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> Who is John Galt?

The Little Red Hen

> Who is John Galt?

The Little Red Hen

Save yourself some time. Skip Atlas Shrugged and go read The Little Red Hen

> Who the fuck is John Galt?

The Little Red Hen

As to Ayn Rand, I appreciate her philosophy and writing, it is great, but I never needed it to reach my own conclusions decades ago. I only read her books a few years back after hearing so much about them. She was a great philosopher AFAIC, a pretty good writer as well, but the ideas were always here, with or without her books. As to violence - that is the argument of the collectivists, not of the individualists.

Rand was an armchair philosopher and a terrible writer. Her characters are unrealistic cardboard-thin mouthpieces for her screed. She showed very little insight into human nature and the complexity of political and economic systems; she just painted everything with a broad Aristotelian brush.

That said, her books are entertaining and appeal to people on an emotional level. They may be a good starting point for a passionate student of philosophy to consider deeper issues.

I just don't think she needed to take 1000 pages to retell the story of The Little Red Hen.

Have you actually read Smith's Wealth of Nations? Good book, but it's definitely NOT a proto-Libertarian screed in favor of capitalism or free markets.

No, that would be Atlas Shrugged.

Ayn Rand took 1000+ pages to retell the story of The Little Red Hen - a Russian folk tale, interestingly enough.

> Try to be like The Little Red Hen, and plan ahead.

Wrong story. Little Red Hen is about pulling your own weight.

Your muscles may need a few weeks to build back up if you haven't been exercising them, but chopping wood with an axe isn't a hotbed of technological innovation.

Your hands will blister long before your muscles get sore. Get a nice pair of leather work gloves, and get them NOW. When civilization goes to shit, it will happen much faster than you think, and you won't be able to rush to Walmart and buy what you need. The shelves will already be empty. Try to be like The Little Red Hen, and plan ahead.

It's not like there are no other verbs that are also nouns.

Verbing weirds language.

It makes it look like the sentence was cut off because there was a trailing verb.

It didn't to me or anyone else who knew that meaning of the word compute. It's not like there are no other verbs that are also nouns.

There are perfectly good nouns that would fit that spot and actually be descriptive.

Cough them up. You can't just say that is so without an example you perceive as better. I see nothing wrong with using "compute" in that way.

It happens. Giant list o' contractions.

Australia isn't like the US, which is criss-crossed with rivers even in the desert areas.

The rivers on the east coast, where the population is? Mostly too short/small to even appear on that map.

The north & north-west? Not desert.

Pretty much everything west of the Murray-Darling? Desert. The ones marked 51-57 on the map are seasonal, and flow only every few years.

Much of central-southern NSW, between the coast & the Murray-Darling? Already irrigated through "water [piped] in from all over the region... going over mountains and through valleys". Or, more correctly, "piped through mountains".

The Murray-Darling itself? It already mostly is "just a trickle by the time it reaches the ocean". Without the 2 dredging machines that run 24/7, the mouth of the river would close up and cut it off from the sea.

Despite having an area very similar to the 48 contiguous US states, Australia has ~50% more desert area (1,350,000km^2 vs 900,000km^2) and much much much less water.

So, no, there's not much water in Australia. It's not considered "the driest continent on earth" for no reason...

Hmm, "I have a dream" speech, 1963. 70 years after that would be 2033. So it would still be under Copyright.

Correction, the expired time does not count from the time he made the speech, but it is the time he died which was in 1968. That means the 70-year term would start from 1968 (and ends in 2038).

Copyright in a work created on or after January 1, 1978, subsists from its creation and, except as provided by the following subsections, endures for a term consisting of the life of the author and 70 years after the author’s death. (page 3)

... Edison didn't just think, "Hey, I could put a filament in a jar and run electricity through it to make it glow" and patent that. He actually did the work to make a light bulb, and it took a lot of trial and error. It was not just a mental process, but a physical process.

Edison did not come up with that idea. He stole most of his "inventions" from other people and claimed them for himself. http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/edison/lightbulb.shtml

the average life span of a dollar bill is less than 2 years according to http://www.enchantedlearning.com/math/money/bills/one/, sure not everyone beats up their money but very few people take care of it, though i suppose larger notes would probably last longer.

Computers can be used to detect earthquakes:
http://www.wired.com/science/planetearth/news/2008/03/quake_network

You can get a free sensor from the Quake Catcher network (or use a laptop).
http://qcn.ucr.edu/

Another subject that might be interesting: Fossils.
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/dinosaurs/dinofossils/Fossilhow.html

Bert

I find it funny that such a thing as a State Rock exists!

