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Seriously? Oh for crying out loud.

The "ending of the Georgian sanctions" and Skolkovo were part of Obama's attempt an attempt at a Russian reset (and which was Clinton's job as secretary of state to implement). Something that was of course naive, and a policy which has since been quite reversed (NATO troops deployed to eastern Europe, sanctions on Russia (with the US always taking a stronger position on the issue than Europe), etc). But you're comparing Obama's naivite with someone who thinks the US should willingly get rid of NATO and personally praises Putin without prompting. How can you even think that's comparable?

You undercut your case when you link sources like "freebeacon", "powerlineblog", "breitbart", etc, just like I would if I were to link blogs, Daily Kos, Huffington Post, etc. Your link to "gave amply in return" says that the claim is false. There is no evidence for tit for tat, and more to the point, the sale wasn't Clinton's to deny. Furthermore, despite how much the right hates it, the Clinton foundation is one of the highest rated major charities in the US. I'm not exactly sure what you have against a charity that spends nearly 90% (a quite high number) of its funds on stamping out AIDS and other diseases, funding disaster relief, funding development projects in impoverished areas, etc. Unlike Trump's "charity" that turned out to be a scam, focused on things like buying paintings of himself and decorations, and which was recently delisted for illegal fundraising. Indeed, the very cases you cite where the Clinton foundation inadvertently failed to list donors is most notable in how rare it is, in that they voluntarily list their donors, something that they are not required to do and something that Trump did not do. Past tense because, as mentioned, his scam charity has now been blocked from further fundraising.

Your "Podesta story" is about Podesta (not Clinton) working for a biofuels company for which 20% of their investment funding came from Russians, a company from which, as far as the documentations go, he probably divested from a while back. Versus Trump, who personally has owned and run businesses heavily backed by Russians, whose customers were largely Russians, and has regularly travelled to Moscow to try to start new businesses in Russia. Personally.

It just amazes me that you cannot see the difference between these two sides. On one side, you have cases where Clinton implemented Obama's policies to try to mend relations with Russia, and ultimately ended up having to do just the opposite, working to get them under sanctions and such. You have Russians occasionally making investments in companies related to people related to Clinton, or making donations to a highly ranked charity that she doesn't earn money from. On the other hand, you have a person who currently, actively, and strongly personally supports Putin, has publicly advocated eliminating NATO, wants to give Russia Crimea, and freaking parades around information from Sputnik. How can you see these sides as even remotely comparable?

It's even worse because there's potential compounding factors on Mars that could make psychological issues even worse. For example, here's one that's little studied: deuterium. Mars's deuterium levels are 5-7 times higher than Earth's (nothing like Venus's 150-240x, but still..). Animals and plants certainly can survive rather high deuterium levels, up to 50% (and bacteria can survive 98% deuterated water); in terms of survival, it poses no threat. However, in terms of effects on long-term health effects, it's much less clear. For example, one study found a 1,8% increase in incidence of depression for every 10ppm increase in deuterium in water (Earth mean = ~155ppm). So when you're talking an ~800ppm increase... the issue of long-term deuterium health effects really warrants more study. Furthermore, microbial food sources that may be used on Mars (either for direct consumption or producing feed for, e.g. aquaponics) can concentrate deuterium even further.

Unlike most isotopes, hydrogen isotopes have rather different properties. Deuterated drugs are a new field of interest, for example, as they can have lifetimes in the body an order of magnitude higher than their non-deuterated equivalents. Deuterated plastics are often dramatically more transparent (and significantly more radiation resistant) than non-deuterated plastics. However, mixtures of deuterated and non-deuterated versions of the same plastic, melted together, often yield an opaque result because the two versions have different melting points and densities, yielding an inhomogenous result.

I recommend a lithium drip.

Well, it's a bit dangerous, but the performance is indeed incredible...

Refs for ballute entry: 1 2. Let me know if you'd like more :)

While I find the idea of a research station floating in the Venusian atmosphere really cool, I care most about what we can do now. .. Why aren't we doing that?

For some proposals in various stages of development to look up, check out VAMP, VEVA, VEP, EVE, VESSR, VISE, VME, VER, SAGE, Zephyr, Venera-D and VALOR :) I'm sure I'm missing a bunch. About half of those are balloons.

It's all about money. Mars gets the lion's share of NASA's robotic exploration budget. Everywhere else fights over the scraps.

Re, aerocapture: actually backwards - for non-manned missions aerocapture is generally lower velocity at Mars (~6km/s) than simple Earth entry (7,8km/s); it's only higher for manned missions to Mars (~8-10km/s), which generally take faster trajectories.

