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Well, there's a neat website that lets you calculate the size of crater and damage done for a given size of asteroid.

the nasa HiRSE team is releasing full resolution images from the new orbiter as they are processed. its fantastic! their site seems to be down at the moment but it has the pictures, and a sofar interesting blog from some of the image processing team http://hiroc.lpl.arizona.edu/

Is there an add word feature? http://www.ece.arizona.edu/~rrgomez/google-funny.j pg

Hi, Thanks for making the correction. If I might, I'd like to note that actually the paper in question is Napoli et al., not Jorgensen et al. I've received plenty of credit but Carolyn gets forgotten, so please refer to the paper as Napoli et al. It's Carolyn Napoli, Christine Lemieux and me. 1990. You can find a free copy, with petunia photos, original cosuppression RNase protection experiment, etc., in The Plant Cell: http://www.plantcell.org/cgi/content/abstract/2/4/ 279 You can also find a link to this paper at my web site, along with links to a short Nova video that explains RNAi beautifully and simply: http://ag.arizona.edu/pls/faculty/jorgensen.html?& index=8#pubs I guess I should clarify that "it wasn't immediately clear it was the same thing as RNAi" because this was 1990 and RNAi was discovered in 1996/7 and published in 1998. RNA silencing was a small field for a long time before RNAi came along and got the whole scientific community excited about it. It was truly a monumental discovery - double-stranded RNA as the key to RNA silencing - and more than worthy of a Nobel. Hats off to Andy and Craig. Rich Jorgensen

Science has been "fighting" with religion for centuries. Do you think that fight is over?

In an age where some stem cell research is banned for religious reasons, managing only to drive the research overseas, is it wise to ignore the battle between science and religion?

This Nobel prize should have been shared with a plant biologist, Richard Jorgenson and others http://cals.arizona.edu/pls/faculty/jorgensen.html , who initially discovered the phenomena. He discovered it while inserting extra copies of an already existing gene into Petunia. Moreover, co-suppression, the silencing of gene expression, has been well documented in plants. They should give credit where credit is due and they Nobel committee missed a nice opportunity.

Did anyone notice how much these images of "Texas" resemble the images recently captured by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter? All they did was add some "clouds" and a few "roads" (obviously Photoshopped in at the last minute). This is just another example of the ongoing NASA conspiracy to convince Americans that there is intelligent life in Texas.

I don't know where this 1 meter stuff came from. The actual full sampling of HiRISE is 30cm, a factor of 6 greater than HRSC, and a factor of 3 better than MOC. Be careful when comparing "sampling" to "resolution" -- they are not the same thing. HiRISE has taken the HiROAD, so to speak, by not trumpeting their 30cm sampling but instead claiming 1-meter imaging scales. Don't hold that against them when comparing to other teams that publish their best sampling.

The other real advantage of this camera is that it returns 14-bit images -- this means that they get dynamic range such that you can see details well, with good S/N, EVEN IN SHADOW, while keeping the well-lit stuff from saturating. Truly awesome. On Friday, when those images come down, 20,000 by 60,000 with awesome signal-to-noise, full dynamic range, and 30cm surface sampling, you will agree that this is a large forward step for Martian surface science.

Unfortunately, a Mars mission doesn't have the mass budget for that much radiation shielding, either during the cruise stage or on the planet (which still has a lot more ionizing radiation reaching the surface than Earth does due to the lack of a strong magnetic field + much thinner atmosphere; otherwise, the Odyssey gamma-ray and neutron spectrometers wouldn't work so well). The processors still have to be radiation-hardened.

http://www.ic.arizona.edu/ic/mcbride/ws200/weavwom e.htm

There is branch of anthropology devoted entirely to basketweaving.

KFG

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answer s/970326c.html
Despite the fact that Pluto and Neptune temporarily change places in their distance from the sun, they will never collide. This is due to two reasons: First, Pluto's orbit is inclined to the ecliptic. by 17 degrees. (To see an illustration of this, take a look at
http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/billa/tnp/overview.htm l )
So even though we say their orbits "cross", Pluto is actually quite a distance "above"Neptune. Secondly, Pluto orbits the sun twice for every three orbits of Neptune. The two planets are said to be in a "resonance orbit". For such orbits, the two bodies never get close to each other. In fact, the closest the two planets come to each other is 2 billion kilometers.

