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You clearly don't understand how trends work:

https://study.com/academy/less...

https://serc.carleton.edu/quan...

Quoting yet another out of date study. This is 2017, and the more recent studies of estrogen use find ONLY benefits. Decreased risk of stroke, cardiovascular problems, etc. The study you quoted followed people taking estrogen before 1997, when only horse estrogen was used. Human estrogen doesn't have negative side effects because it's not horse estrogen, and doesn't contain over 50 contaminants. Again, buy a calendar. I've linked to the benefits of human estrogen before, so quit the lying.

And you base this on...absolutely nothing. In fact, I looked at more recent research which shows that it raises blood pressure, increases risk of blood clotting (stroke, heart attack,) blood sugar, water retention, liver damage, and disruption of electrolyte balance (which can manifest in a dangerous condition called hyeprkalemia.)

https://apps.carleton.edu/camp...

There really is nothing more to say about it. You're a piece of shit who tries to drag others down because you can't do any better yourself

I don't need to drag you down even if I wanted to; you already do a pretty good job of it without my help.

Tardigrades are incredibly durable, and it's good not to just go shitting all over other planetary bodies, but I was wondering how overly cautious they're being. So I decided to try to figure it out, but I'm missing how much gamma radiation they'd be exposed to in ten years.

For anyone else curious:

Tardigrades don't thrive in extreme environments so they wouldn't be breeding like crazy. They do go into hibernation without water or oxygen and can last in that state for at least a hundred years

Median lethal doses of for tardigrades was 4400 Gy gamma radiation outside of water over 48 hours, though over 1000 gys made them sterile.

Humans will die despite medical treatment after 8 sv of radiation. I found that solar flares could produce 60 sv to an astronaut in a space suit. But after half an hour of searching, I couldn't find how much radiation a tardigrade would be exposed to over 10 years in whatever shielding is available on the probe.

There were thousands of articles on "how much radiation are you puny humans exposed to in the cushy ISS before NASA makes you come back down a few months later" and even more articles along the lines of "Human astronauts incompetent to undergo cryptobiosis, again in their nice space ships, would get too much radiation on just a little hop to mars." BUT NO FUCKING NUMBERS! Ugh, so unscientific AND anthropocentric!

Those damn tardigrades though. Ain't nobody messin with them. Not even entropy.

Cute little devils too. I've got a lot of them living in my roof gutters.

Dunno if you saw this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/nature/12...

http://serc.carleton.edu/micro...

Since they've already survived in space, I suspect Mars would not be too difficult. I'm just not certain how much oxygen they need.

Precisely navigating the fields, precisely dispensing varied levels of fertilizer or pesticide as testing indicated. Such automation increases yields/profits.

Even better, it ought to reduce the level of agriculture-related environmental fuck-ups.

I remember reading "Life's Bottleneck" by Issac Asimov. He calculates that if life expands and uses the elements in the entire crust of the earth, the phosphorus will be exhausted first, before carbon, nitrogen, or even trace elements like iodine and selenium. Phosphorus is life's bottleneck.

But there is a big difference between fertilizing with phosphorus and nitrogen. You only need to add phosphorus once, and then only enough annually to replace what is taken out with the crop, which is usually not much. It is a permanent addition to the soil. But the nitrogen is consumed and returned to the atmosphere as the plants grow and then decay. You need to replenish it every year, either with fertilizer or legumes.

Except that phosphorous doesn't stay in the soil - it becomes runoff. See here or here.

1. Precipitation:
You have to consider that the land types are different for the northeast states compared to southeast states such as Florida. Florida has soil in which the rain drains out of much quicker. In addition, engineering designs are different for states that generally get less rain than the southern states. The HDSC calculates precipitation Recurrence Intervals for engineering design purposes. For example, Florida sees a mean annual maximum precipitation of about 5 inches in 24 hours compared to 2.5 inches in 24 hours in the northeast. This discrepancy is much larger when you look at recurrance intervals of >10 years (9 compared to 5 inches). This event has the potential to drop 100 year rainfall on the northeastern states. It will last a few days, but MOST of the rain will fall in one day.