Hmm, anything else that hasn't been covered? Comms, SpaceX has a no cost deal to use the DSN in exchange for landing data. Anything else?

If it's apocryphal, it's at least old. Here's a report mentioning him saying it from 1823.

That of course doesn't mean it's legit :)

Are you talking about EEG or fMRI or the like? Not nearly the sort of resolution you're looking for, by many orders of magnitude. You can see a comparison of techniques here.

Are you talking about EEG or fMRI or the like? Not nearly the sort of resolution you're looking for, by many orders of magnitude. You can see a comparison of techniques here.

1) EVs do have kinetic energy recovery; it's called regenerative braking.

2) Gasoline vehicles that have them are known as hybrids.

3) All systems, including KERS, have purchase price, mass, and maintenance penalties, which is why they're not universally adopted.

4) The particular approach of flywheel-based kinetic energy storage has good W/kg but poor Wh/kg, W/l, and Wh/l. It has catastrophic failure mechanisms, limited storage time, and tends to offbalance vehicles. Flywheels have been becoming less popular with time in vehicles, not more - being overtaken by electric systems, which are increasingly compact and lightweight vs. their power output.

5) All kinetic energy recovery mechanisms suffer from losses. I haven't looked into the round-trip efficiency of flywheels, but round-trip efficiencies of conventional hybrids are often 40% or less, while for li-ion EVs they're often more like 60-70%. The problem is that you're storing and withdrawing power quickly, which reduces efficiencies, and all losses hit you twice - motor, drivetrain, controller, wiring and battery. Hybrids are hit worse than EVs because the packs are smaller (meaning higher-C charge/discharges) and the packs are generally NiMH, which is less efficient than li-ion.

6) Braking losses are only dominant in city driving. In combined driving they're significantly reduced and in highway driving they're almost an irrelevant fraction of the total. Aero losses dominate at high speeds while rolling losses dominate at low speeds.

7) The biggest energy benefit of a hybrid isn't recapturing braking losses, as most people assume. It's that it lets you operate with a much less powerful engine, without the vehicle feeling underpowered, thus helping the engine stay in its optimum power band (IC engines operate most efficiently when fairly near their maximum torque capability). Hybrid vehicle efficiencies don't drop that much when the hybrid system is broken (losing regenerative braking and stop/start), but they lose responsiveness.

8) Rolling losses, for the most part, come down to your tires; there's a balance between 1) grip, 2) rolling resistance, and 3) price. Choose two. (I could throw in other factors like noise, comfort, wearing, etc, but let's keep it simple)

9) Reducing aero losses comes down to reducing your cross sectional area and your drag coefficient. A reduced cross sectional area means that you can have a long car but not a wide or tall one. Reducing the drag coefficient means breaking with styling choices that people prefer in cars in favour of making it look more like an airplane (see the Aptera as an example of taking it to extremes).

Note that things that look aerodynamic often aren't; many "sleek"-looking race cars actually have high drag coefficients (on purpose - to add downforce). General principles for achieving a low drag coefficient include:

* A relatively blunt, steadily-curved front end. The popular American car style of a massive front end is right out - you want the length on the other end.
* Steady transition to a highly raked windshield (within the limits of strength, weight and visibility.. and construction, as multi-axis bending windscreens are more expensive than single-axis)
* A slowly tapered rear end, down to as small of an area as you can. Tapering can be on two axes (teardrop) or either axis alone (airfoil-shaped)
* If you can't achieve a slow taper at any point due to internal space constraints, truncate it sharpy, ideally with vortex generators; otherwise you'll get flow separation and drag a low pressure wake, which is Very Bad(TM).
* Adjust the vehicle angle to have zero net up or downforce.
* Reduce or eliminate the air intakes on the

I said that greenhouses work by suppressing convection, and you reply by showing an image of using plastic to suppress convection. Thanks.

And you ignore my comment about how the thermal inertia of the tree is irrelevant in comparison to the heat loss rate. Do I need to show you the mass? The tree will in minutes equalize to the temperature of the outside air. The only difference the plastic provides is blocking radiative exchange.

If you'd rather, maybe you'd prefer, say, this picture ? Or this, or this, or this? How well do you think this blocks convection? It has holes in it. Floating row covers are designed specifically to extend growing seasons by blocking radiant exchange without hindering plant respiration. What do you want, books covering the subject?

I'll reiterate: most frost occurs at temperatures above freezing

In a single deposit, that's pretty huge.

Regardless, the "running out of helium" thing is a bit of hyperbole. For one, right now we waste most of our helium (in industry, not balloons - balloons and aircraft are only a tiny fraction of the total). We could reduce consumption by an order of magnitude by better recycling. Even concerning aircraft, new fabrics like vectran are significantly less permeable than old ones, and new techniques (hybrid airships, phase-change ballast, etc) help avoid the need for venting.