It's gone paywall online, but a recent edition(June or August) of Scientific American has an article about bird vision, with comparisons to mammalian and human vision.

http://www.sciam.com/print_version.cfm?articleID=0 00DA6AC-F10C-1492-A7CE83414B7F0000

There are nifty diagrams showing the different pigments present in the different eyes and their sensitivities. Another interesting factoid, birds have oil droplets associated with their color sensing cells; the droplets narrow the spectrum that the cell is sensitive too, increasing the birds ability to see color. The relatively poor color vision of humans is ascribed to mammal's rather nocturnal evolutionary history.

A somewhat related posting by the author of the article:

http://listserv.arizona.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9512c &L=birdchat&P=5566

Slashdot wants more characters per line Sky above 37Â375"N 122Â2222"W at Sat 2005 Jul 2 20:11 Slashdot wants more characters per line ScienceDaily Magazine -- News Summaries Slashdot wants more characters per line BBC NEWS | Science/Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Science News Online Slashdot wants more characters per line Molecule of the Day Slashdot wants more characters per line The Loom Slashdot wants more characters per line Cosmic Variance Slashdot wants more characters per line Scientific American news Slashdot wants more characters per line Sciencegate Slashdot wants more characters per line New Scientist Slashdot wants more characters per line LiveScience Slashdot wants more characters per line Science And Politics Slashdot wants more characters per line Chris C Mooney Slashdot wants more characters per line symmetry Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Discover Magazine Slashdot wants more characters per line Mathematician OTD Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Exploration Rover Mission: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter: Home Slashdot wants more characters per line ESA - Cassini-Huygens Slashdot wants more characters per line NASA - Cassini-Huygens: Close Encounter with Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line HiRISE Operations Center -- HiROC Slashdot wants more characters per line Cassini Saturn Slashdot wants more characters per line CICLOPS: Cassini Imaging Slashdot wants more characters per line Saturn Today Slashdot wants more characters per line HubbleSite - NewsCenter Slashdot wants more characters per line MESSENGER Web Site Slashdot wants more characters per line Deep Impact: Your First Look Inside a Comet! Slashdot wants more characters per line Pluto, Charon, and other Kuiper Belt Objects including, Sedna, 2003 UB313, as well as Asteroids and Comets. Slashdot wants more characters per line Nature Slashdot wants more characters per line Pharyngula

They got these university things all over the place. Turns out this Tuscon place has one of the best optical sciences groups in the world, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who have built instruments for interplanetary spacecraft, and a lot of space industry is based there.

They got these university things all over the place. Turns out this Tuscon place has one of the best optical sciences groups in the world, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who have built instruments for interplanetary spacecraft, and a lot of space industry is based there.

They got these university things all over the place. Turns out this Tuscon place has one of the best optical sciences groups in the world, the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory who have built instruments for interplanetary spacecraft, and a lot of space industry is based there.

I recently wrote a small app based on "Filter Builder" by ActiveState. It's called Pattern Sandbox and has helped me rapidly prototype regexes for both Java and Perl (because the Java dialect is very similar to Perl's). I made Pattern Sandbox because it was so annoying to write a regex, compile, get to that part of the code/interface, and then finally try it just to find that it does not work correctly so I have to repeat this process until I get it right. If you are using Java regexes on a regular basis, Pattern Sandbox or similar tools are indispensable. Try it out and feel free to give me some feedback. I hope this is not too much of a plug, but I thought it to be very appropriate.

Back when I first heard of "oobleck" (though it was called "blue ooze" by the guys who told me about it, for some reason), I thought of this precise application.

http://sciconn.mcb.arizona.edu/oobleck/oobleck.htm l

Here in Arizona there is a publicly "accessible" form of this at the Boyce Thompson Arboretum - albeit just with the "cool" tower. They typically operate it in the dry summer months (not during monsoons) - basically the same system as you describe, except with a fan at the bottom of the cool tower to draw the air down, which is then pumped into their outside "lobby" area. It makes the lobby area a very nice place to be after walking through the park...

Or more likely, a Raman spectometer which identifies substances using properties of scattered laser light.