2. Wind:
This will likely transition into an extratropical cyclone. extratropical (mid-latitude) storms have weaker winds than hurricanes, but are over a much larger area. Most hurricanes have severe wind damage only a few miles from the center in the eye-wall. Tropical storm strength winds extend out further, but even those don't usually extend out far in most storms (obviously there are exceptions such as Hurricane Ike). An extratropical cyclone's winds will cause moderate damage over a very large area. The other thing to consider are trees. Trees in the north are much less resistant to the wind, especially since most still have their leaves this time of the year. The winds in this storm won't be as deadly as a hurricane's, but will be a HUGE issue for damage and power outages.

Storm surge:
This is a page with estimated storm surge. This storm will also stick around for a while, so it will be able to pile more and more water up against the shore, as well as have a chance to coincide with astronomical high tides. There are many places in NYC that will flood (although they will be properly evacuated).

3. People
If the center hits around southern New Jersey, this storm will directly affect Washington DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia, NYC, etc. This is a very large amount of people to worry about. These people are used to Nor' Easters but this should be much stronger than a typical Nor' Easter.

I do understand why you think this is being over-hyped, especially when you compare it to the smaller but much more powerful hurricanes that strike the south. Overall, I don't expect this storm to cause many deaths; I think the people will generally be prepared. I do see this storm causing a lot of damage and long-lasting power outages. When you have these affects over such a large area, it could take time to get back to business as normal. Lastly, you should look for more information on Irene because it was very damaging, especially with the flooding in NY and VT, where both the infrastructure and the land type is not used to that kind of rain.

I must be missing something here, or maybe you just can't read the chart you linked. The chart shows the iPad gaining market share at the expense of Android since the launch of the Kindle Fire. The color coding of the chart is obnoxious, as the first chart in the article has the iPhone in red and Android in blue, while the tablet one has the colors reversed.

Education...Seriously its not that difficult to follow. http://serc.carleton.edu/quantskills/methods/quantlit/trends.html This should get you started. If you need more detailed help do not hesitate to ask. ;)

[blah blah] ... Chicken Littles were saying this was going to destroy gulf fishing for decades, kill millions of animals, etc. ... [blah blah environazidjits talking points blah]

Last I heard, oxygen is critical to sustain most forms of life. If you had read the article, you would have realized that they method used to arrive at the 40% sum was to look at how much oxygen depletion has taken place.

This is what happens to the oceans when there isn't enough dissolved O2:
http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/index.html

Petroleum is a finite resource; we can and are using all of it up. That is the very definition of non-sustainable. Beyond that were we able to replace our petroleum-based fertilizer with another equally cheap fertilizer the result would still not be sustainable. Both the pesticides and nitrogen runoff that comes from maintaining these vast monocultures cause massive fish kills. Check out the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Wow, that doesn't look anything like deep sea vessels I have seen. It's... sporty.

Satellites are also capable of shooting oblique views, too. I have no idea what Google did.

Well I presume that it would mean the sterlization of the Gulf of Mexico and the poisoning of the South of the USA.

Not that this is an excuse for BP, but apparently we were already managing to do that before the spill... http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/

That would put it on par with Ixtoc I, which went on for 9 months and didn't kill the gulf.

The irony is the oil spill won't kill nearly as much it otherwise would because a lot of the Gulf is already dead.

It's not big leaks... More that the river is where all the oil and water-soluble pollution from the middle of the whole country ends up coming out.

http://serc.carleton.edu/microbelife/topics/deadzone/

I say we rope-up as much oil as we can, keep it over the dead zone, and spray surfactants at it to clump it together and let it sink harmlessly to the already-polluted and useless seabed.