Helium can't "run out" on Earth because it's part of our atmosphere. Now, chilling it out of the air would be significantly more expensive than recovering from ground reserves - no question there. But from a concentration perspective, neon is about 3,6 times as common as helium, which is in turn about 57 times as common as xenon (by volume). Neon is about $70/kg, xenon about $3500. So it's not linear, but helium would probably slot in at around $150, about an order of magnitude more expensive than it is today. Some back of an envelope calculations show that a party balloon contains around 2 grams of helium, meaning that the helium would cost about $0,30. Hardly world changing, from that perspective at least.

Furthermore, we're not going to be switching to recovering from the atmosphere simply because there will always be more in the ground. We'll move from one deposit to the next, richest to next richest (a downward trend, offset by the upward trend of new finds and the advancement of new technology driving down recovery costs). So long as there's gases in the Earth of any kind, they're going to be more helium-rich than the air. They're also going to be easier to extract the helium from - dilutant gases like CO2, for example, are much easier to freeze out than O2/N2/Ar.

Lastly, the costs of cryogenic refrigeration are only set to go down. Right now, low temperature refrigeration not only has low thermal efficiency, it also has low carnot efficiency. That is, to say, physics says we can be far more efficient than we actually are. But new refrigeration systems, like AMR (magnetic), allow for much higher efficiencies at cryogenic temperatures.

One thing that bugs me about this summary:

At orbital velocity (LEO) an object has a potential energy of around 30MJ per kilogram, an energy density higher than ethanol. Black powder, by contrast (common in fireworks) has 1/10th that energy density. The various colours, with the exception of white, are generally from rather weakly combusting compounds. There's a lot more energy to be had for producing "glow" from the orbital energy rather than whatever they want to burn to produce a coloured glow. And the colour of the thermal radiation from reentry will depend on the surface temperature, and that's customizeable for red, orange, yellow, and white (no green, blue or purple, though) just through simple blackbody emission, customizeable if specific ions are being ablated that tend to radiate in certain bands. The blackbody colour can be varied over the course of reentry by changing the drag coefficient as the surface ablates.

Perhaps "combustion" is the wrong term, perhaps they're just talking about ablation?

Honestly, you don't need special pellets to make a neat fireworks display, rockets can do that themselves ;) In fact... hmm... now that I think about it, the most cost-efficient way to get strange atmospheric effects might be barium clouds. They only require sounding rockets, the glow comes from the below-horizon sun itself, they show effects of the solar wind on the atmosphere (sort of like artificial auroras), and are often mistaken for UFOs and can look like slow fireworks when they expand.

One thing that bugs me about this summary:

At orbital velocity (LEO) an object has a potential energy of around 30MJ per kilogram, an energy density higher than ethanol. Black powder, by contrast (common in fireworks) has 1/10th that energy density. The various colours, with the exception of white, are generally from rather weakly combusting compounds. There's a lot more energy to be had for producing "glow" from the orbital energy rather than whatever they want to burn to produce a coloured glow. And the colour of the thermal radiation from reentry will depend on the surface temperature, and that's customizeable for red, orange, yellow, and white (no green, blue or purple, though) just through simple blackbody emission, customizeable if specific ions are being ablated that tend to radiate in certain bands. The blackbody colour can be varied over the course of reentry by changing the drag coefficient as the surface ablates.

Perhaps "combustion" is the wrong term, perhaps they're just talking about ablation?

Honestly, you don't need special pellets to make a neat fireworks display, rockets can do that themselves ;) In fact... hmm... now that I think about it, the most cost-efficient way to get strange atmospheric effects might be barium clouds. They only require sounding rockets, the glow comes from the below-horizon sun itself, they show effects of the solar wind on the atmosphere (sort of like artificial auroras), and are often mistaken for UFOs and can look like slow fireworks when they expand.

You know, you can all stop this Iceland mythologizing any day now. You should realize that people here make fun of people like you.

Would you even bother to check out our electoral history, you would realize that the parties governing Iceland right now are the same ones that ran the country into the ground in 2008. Yep, they got reelected!

Even in heavy traffic, the overwhelming majority of the road is exposed. And yes, that's the 405, in a high traffic area.

Meh, there's a solar bike path in the Netherlands and they don't seem to have excessive problems with dirt. Because rain exists. They got significantly higher generation than they were expecting - only about 1/3rd less than what you'd expect from rooftop mounted panels.