The city of Tucson is actually sinking. If California starts using more desalinization instead of leeching off the Colorado, it might make room for cities without ocean access to start using more river water. Or people might just keep bitching about how treated water tastes so bad.

Most of the southwest United States has been in a drought for the past 20 years or so. And the city of Tucson is actually sinking. If California starts using more (cheap) desalinization plants instead of leeching off the Colorado, it might make room for cities without ocean access to start using more river water instead of pumping it out of the overtaxed water tables. Or people might just keep bitching about how treated water tastes so bad.

Imagine if what hit the moon hit a major city...

Whenever the topic of meteors comes up, someone has to post a link to the University of Arizona impact effects calculator. Play with the numbers, see if you can destroy the earth.

Also worth checking out along the Lucifer's hammer line of thought is How to Destroy the Earth

I tried a quick reverse engineering of the meteor with the calculator. An iron meteor 4.5 meters in diameter moving 20 km/s hitting crystalline rock at 45 degrees will have a yield of 18 kilotons...slightly higher than the atomic bomb detonated over Hiroshima. The average interval of an impact of this size on earth is about once every 5 years. Most go largely unnoticed. The earth is a big place.

The article posted above seems to be based on this from Ohio State University, which is better illustrated, etc.

If you want to "experiment" with results of various impacts, Arizona State has an online calculator.

I programmed the University of Arizona cubesats. We actually have two satellites launching from the Cosmodrome this summer. The first is, as the summary notes, called Rincon. It is named for Rincon Research which provided us much of the funding. Rincon Research is in turn named for the mountain range on the East side of Tucson. The other satellite is called SACRED, and, honestly, I can't actually remember what it stands for. I think it's something in French...

The summary is not entirely correct about the construction of the cubesats. Some are indeed made from the kit, but not all. Ours, for example, were completely designed and built at the UA with the exception of the radio transceivers. SACRED also includes an experiment board designed by the Univ. of Montpelier.

Here's a much better link to a page describing the cubesats:

UA Cubesats

Some of the other posts have been complaining about the purpose of these cubesats. It's true that they are all very simple. But you have to remember that they were designed and built by students (with faculty help, of course). The UA cubesats have PIC 16F877 microcontrollers on board with 64 KB of ferromagnetic storage memory. So, it's understandable that they will be limited.

The Rincon satellite has twelve sensors which monitor voltage, temperature, and current. These will let us know how well the cubesat is working and hopefully allow us to compute its spin rate. SACRED also has an experiment board which will perform some radiation tests on a few electronic components.

These cubesats (the UA's at least) are more than just beacons, as some posters have suggested. I programmed them, so I'm well aware of their capabilities. They have, for their size, a fairly decent command structure and allow for two-way communication. They take measurements on a schedule (which can be modified) and store the results for later transmission to the ground station in Tucson, Arizona. For the extra curious among you, you can read the cubesat manual I wrote for our project:

Cubesat II Operating System Owner's Manual

I programmed the University of Arizona cubesats. We actually have two satellites launching from the Cosmodrome this summer. The first is, as the summary notes, called Rincon. It is named for Rincon Research which provided us much of the funding. Rincon Research is in turn named for the mountain range on the East side of Tucson. The other satellite is called SACRED, and, honestly, I can't actually remember what it stands for. I think it's something in French...

The summary is not entirely correct about the construction of the cubesats. Some are indeed made from the kit, but not all. Ours, for example, were completely designed and built at the UA with the exception of the radio transceivers. SACRED also includes an experiment board designed by the Univ. of Montpelier.

Here's a much better link to a page describing the cubesats:

UA Cubesats

Some of the other posts have been complaining about the purpose of these cubesats. It's true that they are all very simple. But you have to remember that they were designed and built by students (with faculty help, of course). The UA cubesats have PIC 16F877 microcontrollers on board with 64 KB of ferromagnetic storage memory. So, it's understandable that they will be limited.

The Rincon satellite has twelve sensors which monitor voltage, temperature, and current. These will let us know how well the cubesat is working and hopefully allow us to compute its spin rate. SACRED also has an experiment board which will perform some radiation tests on a few electronic components.