• The food is full of that chemical concoction high fructose corn syrup. Instead of eating a natural food that they could trade from many (nearby) Central American countries they concoct their own with farming subsidies - keeping their neighbors in poverty and servility - and inanely socio-reengineering their own population into believing it is natural.
• Corn is feed to the cows to make beef and hamburgers instead of letting them eat grass.
• "Organic" fuel is produced in a sick attempt to make the whole thing look green/responsible - but is simply unsustainable biosphere destruction. Now what was just a food issue is now horribly entwined in energy politics.

And all of the above are simply theft and rape from nature - and the biggest sufferers are the oceans - who cares about dead zones under the waves.

Stand up you Americans and say no more to this corn-politics. Don't listen to the political energy-security spin wrapped up as patriotism and way-of-life, the big industries selling those million-dollar harvesters and homogenising small-town USA. Pay your carbon abuse, and don't just switch your glaring carbon debts to not so "invisible" nitrogen-dumping or phosphorous-dumping in your seas and waterways.

Or you know, there could be many lifeforms that can survive in a vacuum indefinitely, and they have existed for far more than 6 billion years?

No probe needed. All things evolve into other things. Whereas we define ourselves as "evolved from fish", the more accurate term is "our eldest ancestors were single celled organisms".

Look at the hypoxic zone in the Gulf Mexico, and tell me organic food is not more healthy.

Look at the meat-packing plants that moved away from large urban centres like Chicago and to small towns (and thus away from large city media and scrutiny), where illegal aliens are used as slave labour (and even recruited by company brass) mass slaughtering cattle sickened by corn on CAFOs), and tell me organic food is not more healthy.

The arguments against organic food are legion; it's a shame that this study lacks a larger view of the health benefits beyond nutrition of organic food.

I'd rather be fertilizing the oceans with treated sewage and land runoff - iron powder gets expensive after a while.

That can have negative impacts. All that runoff and sewage creates Dead Zones where fish can not live. The Dead Zone created by the runoff from the Mississippi River is 6,000-7,000 square miles and is growing. Runoff may also create red tide.

Falcon

do you work for ... Monstanto?

Hell. No.

And, if you do buy from a particular farmer, they are the ones getting your money, not say, Cargill.

Even if you don't buy from the farmer directly, the farmer is still paid (very well in today's market, unless they mismanage their operation).

I could go on to attack the rest of your points, but as far as I can tell, your running theme is that what's happening today is not only OK, but actually the best it can actually be. Which seems pretty far fetched.

That is most definitely not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that 'organic' != 'sustainable' in any literal sense unless you:

• Massively and continually expand the geographical extent of farm production lands. Hopefully we'll have enough land that we haven't used up the entire surface of the earth before previously depleted areas have been replenished by natural phosphorus deposition etc. Relatively cheap organic sources of fertilizer like dung are mostly byproducts of non-organic production, and are only readily available in sufficient quantities while organic farming is a very small percentage of total production.
• Get rid of a couple billion or more people and subsequently cap the population
• Either bear a massive increase in the resource cost of food production or create a class of slave laborers with a much lower standard of living (and per capita resource cost) than the rest of society in order to do the farming

There are many ways we can improve farming methods, and we're actively researching drought tolerance, nitrogen deficiency tolerance, etc., to lower input requirements on the plant side, as well as refining precision Ag technology and advances in mechanical engineering to make the processing/production side more efficient.

Saying you want to be 'sustainable', therefore you want to only use organic production methods is like saying you want energy independence, except you don't want to use solar (PV cell manufacture has toxic byproducts), windmills (think of the birds!), hydro-electric (think of the fish!), nuclear (think of the waste!--because we won't allow reprocessing (think of the terrorists!)), or geothermal (think of our heritage!). You have to prioritize. If terrorists scare you more than nuclear waste, or nuclear energy scares you more than energy dependence, that's perfectly fine, but it is crucial to realize that you're making a choice about the ordering of your priorities. So it is with organic farming and sustainability.

Many of the proponents of the former feel that their cause is justified in deliberately conflating it with other causes (health, sustainability, religion (this one is big in the genetic modification debate), class warfare and anti-corporatism, IP law, etc.) because they think that it will advance their own, so confusion on this is common.