I too have criticisms of the "Solar Freaking Roadways", but let's start with common criticisms that aren't well grounded:

1) They'll scratch up: first off scratches can reduce light transmission but solar panels don't require good "optical quality", only transmission; the light is free to scatter on its way in. It's the same thing that applies to greenhouses - you may have noticed that many greenhouses use "fogged" plastic that you can't see through, yet still lets the vast majority of the light in (in that case, the scattering is actually seen as advantageous). Beyond that, in the case of roadways, I'd think it a given that they'd coat them with a an anti-scratch coat (aka harder than Mohs 7 / quartz sand, the hardest common natural material))

2) Traction: Traction glass exists - it's just surface texturing. They use it for semi-transparent flooring, it's nothing special.

3) "Glass would break and then shred tires": It's easy to make glass bear purely compressive loads (solid objects on both sides of it) without fracture - that's what it's best at. It's shear and tensile loads that glass is bad at, but these aren't applicable when it's flat on a hard surface. And lamination, like in windshields, prevents dangerous shards from coming off in the event of a fracture. This is not an actual limitation.

3) Shadowing: Go to Google Maps satellite view and look up random roads. The overwhelming majority of road surface is completely unshadowed at any point in time. Even in-city roads are overwhelmingly unshadowed. Shadows are practically irrelevant in the countryside except in wooded areas.

4) Costs: The costs of the materials for a road are a minority of the costs of the project, and continue to be a minority of the cost of the project under any realistic pricing for large-scale production of paving panels. A key driver for affordability, however, would be scale: this means large scale production (so road panels are similarly priced to rooftop panels plus the extra glass costs) and continuous paving systems. Anything smaller scale would have elevated costs.

5) "They'd be better on roofs": the main problem with roof installations is there is no way to do mass-scale continuous install (the sort of possibility that paving gives). Each roof has to be handled on its own, with its own engineering issues, with its own project overhead, its own inverters, etc. The key issue to cost reduction these days is getting rid of the overhead; panel production costs themselves have gotten quite low and keep going down. Furthermore, with a road you get "two birds with one stone" - a driving surface and a power generation surface built at the same time in the same space, sharing the same project overhead. It's fine to sacrifice some panel efficiency to glass, shadows, dirt, etc if it reduces your overhead costs.

All of this is not to say that I think they're inherently some sort of great idea that we should dump billions of USD into right this moment I simply think that they do deserve more development and testing, and I have issues with some of the criticisms that have been levied. On the other hand, I do have some issues with the "solar freakin' roadways" people. Number one on my list is the snow-melting concept. It takes five minutes to run the numbers on that and find that it takes way more energy than could ever be considered reasonable. You could melt thin layers of frost off the surface, but nothing of any relevant mass.

If one wants to pursue an anti-snow approach, my personal alternative is having an air bl

So we're totally going to colonize the universe, but look out for the ice fog!

You mean the stuff that regularly takes down airplanes, despite over a century of experience?

Lots of animals use tools. And not just use them but make them. I find corvids particularly spectacular in this regard because of their small brains and their evolutionary distance from us. They carefully select the right materials, trim them down, bend them, etc to meet their needs. They have been shown to use tools to make other tools, and have even been shown to invent tools not by a process of trial and error but by analyzing the problem and creating an appropriate tool for the problem on the first go. They also show "handedness", despite not having hands - they tend to gravitate toward using a tool balanced against one side of their head or the other

They however suffer from the problem that they're not good at communicating information about tool making and tool use to others. Even chimps aren't good at it. So you're never going to see a crow invent a machine gun or the like. Anything with more steps and background knowledge than one individual could reasonably acquire in their lifespan is pretty much ruled out.

Also: apparently my communication skills could use some improvement. "with a harder challenge harder challenge, they pausing, look back and forth"? I shuold porfraed betr...

Bananas aren't really trees; they're monocots more related to grasses than what one usually considers "trees". Their stems don't even deserve to be called trunks - they're not woody, and they grow from a corm that sends up multiple shoots, like grasses. The only reason some people call them trees is because they're big and their stems are thick.

There actually is one grouping of woody monocot "trees" - the palms - but their "wood" is very different from that of dicots (there's no heartwood, no growth rings, or anything of that nature). You can see a closeup of a chopped-down coconut tree here - while it's clearly "woody", it's also clearly not a normal wood - just lignin-toughened vascular bundles. Still very useful for most wood purposes though, and IMHO rather attractive. Eco-friendly, too, because trees old on coconut plantations have to be chopped down and replanted (they stop bearing fruit), and they produce copious amongs of wood during their lifespan that has long been considered more of a waste product than a resource.

One can of course take the concept too far (OTRAG, I'm looking in your general direction...), but mass production is indeed a key aspect.