These cubesats (the UA's at least) are more than just beacons, as some posters have suggested. I programmed them, so I'm well aware of their capabilities. They have, for their size, a fairly decent command structure and allow for two-way communication. They take measurements on a schedule (which can be modified) and store the results for later transmission to the ground station in Tucson, Arizona. For the extra curious among you, you can read the cubesat manual I wrote for our project:

Cubesat II Operating System Owner's Manual

I know of several Highlevel-to-Lowlevel language translators (e.g. Java-toC, Oberon-to-C, you name it) that have been around for decades. Surely, you cannot get a patent for doing the same thing with a different language, can you. Can you?!?

Compiling something to JavaScript in the browser environment is about as obvious as compiling to C on Unix. Case in point, here are a few other X-to-JavaScript compilers pulled off the top of my head: Python, Prolog, Oberon, etc. Seems pretty obvious to me. Not that that has ever prevented the US Patent Office from granting a patent, of course.

The core is divided into two parts, the outer core which is liquid, and the inner core which is solid. If you are curious why this is, you need to study the phase diagram (P-T graph) of iron.

How is this known?

S waves do not travel through liquids.

The core is divided into two parts, the outer core which is liquid, and the inner core which is solid. If you are curious why this is, you need to study the phase diagram (P-T graph) of iron.

How is this known?

S waves do not travel through liquids.

(1) Except as otherwise specifically provided in this chapter any person who--

...

(c) intentionally discloses, or endeavors to disclose, to any other person the contents of any wire, oral, or electronic communication [emphasis mine], knowing or having reason to know that the information was obtained through the interception of a wire, oral, or electronic communication in violation of this subsection; or

...

(ii) Notwithstanding any other law, providers of wire or electronic communication service, their officers, employees, and agents, landlords, custodians, or other persons, are authorized to provide information, facilities, or technical assistance to persons authorized by law to intercept wire, oral, or electronic communications or to conduct electronic surveillance, as defined in section 101 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, if such provider, its officers, employees, or agents, landlord, custodian, or other specified person, has been provided with--

(A) a court order directing such assistance signed by the authorizing judge, or

(B) a certification in writing by a person specified in section 2518(7) of this title or the Attorney General of the United States that no warrant or court order is required by law, that all statutory requirements have been met, and that the specified assistance is required,

Simply put: It is illegal to tap any electronic communication (including email) without a court order.

As to H2O, you're just wrong. I challenge you to cite a peer-reviewed scientific calculation that finds 95% of the greenhouse effect due to water vapor. It's pretty straightforward to do these calculations and if you posit that almost all the greenhouse warming is due to water vapor, you find much greater meridional temperature contrasts than we observe (because there is so much water vapor in the tropics and so little over the polar regions) and a greater environmental lapse rate than we observe (because water vapor falls off so quickly with altitude, while CO2 remains fairly constant, so radiative cooling to space would start at lower altitudes).

In fact, H2O contributes around half of the greenhouse effect and CO2 contributes a bit more than a quarter. See The Earth's Annual Radiation Budget," by J.T. Kiehl and K.E. Trenberth, Bull. Am. Meteorolog. Soc. 78 (2), 197-208 (1997) for details.

The Ordovician climate had significantly higher CO2 levels than today, but there were no significant glaciers during most of that period and the sea levels were much higher than today. If we transitioned into an Ordovician climate, all of Florida and the Gulf Coast would be underwater.

The statement that CO2 correlates well with temperature is incorrect. CO2 has been steadily increasing over the last 100 years, while temperatures rose from the 1880's to about 1940, cooled until about the 1970s, and has risen again of late.

The 30 year dip is potentially contributed to by a number of factors including solar variation and less solar energy reaching the surface due to greater cloud cover (partly due to particulate pollutants but for other reasons too). Yes it represents an abberation in the correlation, but that does not prevent the existence of generally good correlation otherwise (particulrly over things like rate of increase and the fact that the current warming trend stands out as anomolous - just as the current atmospheric carbon dioxide spike.

CO2 is not a pollutant. It is, in fact, the lifeblood of the planet, required for growth of vegetation. It is the cornerstone of the food chain.