Me too. I have heard of state flowers and birds, but never rocks.

But looking deeper, I guess my state has a state rock
http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/texas/

You can make any jokes you want that Texas' state rock is Petrified Palmwood.

United States total area: 3,537,441 square miles.

The area of Finland is 131,000 square miles.

Contamination. 'Nuff said.

Obviously. I'm sure they never accounted and corrected for that possibility. After all, it's not like these people are the type who would know anything about basic experimental science or anything.

Sometimes even the researchers think it's contamination, but the story's too good for journalists to pass up. A memorable example:

"Scientists at University of Alabama sequenced a 130-nucleotide long mitochondrial DNA sequence from dinosaur vertebrae, and found that it was 100% homologous to mitochondrial DNA from turkeys. However, the scientists themselves 'remain quite sceptical of our own work' and noted that they had been consuming turkey sandwiches in the laboratory."

Even though the triceratops-turkey 'finding' was never published and eventually dismissed by the researchers, the false result was leaked onto the internet, where it can still be found today.

This RNA synthesis paper, however, has no such caveats.

The debris was small, just 1/3 of an inch long, and was flying at about 19,800 mph, NASA officials said. The space station orbits the Earth at about 17,500 mph.

That's nothing. I'm moving through space at 64,800mph and I'm just sitting here at my desk!

Mercuries rotation is synchronized with its' orbit in such a fashion that the same portion always faces towards/away from the sun.

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronomy/planets/mercury/

"Until 1962 it was thought that Mercury's "day" was the same length as its "year" so as to keep that same face to the Sun much as the Moon does to the Earth. But this was shown to be false in 1965 by doppler radar observations. It is now known that Mercury rotates three times in two of its years. Mercury is the only body in the solar system known to have an orbital/rotational resonance with a ratio other than 1:1 (though many have no resonances at all)."

That is roughly equal to 13,125 sq. miles - Larger than the state of Maryland, among others. (according to http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/area.s html ). Are there even that many undeveloped, practical miles left in the US? Are they in areas which would foster this kind of growth? I'd say pave over New Jersey, but it isn't big enough! I am all for new energy ideas. A thesis of mine involved a solar tower placed on Staten Island, NY's Fresh Kills Landfill. This, however, sounds even *less* practical.

Woodchuck -- Could Chuck: As much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
According to http://www.enchantedlearning.com/rhymes/Woodchuck. shtml

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronom y/stars/lifecycle/

Oh yeah, that's right... too many global warming chicken littles out there are going to have egg on their face if atmospheric C is reduced to pre-industrial levels and global temps are still rising thanks to the simple fact that the sun is getting hotter.

And the sun's temperature has absolutely NOTHING to do with heating the earth. Throw water outside of the space station, and it will freeze pretty darn quickly.

Also, our sun isn't heating up, its cooling down. It happens to all stars as they are. If it were heating up, it'd be looking more blue than red.

After the female names run out, they use letters from the Greek alphabet. (alpha, beta, gamma, delta, epsilon, zeta, ..) Zeta is only the 6th letter, making the 26+6=32nd storm of the year.
Actually, they don't use all the letters a-z, Q U X Y Z are not used. That throws your math off a bit, methinks...
Reference

Well, Uranus was originally named Georgium Sidus after King George III of England. Talk about blatant ass kissing there.

Source: http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/astronom y/planets/uranus/

Not quite what you had in mind, but what about these guys?

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/inventors/edison/ lightbulb.shtml

he first electric light was made in 1800 by Humphry Davy, an English scientist. He experimented with electricity and invented an electric battery. When he connected wires to his battery and a piece of carbon, the carbon glowed, producing light. This is called an electric arc.

Much later, in 1860, the English physicist Sir Joseph Wilson Swan (1828-1914) was determined to devise a practical, long-lasting electric light. He found that a carbon paper filament worked well, but burned up quickly. In 1878, he demonstrated his new electric lamps in Newcastle, England.

In 1877, the American Charles Francis Brush manufactured some carbon arcs to light a public square in Cleveland, Ohio, USA. These arcs were used on a few streets, in a few large office buildings, and even some stores. Electric lights were only used by a few people.

The inventor Thomas Alva Edison (in the USA) experimented with thousands of different filaments to find just the right materials to glow well and be long-lasting. In 1879, Edison discovered that a carbon filament in an oxygen-free bulb glowed but did not burn up for 40 hours. Edison eventually produced a bulb that could glow for over 1500 hours.