It seems the OTRAG failed only because it wasn't tested enough. All new rocket technologies fail at some pont and often spectacularly. There's nothing to indicate that the OTRAG is a particularly deficient design.

For those too lazy to Google or read the link, you can picture the OTRAG as a bundle of pencils or crayons tied together, a rocket that looks almost entirely made up of strap-on boosters.

Indeed, and unfortunately, rocket technology is on the opposite side of the tech/price scaling curve. NASA has their own inflation rate used for budgeting long-term projects, and it trends much higher than the US national inflation rate. The reason is obvious when you think about it: back in the 1950s, many common commercial products were handmade, with domestic labour, but are now mass-produced with cheap overseas labor and advanced labor-saving technologies (depending on the type of product). But just like in the 1950s, NASA still builds things largely by hand, generally in small numbers, and with a highly skilled domestic workforce.

"We've got to get mass production" is often a mantra of the alt-space community, and really in large part what's kept Russian costs down. It's also what makes SpaceX competitive - not only are they set up to make lots of cores per year (last I heard it was something like 40), but they put 9 engines per core, and their upper stages are just short, single-engine versions of their lower stages. And the Falcon Heavy is, to the most part, three Falcon 9s stuck together.

One can of course take the concept too far (OTRAG, I'm looking in your general direction...), but mass production is indeed a key aspect.

You joke, but there actually is a Pakistani children's show called Burqa Avenger about a burqa-wearing ninja who fights people that try to stop girls from getting an education. ;)

One could take the joke from SATW and pit an arabian or south asian woman in a burqa against a Somali ship hijacker and get an epic Ninja vs. Pirate battle ;)

Huh? Russia has engaged in plenty of secret wars and occupations in the past "since decades", including some really brutal slaughters (see Grozny for an example, that's how Russia puts down a rebellion). And the US and Israel "sponsored and trained ISIS" (Daesh)? The US and Israel are actively fighting Daesh (the former being among the most active entities in the world fighting them). The US has never supported Daesh - they're even giving pretty much a free pass to al-Qaeda right now (al-Nusra in Syria) because even al-Qaeda is fighting Daesh (when even al-Qaeda thinks you're too radical, you're seriously messed up). Even before the US started actively fighting Daesh they were helping the Iraqi military in their efforts to fight them.

... you can work 3d printing into a higher percentage of your stories than this. Here, let me help:

Experts Chime In To Explain Fukushima Thryoid Cancer Concerns; Possibility To 3D Print New Thyroids?
Samsung Demos PCIe NVMe SSD At 5.6 GB Per Second, 1 Million IOPS - Can Store Over 100k Printable 3D Models
DARPA Program Targets Image Doctoring, Hasn't Yet Tackled 3D Printed Duplicates
Oracle Fixes Java Vulnerability Used By Russian Cyberspies With 3D-Printed Keyboard We Assume Based On No Evidence
Should Japan Restart More Nuclear Power Plants And Retrofit Them With 3D-Printed Control Rods?
Only 8% of the Universe's Habitable Worlds Have Formed So Far; Remainder Awaiting Jumbo-Sized MakerBot.

Come on, Slashdot, you can do it!

Best of luck with your simple to operate and maintain, affordable-to-launch Martian tunnel borer. And I'm sure you'll only go through oh-so-predictable strata.

That's actually correct. Ambient light on Mars is pinkish when dim, butterscotch/oolong-tea colored when bright - except near the sun at sunrise/sunset where it's bluish.

The main problem I see is that it seems like you're making a lot of assumptions based on geology here on Earth, such as which minerals are likely to be present at sites with particular geologies. Doesn't that depend a lot on the early planetary formation?

Chemistry works the same everywhere. What elements readily form compounds with other elements is the same everywhere. At what temperatures minerals begin to crystalize out of magma is the same everywhere. Etc. Economically valuable deposits of resources are locations in which chemistry tended to concentrate that mineral and leave it at an accessible location. The same parameters must apply to the moon just like on earth.

Also, correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought I had read that, just like you say with the Moon and heavy elements sinking to the core, the exact same thing happened to the Earth, and as a result, we have no heavy metals, including iron(!), accessible here on the crust left over from the formation of this planet.

90% of the mass of the Earth is oxygen, iron, silicon, and magnesium. And these chemicals tend to form compounds with each other. Consequently it's impossible for "all of the Earth's iron", for example, to have sunk to the core. More to the point, these oxides aren't as dense as the pure metals. For example, in the crust a lot of iron is found as limonite (that yellowish-orange color you often see in clays), which can be nearly as light as quartz. The largest single mineral component of the mantle (and thus the Earth) is olivine (commonly known as peridot when sold as gemstones), a magnesium iron silicon oxide.