And no one said carbon dioxide was, in and of itself, bad. The fact remains that there is a natural carbon cycle that has, for the last several million years, been keeping a great deal of carbon sequestered and out of the atmosphere. The problem is not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the problem is dramatic abberation from the natural cycle caused by our release of the previously sequestered carbon into the atmosphere. We are providing a new forcing to the natural cycle - a new forcing to a complex system: it is reasonable to expect that this forcing, differing from the natural fluctuations, could introduce significant new changes in the behaviour of the system. While changes will have both positive and negative effects, the reality is that for humans in general rapid change is, in and of itself, a negative effect.

Water vapor is by far the primary contributor of the greenhouse effect, accounting for 96 to 99%.

I would like to know where you got that figure - I can't find any respectable sources that give a figure anywhere near that high. For example this paper on the subject gives a figure of 60% clear sky contribution for water vapour and 26% clear sky contribution for carbon dioxide. The 1990 IPCC report estimates around 60%-70% contribution from water vapour.

The fact that water vapour contributes significantly to the greenhouse effect is, at least, not in dispute. The point is not that the greenhouse effect is bad, but that humans are providing a forcing on the system that has the potential to destabilise it, or at the least create significant change: The water cycle, like the carbon cycle, is a natural process that maintins a rough equilibrium (there is, of course, some fluctation due to all manner of other causes and factors), and the introduction of massive amount of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere is not a part of that natrual system, thus we can reasonably expect significant change.

During the current interglacial period, the Earth has been about 2C cooler (The "Little Ice Age" around 1600-1700, when the Thames regularly froze over)

Again I'll have to ask you for sources on that because all the reputable sources I can find put the little ice age as at most 1.2C colder than 2004 temperatures, while most studies (which the IPCC sumarises well) put the figure at less than 1C. More importantly, while there were local fluctuations, the actual degree of fluctuation in mean global temperature was a lot less. Certainly Europe experienced some cold years - that does not mean that everywhere did.

and it has also been about 2C warmer (The medieval warm period around 1000 - 1200, when Greenland was colonized by the Vikings and exported surplus crops.)

I've seen nothing claiming the medieval warm period was as warm as that! Greenland was indeed settled by the Norse around that time - they settled in a couple of fjords that offered some

HiRISE, under the best of conditions, will do about 30 cm/pixel sampling, giving it a resolving power of just over half a meter. So it is indeed the most powerful camera in Mars Orbit.

I cannot describe in words how assine [sic] this statement is..

Let's see... This web page lists the LD50 for Clostridium botulinum for mice as 30 picograms per kilogram of body weight, and C. botulinum neurotoxin at 200 picograms/kg. We're so nonchalant about botox that people have parties where they inject themselves with it to get rid of wrinkles. See also this portion of the Wikipedia entry on plutonium.

Every time I see one of these studies, I remind myself that they're being performed by the same idiot pre-meds who were struggling through basic physics and chemistry courses. Even that's when they didn't get special dumbed-down "premed" versions of those classes. Somehow, this is not surprising. Not saying all doctors are dumb, just most of them.

Well the researchers performing this study may be aware of something you're not, which is that radiation affects biological systems without ionizing them. Drop your simplified billiard-ball model of physics for a moment, and first read how microwave radiation affects polar molecules, followed by a quick search for the word "polar" in this page. Note that the direct application of rotational forces to specific molecules can not always be modeled as a simple thermal model when it is being applied, because it is not being applied equally to all molecules, nor is it being applied equally in all degrees of freedom.

Then, with that background present for understanding a basic mechanism, read this.

There's a fascinating document at http://caao.as.arizona.edu/publications/2004%20spi e%20plenary%20final%202.pdf
comparing and contrasting three sites for a new major telescope facility. Suffice it to say that the top of an unclimbed mountain in the middle of Antarctica is the MOST pleasant and accessible of them.

Input diameter 580m, density Dense Rock (3000 kg/m^3), impact velocity 21.36 km/s, and pick your own impact angle, impact site and observer's distance from ground zero.

It doesn't really look all that bad. The nuclear war comparison is misleading: sure, it may be energetically equivalent, but a nuclear war would spread that destruction worldwide and target cities deliberately, quite aside from the fallout. It'd wreck a city and severely damage a smallish country, but a subcontinent? Not convinced.