Lewis Howard Latimer (1848-1928) improved the bulb by inventing a carbon filament (patented in 1881); Latimer was a member of Edison's research team, which was called "Edison's Pioneers." In 1882, Latimer developed and patented a method of manufacturing his carbon filaments.

In 1903, Willis R. Whitney invented a treatment for the filament so that it wouldn't darken the inside of the bulb as it glowed. In 1910, William David Coolidge (1873-1975) invented a tungsten filament which lasted even longer than the older filaments. The incandescent bulb revolutionized the world.

That's no dude! It's the allegorical figure of the goddess Virtue crushing a tyrant. "Sic Sempter Tyrannis" - "Thus always to tyrants."

Actually, to speed things up, you'd need to reel it in a bit. As the moon pulls further away from Earth, the Earth's rotation slows. A billion years ago, days were only about 18 hours long.

Sun heats the land, air and water unevenly which makes wind (read more). Wind blows the water which makes waves (read more). Waves bend the joints between the floats, which causes fluid to be pumped, which turns generators, which makes electricity (read more).

So your thinking is correct -- there's no such thing as a free lunch. If the energy ever stops coming into this system (i.e., the sun stops shining), we've got big problems... :-)

Having participtated in small scale ecology studies, I would guess that these senors will raise many more questions (which would be a good definition of the "new windows") than answers. Population ecology and the evolutionary biology that ties into it is a field with many more 'big' questions than most people realize.

In most of the primary literature I cover, for every possible cause of a behavior (such as migratory routes) that is eliminated, another 2 consistently appear (seriously). I think we will see some very interesting questions, rather than any definite answers (at least in the short term). I would definitely like to see this used with the arctic tern.

18% isn't bad considering the logistics. The US is nearly 100x larger in area than South Korea...

South Korea - http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/cabs/skorea.html
Population 48m
Area 38k sq. miles (about the size of Indiana or Kentucky)

US - http://www.enchantedlearning.com/usa/states/area.s html
Population 293m
Area 3.5m sq. miles (2.9m continental)

I wonder what the percentage would be if we only accounted for metro areas like Seattle, New York, LA... while I'm sure it's nowhere near 73%, I bet it's well above 18%.

Platypi do not have breasts, or even nipples. Females lactate through many small, pore-like openings on their bellies, and must lay on their backs and allow the milk to form pools for the young to nurse from. (Even your link touches upon this)

http://www.enchantedlearning.com/subjects/mammals/ platypus/Duckbillprintout.shtml

In addition, Platypusses do not waste their time seeing this movie. Platypoids have better things to do.

how much wood could a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood

Answer:
Woodchuck
Could Chuck: As much wood as a woodchuck would if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
According to http://www.enchantedlearning.com/rhymes/Woodchuck. shtml

How viable is solar power? I was asking myself this question and here's the numbers I came up with.

In 2001 the USA used 96275 trillion BTUs of energy that year. This comes to 3.22 trillion watts.

Now there are about 295 million people in the US, so this comes to about 11Kw per person at any given time.

This means each person uses is responsible for 262 Kwh of power per day.

Now lets say that square meter of sunlight provides 1 kw of energy on average and the average area gets 5 good hours of sunlight per day. Looking at this chart, you can see that this assumption isn't too far off.

The typical solar panel is about 30% efficient. This means that for every square meter of solar panel would render 1.5 KwH every day.

This means that each man woman and child would need 174 square meters of panel to be responsible for all the energy made and used in their name!

If every person in the united states of America put up solar panels. We would have over 51 billion square meters of panel, that's close to 20,000 square miles of panel or the equivalent of covering most of over in panels.

Now these numbers account for all energy used both domestic, industrial, and exported. Also these numbers do not account for the added or lost efficiency of converting systems over to pure electrical power as opposed to other energy processes like those used in the internal combustion engine.

I left the links to my math in just incase I botched anything.

I think you're wrong about that. Africa is big, bigger than either North America, South America or Europe, but not bigger than all of them combined. Here's the first page that came up on my google search.

Africa - 30 million sq. km.
N. America - 24 million sq. km
S. America - 18 million sq. km
Europe - 10 million sq. km

Since you actually said Africa is bigger than the Americas and Europe combined, you're saying 30 > 24 + 18 + 10, which is not true. The kindest interpretation of your statement is that you meant to say Africa is bigger than South America and Europe combined. That's true by a 7% margin.