If you study the issue of sustainability, you will quickly see that there are no simple or easy answers. It is hard enough to get people to agree on a definition. E.g., 'Sustainable means we can support population growth until all societies advance socio-economically and presumably reach voluntary population peak' vs. 'The definition of sustainability must include an internationally-enforced limit on global population levels dictated by production and distribution capacity as restricted by a hard cap on Ag land expansion and maximum total carbon output to preserve the environment'. Any given definition reflects a different set of priorities.

The bottom line is that with respect to sustainability, it is not at all obvious or necessarily likely that organic farming is even a step in the right direction.

Richard Felder offers classes on educational methods, I have seen him a few times. He does something similar to a MB personality test, four dimensions of classification. http://serc.carleton.edu/NAGTWorkshops/earlycareer/teaching/learningstyles.html

One of the dimensions is visual-verbal. Lectures generally include a lot of verbal content (droning on) but many times have limited visual component.

Active-Reflective considers hands-on vs. sit back and analyze the situation and act later.

And there are two more dimensions. Ideally you do things in class that help all the students...

What I'd like to see happen, is for a mission to gather some samples and then return them to earth! For all we know, there may be certain materials on Mars that contain "dead" matter that could return to life once exposed to a more hospitable environment. The logistics of keeping the samples in a martian-like environment for the entire journey, and subsequently while on earth would be challenging, but not unachievable. Gravity would be the only real enforced change. There would be a lot to learn from such a mission and I don't consider the finding of some micro-meteorites on earth and the supposition that they originated on Mars sufficient evidence that they indeed originated on Mars, or even if they did that they are representative. If fragments of earth were blasted into space by a massive collision I doubt whether we could extrapolate anything biological from them.

See, for example, the infamous Gulf of Mexico dead zone at the mouth of the Missisippi:

OK, so life is difficult to define (but we know it when we see it!). But things all life known to date share are the use of DNA / RNA / proteins to encode and transmit the information needed to construct copies of the original. So I think viruses have a good claim to being alive. Further, it is pretty generally agreed that viruses have evolved from more complex intracellular parasites (and there are many of those, and none of them are considered not to be alive). And they are still evolving - just look at the current bird flu scare. Is it possible to evolve from "alive" to "not alive"?

Yes, and the turbine is much much smaller than Bermuda!
To put it into perspective look at this picture of the gulfstream. Can you even pick out Bermuda?

On the other hand a supertanker is much larger than the turbine. 35m draft!!

AC today 'cause I got me mod points;-)

I decided to try out google earth and the first thing I do is look up my house an the church about a mile down the road where I got married - and the pictures there were slightly better than what can be seen on google maps, so not terribly impressive.

Then I tried to look at pictures of my alma mater. And got... nothing. Some indistinct mottled red and green.

It's not as though Northfield, MN is really all that rural; I kind of expected bad results when searching for some really rural place in wisconsin, but I got nothing better when looking at a town that is, essentially, a far-flung suburb of Minneapolis.

And what's with the entire state of Indiana being provided in a different color from surrounding states?

• Black Wolf meets a nun
• Black Wolf on MSN
• Audio Prank: The Dragonmaster

A local guy filmed it in action, and you can hear just how audible these things really are:
<http://www.wigleyandassociates.com/uploads/MVI_67 83.avi>

It still is. TOC is a stripped down version of OSCAR, which is what AOL's IM clients (and other licensed IM clients like IBM's Sametime) use.

Yup. There's some info on this Geology page about crystals, as well as an equation mentioned here. The only info I could find on how long diamonds actually last was on this site, which said hundreds of millions of years, which is effectively forever as far as humans are concerned - unless this works out.

If they wanted to lock out clients, they probably wouldn't have written a plaintext protocol and released it under the GPL.