And taking into account the low probability that this will happen at all, I wouldn't call this 'Earth's Biggest Threat'. That would still be either the United States or Russia, as I'd reckon that the chances of one of those two going nuclear on somebody over the same timescale is rather greater than the chances of this rock hitting us.

From: http://www.lpl.arizona.edu/impacteffects/

Your Inputs:

Distance from Impact: 161.00 km = 99.98 miles
Projectile Diameter: 2000.00 m = 6560.00 ft = 1.24 miles
Projectile Density: 8000 kg/m3
Impact Velocity: 17.00 km/s = 10.56 miles/s
Impact Angle: 45 degrees
Target Density: 2750 kg/m3
Target Type: Crystalline Rock

Energy:

Energy before atmospheric entry: 4.84 x 1021 Joules = 1.16 x 106 MegaTons TNT
The average interval between impacts of this size somewhere on Earth during the last 4 billion years is 5.1 x 106years

Major Global Changes:

The Earth is not strongly disturbed by the impact and loses negligible mass. The impact does not make a noticeable change in the Earth's rotation period or the tilt of its axis.

The impact does not shift the Earth's orbit noticeably.

Crater Dimensions:

Transient Crater Diameter: 24.4 km = 15.1 miles
Transient Crater Depth: 8.63 km = 5.36 miles

Final Crater Diameter: 37.2 km = 23.1 miles
Final Crater Depth: 0.879 km = 0.546 miles

The crater formed is a complex crater.
The volume of the target melted or vaporized is 30.4 km3 = 7.3 miles3
Roughly half the melt remains in the crater , where its average thickness is 65.1 meters = 213 feet

Thermal Radiation:

Time for maximum radiation: 1.99 seconds after impact
Visible fireball radius: 31.8 km = 19.7 miles
The fireball appears 44.9 times larger than the sun
Thermal Exposure: 8.22 x 107 Joules/m2
Duration of Irradiation: 439 seconds
Radiant flux (relative to the sun): 187

Effects of Thermal Radiation:

Clothing ignites
Much of the body suffers third degree burns
Newspaper ignites
Plywood flames
Deciduous trees ignite
Grass ignites

Seismic Effects:

The major seismic shaking will arrive at approximately 32.2 seconds.
Richter Scale Magnitude: 8.7
Mercalli Scale Intensity at a distance of 161 km:
VII. Damage negligible in buildings of good design and construction; slight to moderate in well-built ordinary structures; considerable damage in poorly built or badly designed structures; some chimneys broken.
VIII. Damage slight in specially designed structures; considerable damage in ordinary substantial buildings with partial collapse. Damage great in poorly built structures. Fall of chimneys, factory stacks, columns, monuments, walls. Heavy furniture overturned.

Ejecta:

The ejecta will arrive approximately 184 seconds after the impact.
Average Ejecta Thickness: 75.8 cm = 29.8 inches
Mean Fragment Diameter: 6.91 cm = 2.72 inches

Air Blast:

The air blast will arrive at approximately 488 seconds.
Peak Overpressure: 278000 Pa = 2.78 bars = 39.5 psi
Max wind velocity: 357 m/s = 798 mph
Sound Intensity: 109 dB (May cause ear pain)

Damage Description:

Multistory wall-bearing buildings will collapse.
Wood frame buildings will almost completely collapse.
Multistory steel-framed office-type buildings will suffer extreme frame distortion, incipient collapse.
Highway truss bridges will collapse.
Glass windows will shatter.
Up to 90 percent of trees blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves.

The attempts to come up with alternative theories of gravity are quite noble, but they only work on certain scales

the proponents of these theories sometimes neglect examples that invalidate their theory

This effect is impossible to reproduce using alternative theories of gravity

You will find that yes, these alternative theories do work quite well at describing the rotation curves of galaxies, as TFA suggest. But on larger scales, such as in cluster of galaxies and the cosmic microwave background, they seem to fail convincingly

According to the impact effects calculator, a 1-meter, 1000-kilogram object hitting rock at a 90-degree angle at 150000kps would (assuming the atmosphere had no effect on it) release about 1410 megatons of energy. Splat.

I disagree. The intent of the people in allowing the fictitious legal entity known as "corporation" to exist is to only lessen personal financial liability. It is never the intent to allow to lessen personal moral and ethical responsibility.