And given the common feelings expressed about Bush over here that's a few more electoral college votes for the Democrats. According to the US Census in 2000 the UK has the about the population of California, Texas and Nevada added together (UK Population is somewhere around 55million). Even England alone has over 50million so that's about the same as California and either Texas or New York. Should be worth a few Electoral college votes.

Stephen

Thomas Edison is analgous to the head of the sony division that used Russel's patent at Sony; he did not invent the lightbulb.

When you look close at the history of technology, as an American you might find out how much hyperbole there is in the idea that "Amercans invented almost everything." The truth is more like we claimed credit for everything.

1. The National Biodiesel Board explicitly says that its production capacity is only 150 million gallons per year, with another 200 million potential. At the limit this is less than 1% of road-diesel consumption and about 0.6% of total distillate fuel consumption.

2. US production of soybeans in 2004 was 3.15 billion bushels. At a yield of 11.5 pounds per bushel and a guesstimated 7 pounds/gallon, the entire US soybean crop would produce 5.18 billion gallons of soybean oil. You would need roughly 7 times as much production to replace all over-the-road diesel and 12 times as much to replace all distillate fuel oil consumption; I'm not going to waste the time to calculate what it would take to replace motor gasoline (that's your homework, and you're flunking).

   Total US acreage of soybeans harvested in 2004 was roughly 74 million acres, or 116,000 square miles. 12 times this is about 1.4 million square miles. Total area of the USA is 3.5 million square miles, so you are talking about planting another 40% of the land area of the USA in soybeans (over and above the area already used for other crops) just to replace distillate fuel oil use.

Actually, you're more correct than you think. Not only do you have to be outside - you have to be really outside, since the best view would be from Saturn.
You can't see it from Earth due to the planets positions

By that argument, any energy source in finite

Not solar energy! Oh wait... n/m.

Actually, steel and quartz are both Moh 7. Glass, on the other hand, is Moh 5. You should check your numbers before hitting submit. In fact, for the very reason that steel, quartz crystal and silica have the same Moh characteristics, the steel wool is a near-ideal example medium.

Maybe more importantly, you can't bring old CDs within three feet of steel wool, or they catch fire, immediately destroying all other music within 10 feet and causing a Save Versus Nerd Jokes at dc40 to 50 feet for all non-magical non-living items in range.

Mod parent down, metamoderate modders down.

10**6 * 2 * pi * (0.01791 / 2) meters per minute

Well, I guess if your whole country (at 16,639 sq mi) is 2/3 the size of West Virginia (which ranks 41/50 in USA state size), then I would hope you could do same day delivery to anywhere in the country...

Basically, this latest asteroid is a lot closer.

Could explain it, but then why not the Niger and the Congo lit up like Xmas trees too?

African rivers

No, but you seem quite willing to unequivocally state that economies of scale make it impossible for them to do so.

No, I'm just saying that Apple's decisions are understandable. Making a profit off of a large number of individuals is a VERY difficult thing to do. It's not a risk that Apple needs to take, so they don't.

Why do you keep assuming that Apple would provide the same quality of service to individual artists with no track record as they do to labels?

In this case I'm not. Every time you involve a human into the process, the costs go up substantially. After credit card fees and the amount that Apple sends to the artist, Apple may not make more than 5-10 cents per sale. At 10 cents a sale, you're going to have to sell at least 20-40 copies to cover the 15 minutes it takes for an $8/hr support person to answer their question.

What do you suppose happens when an unknown developer with a free ADC account has a support request?

I suppose that Apple has already made significant margins off of his purchase of a Mac, and will make more money off of his OS X upgrade purchases, then will make even more money from all the users who flock to their platform because of the software that the developer wrote.

This is the house that Jack built... ;-)

which sits in the input queue until the intern assigned to handling unknown artists gets around to pulling it up and checking it before passing it on to the iTMS.

Which again involves a human. We'll again assume that he's paid $8/hr, but we'll lower the time to respond to 10 minutes. This tacks another 2-4 sales per song onto the break even costs.

I do have to acknowledge that you have helped me come to this realization, and I have to thank you for that.

Glad to be of service. :-)

i don't think so, i mean our magnetic field is much stronger than mars. Mag fields
I think the most risk we have is to loose a "few" satellites, and some increase in skin cancer..but nothing as drastic as loosing all the water and life on earth.

Unless of course you're talking about the end of the Sun and the solar system. When then the Sun will expand to the size of Vennus turning Earth into a new Mercury.
but then again not to worry that will not happen on the next 5 billion years from now and we will have extinct ourselve until there =P