.

If they use uranium fuel, they will breed all the transuranics that uranium fueled reactors normally breed. That they think they can burn most of them away is useful. The problem with a lot of thorium fueled designs, is that 28 day Pa-233. If the fuel stays in the core, the Pa-233 has a big enough cross section for neutrons, that you make Pa-234, which provides access to all the transuranic production of uranium fueled reactors.

If this reactor can safely burn up transuranics and fission products, I would hope that they consider one (or a few) channels through the core of a refractory material, through which they can insert/circulate existing used fuel. It is not enough to just not generate more waste, we need a way to get rid of the existing waste.

And they might as well stick to uranium, until someone finds the magic to get most of the Th-232 to transform to U-233 correct.

Six things a text editor must do - or it's a one-way trip to the trash

Make mine emacs

I prefer emacs, or clones of emacs. From the DOS days, epsilon was a useful clone of emacs. I've seldom had to work with the LISP side of emacs, that it is LISP is almost irrelevent.

Some have accused emacs of being an O/S. I believe QNX-4 allowed a person to bind a program to the kernel, which meant you could actually boot emacs on a computer.

coffee.el

On International Woman's Day we remember Grace Hopper

Re: Revisionist B*llocks

My Mom grew up in western Canada, in a world where women were not allowed to have credit. If you didn't have enough money to buy a fridge outright, you could not buy a fridge. A man, didn't even need to have a steady job to be approved for credit. I'm early 50's and my Mom is early 80's.