Moore I
Moore II

(Yes, I know the ant isn't Pheidole Moorium, but it is a Pheidole)

My answer is a resounding "sort of." I first note that this article cites no scientific publication or conference presentation as its source, only the Sunday Telegraph. By contrast, the Related Story "Cosmic laws may need revising, claim astrophysicists" refers to a Phys Rev Letters article published last year. So it is impossible (or at least hard) to check up on this story. On the other hand, strangelets are a respectable, is speculative, concept in Quantum Chromodynamics.

While the basic equations of QCD are pretty well established, it is an exceedingly difficult theory from which to do low-energy calculations, such as for bound states of quarks (baryons or mesons). For example, no one has been able to caclulate why the neutron is heavier than the proton, or why their mass is what it is. Nonethless, some QCD models claim that quark matter containing roughly equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks may be meta-stable or even stable, or even may represent the "true ground state" of strongly interacting particles. Such strange quark matter (SQM) could exist on a large scale (some have suggested that neutron stars may actually be SQM stars) or in small "strangelets." Atlthough such calculations are hardly robust, this motivates people to look for such "stranglets," either in accelerator experiments, in cosmic rays, or in astophysical observations.

With a little searching I found a couple of review articles that address this question (together with other related ones), which I attach. The first is one written by several highly respected physicists (both experimenter and theorists) to address concerns that the high energy nuclear collisions at RHIC might somehow produce states of matter or of the vacuum that would destroy the earth or the universe. Production of strangelets of a particular type are among the scenarios they address. The second is a review from some conference that directly addresses astrophysical implications of the existence of strange quark matter, and what bounds we can put on the existence of SQM based on observations (section 6). Here they note in passing that earthquakes might be used as a signature for stranglets.

Thus it is plausible that a group at SMU has, indeed, examined earthquake records to look for evidence of strangelets hitting the earth. Without seeing their paper I cannot judge whether this is believed by them to be a "positive" result or merely a "non-negative" one. Experience shows that in searches like this, and in cosmic ray experiments in general, there have been many observtions of new phenomena that later turned out to be very real and important, but also at least as many sightings that turn out not to be real. I wouldn't conclude that strange quark matter has been observed based on this article, but this is not obviously crack-pot nonsense either.

******

Here are the articles he cites: one, two.

My answer is a resounding "sort of." I first note that this article cites no scientific publication or conference presentation as its source, only the Sunday Telegraph. By contrast, the Related Story "Cosmic laws may need revising, claim astrophysicists" refers to a Phys Rev Letters article published last year. So it is impossible (or at least hard) to check up on this story. On the other hand, strangelets are a respectable, is speculative, concept in Quantum Chromodynamics.

While the basic equations of QCD are pretty well established, it is an exceedingly difficult theory from which to do low-energy calculations, such as for bound states of quarks (baryons or mesons). For example, no one has been able to caclulate why the neutron is heavier than the proton, or why their mass is what it is. Nonethless, some QCD models claim that quark matter containing roughly equal numbers of up, down and strange quarks may be meta-stable or even stable, or even may represent the "true ground state" of strongly interacting particles. Such strange quark matter (SQM) could exist on a large scale (some have suggested that neutron stars may actually be SQM stars) or in small "strangelets." Atlthough such calculations are hardly robust, this motivates people to look for such "stranglets," either in accelerator experiments, in cosmic rays, or in astophysical observations.

With a little searching I found a couple of review articles that address this question (together with other related ones), which I attach. The first is one written by several highly respected physicists (both experimenter and theorists) to address concerns that the high energy nuclear collisions at RHIC might somehow produce states of matter or of the vacuum that would destroy the earth or the universe. Production of strangelets of a particular type are among the scenarios they address. The second is a review from some conference that directly addresses astrophysical implications of the existence of strange quark matter, and what bounds we can put on the existence of SQM based on observations (section 6). Here they note in passing that earthquakes might be used as a signature for stranglets.

Thus it is plausible that a group at SMU has, indeed, examined earthquake records to look for evidence of strangelets hitting the earth. Without seeing their paper I cannot judge whether this is believed by them to be a "positive" result or merely a "non-negative" one. Experience shows that in searches like this, and in cosmic ray experiments in general, there have been many observtions of new phenomena that later turned out to be very real and important, but also at least as many sightings that turn out not to be real. I wouldn't conclude that strange quark matter has been observed based on this article, but this is not obviously crack-pot nonsense either.