It would be insane if, for example, you chose not to steal in the evening, but as part of the corporation you stole from 9 to 5 on the corporation's behalf, as long as you made money to the shareholders. It is also insane that a person who condemns censorship and values free speech joins a corporation and is then engaged in aiding and abetting the very same things they dislike while destroying the things they enjoy. But unfortunately that's exactly what happens. Once a person joins a group, they often believe they are no longer individually responsible.

But it doesn't have to be this way.

In fact, in a recently linked article on Slashdot, Richard Stallman has called all Linux developers to think for themselves and to make their own moral and ethical choices. And there were people on Slashdot condemning Stallman for "trying to split the Linux comunity for his own ego". That's insane! So, the wholeness of the comunity is of more value than the sanity of the individual decision? Since when does this kind of group-think dominate?

Groups and communities are important. But the health of the community can only be assured if the individual members take full individual responsibility when acting within the community. Group-think has the superficial feel of the community, but it destroyes any community from the inside.

Compare (quoted from http://ag.arizona.edu/futures/home/glossary.html):
---
Group-intelligence. This is where each member of the group contributes to the whole. The result is a synergistic effect where the group is more than just a sum of the parts. Groups or teams that operate this way function well. See group-think for the opposite effect of a group.
---

vs.

---
Group-think. This is the effect when a group works together and is sufficiently similar either by group membership or by training that they "think as one". This frequently results in narrow perspectives, avoidance of debating key assumptions or trends, and detracts from what can be positive benefits of a group. See group- intelligence (opposite) and mindset (similar).
---

This means anytime it misses in L1, the entire machine stalls waiting for the data to come back from L2/L3/memory. This is fine for applications where the compiler can figure out all the data dependences and schedule the code to hide these cache misses (i.e. scientific applications). It is not good for your run-of-the-mill GUI programs like Word, Firefox, your favorite email reader, etc. Out-of-order architectures like Pentium Pro/II/III/4 and Athlon hide L1 misses a LOT better because other (independent) instructions can execute while the cache miss is going on.

A few points brought up in the article that I'll respond to:

• Predication - Predication (conversion of if/else code with branches to branchless straight-line code using predicated instructions) is not limited to EPIC/Itanium architectures. Conditional movs (cmov) in x86/AMD64/EM64T are a watered-down version, but they suffice for a lot of simple situations such as the one the article brings up.
  
  
• Instruction Level Parallelism (ILP) - Sure, the Itanium can decode/execute/retire up to 6 instructions per clock. That's dependent on two things: a) the compiler finding 6 independent instructions to schedule every clock, b) no L1 cache misses occurring (remember, Itanium is in-order, cache miss = stall).
  
  
• ILP is dead anyway - CPU cores are much faster than memory. Any time you have to go to main memory for something, you take a HUGE hit in performance. Who cares if your CPU core executes 100,000 instructions in 0.00001 ns if it takes 100,000 cycles to bring a cache line in from memory? Memory bottlenecks are starting to dominate CPU performance (see this paper for more info), so single-thread performance is going to be dominated by how well the cores mitigate cache misses. Out-of-order cores can do this well (it's getting harder, read the paper), but it's difficult for in-order cores.
  
  
• Thread Level Parallelism (TLP) - Any benefits of TLP stated in the article will apply to dual-core out-of-order processors in the same way they will apply to Itanium processors.
  
  
• Power - Intel just came out with their dual-core mobile stuff. AMD will sometime before the summer. The article claims that performance per watt is superior for Itanium; that may have been true a year ago, but it's about to not be true.
  
  
• Floating point performance - Itanium is the fastest FP chip on the planet. However, a lot of consumer apps aren't floating point-intensive, they're non-FP apps like Word, Firefox, an email client. Performance of these apps, like I said before, is much more dependent on not having cache misses dominate performance. Plus, with SSE2/SSE3 taking over all the FP duties in the latest Athlon64/Xeon/P4s, and Intel and AMD concentrating their efforts on improving those functional units, I bet consumer-level FP performance goes up.
  
  

Oh yeah, this is all academic anyway; backwards-compatibility (x86 has it, Itanium doesn't) is probably going to be the real driving force like it has been for the past 6 years.