Unlike the outer layers, earth's core is predominantly metallic iron, not oxides, and thus far denser. It's also highly enriched in many heavier elements which either don't readily oxidize or form heavy oxides. For example, platinium is found at about 5ppb concentrations in the crust, but is believed to be about 6ppm in the inner core, over a thousand times greater concentration. Uranium, thorium, gold, and countless other elements are vastly more common in the core than the crust. That doesn't mean that they're absent elsewhere. Even ignoring deposits from bombardment, you will often find small amounts of rarer elements in minerals with elements that they're chemically similar to.

You can see the nature of mixtures in what erupts to the surface as lava - an igneous flow will ultimately crystalize out into a wide range of tiny mineral grains - various feldspars, quartz, various iron oxides, etc. These crystals have different densities, and they're made from elements with different densities - but the forces keeping them in solution are greater than the forces working to fractionalize them. Differentiation inside magma takes a long time - for example, to get basalt rich in large olivine crystals, like picrite, the magma has to sit and slowly cool over many thousands of years, allowing the olivine time to crystalize out and the crystals time to settle to the bottom without the bulk of the magma hardening and trapping it - then the upper olivine-poor magma erupting, then the olivine-rich magma erupting (again, all without hardening to the point of becoming trapped in the magma chamber).

Or, to put it another way: salt is heavier than water, but the bottom of the oceans is only slowly increases with depth (and is highest near the surface where water evaporates, but that's a side point). It's a lower energy state for the salt to dilute than to all collect at the bottom.

nd that all our valuable ores (iron, gold, silver, even tin and lead) came from asteroid impacts over the eons, which is why they're concentrated in particular places.

That's not why elements are concentrated, as a

... who brought us the available-in-30-languages childrens' book "The Little Mole Who Wanted to Know Who Pooped on His Head"?

But not when Assad or Putin does it you say?

You're really telling me that you see no difference between laser guided bomb strikes that occasionally go wrong and mass-produced $200 barrel bombs rolled out of helicopters to turn cities of millions of people into this?

Yeah, totally the same thing.

As for Russia's involvement in Syria, I don't think anyone is objecting to the fact that they're bombing. It's the fact that rather than bombing Daesh, they're bombing groups opposed to Daesh, in order to prop up the failing government of the aforementioned guy flattening cities with mass-produced $200 barrel bombs. As well as having sent large amounts of equipment with absolutely no bearing to Daesh (or any rebel group really), such as advanced air defense systems and air superiority fighters carrying air-to-air missiles. People's problem with Russia's actions are not that they're taking part in military activity, but what side they're taking part on behalf of.

Those are huge numbers for a space mission. You're calling 1600 people / 250 reporters covering a NASA press conference small? That's freaking insane. By contrast, people generally have more interest in human endeavours in space than robotic, but when NASA held their press conference to interview members of the Colombia crew live from space (which turned out to be the last chance before they died), only four reporters showed up. The "Martian microfossil" press conference had about two hundred.

Seriously, you think one in every 2000 people on Earth, from newborn Vietnamese infants to elderly Masai tribesman, logging onto NASA.gov to read about a relatively low budget mission to be a poor showing? How often does anyone go to NASA.gov? Look at how much the page views for their entire website spiked from NH. Tiny percentage of their budget, cut their distance to the top of the net rankings in half.

783000 people streamed bloody NASA press conferences. When does anything like that ever happen?

450 major papers had it on their *front page*. We're not talking blogspot.com, we're talking NYT, LA Times, etc. When was the last time you ever saw anything like that? Maybe the Columbia disaster?

This should have been "moon landing"-ish, are you out of your gourd? The Apollo Program as a whole consumed about 5% of a year's worth of the US GDP. New Horizons consumed 0,005%.

Maybe I'm reading you wrong. Maybe you're joking. I sure hope so...

Versus, you know, how normal Turks live

Turkey doesn't give them a chance to do that. It keeps them behind barbed wire in tents exposed to the weather, with their daily activities being to queue for a ration of rice and bread.

You act as if they were allowed to live in Turkey as regular Turks do. Which is, of course, not the case. This is how Turkey makes them live.

Yeah, great habitat there....

Posting as AC, even though I've never gone near the site

I don't think you were as anonymous as you intended, Jeffrey Lynn Brandenburg of 2 Abingdon Way, Durham, NC, (919) 405-2364, 52 year old father of two children and husband of Lauri Brandenburg, who might find your particular post interesting.

I suppose this is what it feels like to be part of the hack?