******

Here are the articles he cites: one, two.

One of the most popular pre-WWII ciphers was the Playfair Cipher. Very simple, just know the code word of the day.

Hey, you forgot to link to These pictures of her... damn... that's all I can say.

Hey! Not only is she female, she is a Slashdot member, she is a Legend of Zelda fan, AND, she is good looking. Of course, if it's too good to be true...

Geeks and Nerds are indeed very different, I would say. Both are typically characterized by a strong intellectual bent, a tendency to hyperfocus on things they're interested in, and often but not always, a set of interests heavily weighted toward math, science and technical things. There are, however, nerds and geeks in any field you care to name, not just math and computer science.

Nerds mostly only care about the subject(s) they're nerdy in. They generally don't socialize well, don't understand social groups, and take whatever they're nerdy about very seriously--in fact, they tend to take themselves, and really just about everything, more seriously than they ought to. They are often competetive about their fields, and are more likely to get into dicksize wars than geeks are (not that geeks don't do this quite often).

Geeks tend to have more fun. Geeks more often have stronger interests outside their fields of geekery, and don't take things so seriously. Geeks also do socialize, contrary to popular perception. They don't socialize "normally", but they generally get along perfectly well in groups of other geeks (though "normal" people would probably have a great deal of trouble understanding the dynamics of geek social group). Nerds don't usually socialize well even with other nerds. Geeks tend to be less self-conscious, and more willing to weird out the "normals". Some, of course, take this too far.

Geeks are also much more likely to go to Rocky Horror Picture Show showings--in fact, most people who go to RHPS, in my experience, are geeks in some way or other.

There's a longer treatment of this (though it's somewhat in need of updating) at http://gridley.acns.carleton.edu /~madins/geek.html

I was a physics major at Carleton College, a small but highly-regarded liberal arts college in Minnesota. I have spent the rest of my career teaching at Great Research Universities, such as Johns Hopkins and the University of Michigan, which are terrific graduate institutions, but where the undergraduate experience can be the impersonal, polar opposite of what a great liberal arts school can give you. If you want to learn the flavor-of-the-month programming language go to a community college or your local bookstore. If you want to become an educated person, someone with the desire and the skills to keep learning throughout your life (not just about programming, but about literature, science, music...) then consider a liberal arts school such as Carleton, Swarthmore, Amherst, Haverford, Williams, Grinnell, Oberlin, the University of Chicago, etc. These schools produce impressive, well-rounded, incredibly talented graduates who have learning skills that last a lifetime.

That's really what education, as opposed to vocational training, is all about: learning how to learn.

Gah. After several attempts to get the user login to work in lynx, I have given up.

Anyway, I wanted to respond to the questions people have been posting as to whether source code ought to be considered protected, expressive speech.

In short, yes. If you read the opinion, or even the first paragraph of it, you'll see that the primary point it makes is that the export restrictions constitute a prior restraint on scientific expression. This is a crucial point, that not many people seem to have remarked on, and I'm very happy that the court saw how important it is. I've been involved in the scientific community most of my life (my parents are both marine biologists at a major oceanographic research institution), so I have a particular interest in this aspect. Free exchange of scientific ideas is, as anyone who understands the issues will tell you, absolutely essential to scientific progress. We like to talk about how wonderful our culture of openness and sharing of source code and ideas is, and I'm not saying it isn't, but you know what? We didn't come up with it. We borrowed it from the tradition, which has existed as long as anyone has done scientific or mathematical research, of publishing one's results in peer-reviewed journals, of sharing one's information, and of helping other people doing similar projects. Collaboration and sharing of knowledge is one of the most important principles of scientific research, just as it is of the free software community.

Scott Madin, cookieless.
http://www.student.carleton.edu/M/madins/