A good example is with potatoes -- there are about 200 different varieties of potato, but my understanding is that only four or five of them are seriously grown on a large scale in the US.

Heirloom vegetables are still grown on a small scale just about everywhere. Plants are prolific seed producers, so it'd only take a season or two to get enough seeds for everyone.

Heirloom Seeds and Their Keepers: Marginality and Memory in the Conservation of Biological Diversity

The author of this book has traveled around the world, doing research on "seed savers", generations of people who farm, save and share their own seeds.

Also see The Meat You Eat by Ken Midkiff, for how Agribusiness makes us all unhealthy.

I found both books at my public library. Well, I wasn't looking for those particular titles at the time, so I guess they actually found me.

Organic seed companies are a good source for heirloom varieties. Seeds of Change, for example.

It's a wonderful site on anything involving historical space exploration and rocketry. I've been going there for years. I have a lot of these wonderful historical sites. These are quasi-related:

http://www.astronautix.com/
The home page of this site.

http://www.nuclearweaponarchive.com/
A site on the history of nuclear weaponry.

http://www.fas.org/
The Federation of American Scientists. Look on the left menu for links to weapons, rockets, missiles...

http://seds.lpl.arizona.edu/nineplanets/nineplanet s/
The Nine Planets - A site about our solar system.

Every time I find a good historical site, I add it to my collection. Wikipedia.org just goes without saying.

Its all PR stunts, that amount of freon is insignificant to the 1000 billion tonnes of coal being burned yearly by USA to make power, that itself spews PURE uranium atoms into the air that we all intake, that otherwise would not be there.

Uh, freon fucks with the ozone layer. CO2 and uranium contamination from coal-fired plants is a completely different problem. (And all atoms are PURE, it's not like a uranium atom could be contaminated with carbon or something...)

If the greenies and eco dudes had a clue they would promote safe pebble based nuke plants

I thought pebble-bed reactors were an interesting idea. Too bad they haven't actually proven to be safe.

Fission is a non-solution, inherently confounded by security, fuel availability, and pollution issues. Only fusion - including making good use of that big fusion reactor just 93,000,000 miles away - is a viable long-term solution.

The "non-coronagraphic photograph showing Saturn through a vortex phase mask" (http://www.u.arizona.edu/~grovers/ovc/004.jpg) about 4/5ths the way down the page has no aliasing at all between the masked portion and the captured light. Why not? If this is a CCD image, I would expect the edge of the mask to cover fractions of pixels and consequently, some light. The image appears to have been masked directly in software, and thus, data was discarded. Scientifically, that concerns me, and there does not seem to be a good reason for the image to have been modified in this way. Can someone clarify?

-Hope

Apparently all the work so far is only computer simulations. There are some serious problems to overcome before this could be a practical system. The author states:

"These calculations assume no aberrations or other scattering sources, and they assume the vortex mask can be made achromatic."

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~grovers/ovc.html

In other words, the lens material is made from unobtanium and the rest of the system has to be perfect. The author certainly knows this will never happen.

Mike

http://www.u.arizona.edu/~grovers/ovc.html

Optical Vortex Coronagraph Figures

Optics Letters Preprint (4.8 Mb)[pdf] --- To Appear 15 December (ol.osa.org)
This work first appeared in the Master Degree Thesis of Greg Foo:
OSC QC350.O77 Vol. 353, 2005.

The thing is, unless you do a large-scale version "shoving people into a phonebooth", nowhere close to billions of lives are at risk. According to the impact calculator, from a 200 meter asteroid, you'd get the sort of damage that causes almost complete casualties only within about 10km of impact, and lesser casualties out to about 20km (not much if any beyond that).

So, if you want to kill billions, you'll have to fit them at least three per square meter, or put them under flimsy structures full of dangling knives one every two square meters, or whatnot. And that's if you direct the asteroid to your target impact area, as opposed to the middle of nowhere, which is the most likely target.

Probably the worst realistic event would be to impact in the water near a coastal area and cause a massive tsunami before warnings can spread, with people having no warning that an asteroid was about to hit Earth (for which the logical response would be to move inland). But I still can't picture a possible scenario in which billions would die. We're talking about something atomic bomb-power, not supervolcano power.