The oval shape would be better if the thing actually had wheels and was designed to be driven around regularly (optimal shape for reducing wind resistance while maximizing useful interior volume = teardrop or truncated teardrop, depending on the situation). But it's supposed to just sit in one spot. So what the heck? They could still have rounded off the edges to give it a smooth, iPod-y feel without much impact on the space and while still maximizing structural strength and minimizing wind resistance (more to the point, since sits flat on the ground, there's no point at all to curving the base - the only thing that curve does is eat up space in order to make them more likely to roll)

My first thought when I saw this was that it's the hipster form of glamping.

They reportedly considered a floating shade cloth, but found this to be a cheaper solution when all costs were factored in.

Why is it cheaper? Don't ask me. But it reportedly is.

IMHO, the "ideal" solution would probably be to use the area over the water for productive purposes, such as floating sealed algae farm or floating solar farm, so that you're both stopping evaporation and getting a secondary benefit with the same system. But the overhead times and costs would obviously be much higher for that.

Whoops, I was wrong - it's nearly 2 kilograms per person here, not 1. But you've still got us beat :) (Also, it looks like America is up to 207 million pounds of fireworks per year, a big increase... so 285 grams per capita per year).

I just think it's really weird how Americans see themselves as a major-fireworks nation when they set off so few.

We send spacecraft on comparable missions all the time. And it doesn't really take a spectacularly large payload to destroy (yes, destroy) an asteroid a few hundred meters in diameter. 1/2-kilometer-wide Itokawa could be blown into tiny bits which would not recoalesce, via a 0,5-1,0 megatonne nuclear warhead, a typical size in modern nuclear arsenals (in addition, the little pieces would be pushed out of their current orbit).

I know it's a common misconception that "nuking" an asteroid would simply create a few large fragments that would hit Earth with even more devastation, but that's not backed by simulation data. And anyway, even if it didn't blow the asteroid to tiny bits (which simulations say it would) and even if it didn't push the remaining pieces off trajectory (which they say it does), anything that spreads an Earth impact out over a larger period of time is a good thing - it means the higher percentage of the energy that's absorbed high in the atmosphere rather than reaching the surface (less ejecta, lower ocean waves, a broader (weaker) distribution of the heat pulse, etc), the weaker the shockwaves, the weaker the total heat at any given point in time, and the more time for Earth to radiate away any imparted energy or precipitate out any ejecta cloud. If the choice is between 15 Chelyabink-sized impactor (most of which will strike places where they won't even be witnessed) or one Meteor Crater-sized impactor (same total mass), pick the Chelyabinsk ones. 50 10-megatonne meteor crater impactors or one 500-megatonne Upheaval Dome impactor? Pick the former. The asteroid impacts calculator shows the former generating a negligible fireball and 270mph wind burst at 2km distance, while the latter creates the same winds 25km away (156 times the area) and a fireball that even 25km away is 50 times brighter than the sun, hot enough to instantly set most materials on fire.

But that's all irrelevant because, quite simply, simulations show that nuclear weapons do work against asteroids.

What we need is enough detection lead time to be able to launch a nuclear strike a few months before the impact date (to give time for the debris to disperse). There is no need to "land" or "drill" for the warhead. There is no pressure wave; instead, an immense burst of X-rays is absorbed through the outer skin of the asteroid on the side of the explosion, causing it to vaporize (unevenly) from within, especially near the ground zero point, and creating powerful shockwaves throughout its body. In addition to ripping it apart, the vaporized material and higher energy ejecta flies off, predominantly on the side where the explosion was detonated, acting a broad planar thruster.

You know, I should really learn to google things before I suggest "new" ideas ;)

Oh god, I just had a terrifying thought... A T-Rex with the threat gestures of an Amazon. For those who don't own Amazon parrots, when they get overexcited or aggressive, they not only do this fantail display, but they have this creepy thing that they do with their eyes where they make their pupils expand and contract. Picture this, but with the pupil repeatedly changing in size 3x while it stares at you. It basically means "This is my Crazy Time. Go on, try coming close to me, see what happens!" They really lose their mind during it - for example, they may go into Crazy Mode because you gave them some treat that got them overexcited, but because they can't think straight, they're prone to drop and lose whatever it was that you gave them.

But yeah... crazy T-rex flaring whatever feathers it has and giving you an unflinching death stare with giant pulsating yellow eyes.

I counted four lanes, but you're right, it's actually only two lanes, the other half is a rail line. So half of what I accounted for being rail rather than road totally justifies $60k per square meter!

And bridges! Wow, no road has ever included bridges before! We're not talking the Danyang–Kunshan here, they're little bridges over a little river. And the terrain of the valley bottom would be considered "flat" by the standards of many countries, such as Japan. I drive on roads with more elevation change than that every time I go to my land.

There's absolutely zero reason for a 28 mile road through the countryside to cost 9.4 billion dollars. None. The longest road tunnel in the world is over 15 miles long and cost a grand total of $113 million. In Sweden, where wages are tenfold what they are in Russia.

(Lastly, I have no clue what you mean by "original source video". )

I counted four lanes, but you're right, it's actually only two lanes, the other half is a rail line. So half of what I accounted for being rail rather than road totally justifies $60k per square meter!

And bridges! Wow, no road has ever included bridges before! We're not talking the Danyang–Kunshan here, they're little bridges over a little river. And the terrain of the valley bottom would be considered "flat" by the standards of many countries, such as Japan. I drive on roads with more elevation change than that every time I go to my land.

There's absolutely zero reason for a 28 mile road through the countryside to cost 9.4 billion dollars. None. The longest road tunnel in the world is over 15 miles long and cost a grand total of $113 million. In Sweden, where wages are tenfold what they are in Russia.

(Lastly, I have no clue what you mean by "original source video". )

Small prop driven aircraft, ALREADY.

The market was almost nonexistent about five years ago but it's growing quite fast. Don't underestimate what the major and ongoing advances in motors, controllers, and batteries will bring in the future. There's many radically new technologies in the works to partially or completely electrify aircraft transportation, far beyond just electrically driven propellers.

find it humorous that you are ranting about me for "anecdotal evidence" when you just challenged someone to "prove me wrong right now in just a couple weeks" by using the same kind of evidence.

Surely you'll admit that "I experienced it myself" is better than "some TV 'documentary' whose name I don't remember had some woman who claimed it"

The human digestive system does not throw away energy from digestible substances.

Uhhh, yeah, it can. Maybe there's more to this than you know? Ok, the digestive system may not, but the excretory system can.

Link

The interior surface of the small intestine is composed of microvilli that dramatically enlarge its absorptive surface, accounting for an extraordinary efficiency in absorbing consumed substrates: 98% of all digestible carbohydrate is absorbed; 95% of all fat is absorbed; and 92% of all protein is absorbed.

That's the baseline. How much more efficient exactly do you think your particular digestive system is than 98% of carbs, 95% of fat and 92% of protein?

Lasers wouldn't even come close to working, unfortuately. Ignoring that the fact that this isn't going to be pure, bubble-free, single crystal ice - celestial bodies just don't work like that - even if it was the laser light would still attenuate way too fast. And it's even worse outside the visible spectrum.

I don't think this is at all special. There have been tons of space-matter-abiogenesis experiments that have been done, with similar results. For example, it's been shown that Titan's atmosphere can produce at least 16 amino acids and all five nucleotide bases, and we've already detected organic molecules over 10000 daltons there.

Nature likes to produce rather complex mixtures of organic chemicals without any help from life, nobody should doubt this any more, there's been way too much evidence that it happens. Nature is more than happy to continously rain down vast amounts of varied, complex organics given the right situation, providing both potential organic catalysts to develop into early life and "food" that they can scavenge. The question that needs to be answered next is, from a random diverse mix of organics, how does a hypercycle get started, wherein some chemicals / mixtures of chemicals / families of chemicals begin to encourage the creation of more chemicals "like" them, increasing the odds that there will be more produced of whatever is needed to keep the cycle going. Once you get to that point, you have the potential for evolution to take hold - first by a simple race to produce the most exact copies of the most efficiently-catalyzing chemicals and the poisoning of competing chemicals, up to the development of membranes to provide defense/hoarde resources/survive adverse situations/etc (the first "ur-cells").

To make the loading difference clear: here's the max loading for a 100 meter span (the spacing of the pillars) for different techs:

* Hyperloop capsule, loaded: 26 tonnes
* HSR train, loaded: Several hundred tonnes (caltrain locomotives alone weigh 190 tonnes)
* Oil pipeline: 332 tonnes (850kg/m * 100m * pi * (2.23m/2))

By spreading the loads out into many smaller, fast moving capsules, Hyperloop greatly reduces its track's required structural strength.

So I don't see your point

The point is that the claim was false.

Yes you can use Tsunami in French (like you can do in English) but the phenomena is know in French as "raz-de-marée"

Unless Wikipedia is lying (and if it is, please go in and edit it), tsunami is the proper technical term for specifically a tsunami, while raz-de-marée is a sea flood of any type (for example, also including storm-driven coastal floods). The proper technical term in French is a japanese word having literally zero connection with France. The proper technical term in Icelandic is flóðbylgja (or if you want to be more precise, skjálftaflóðbylgja). In what way is having your proper technical term be a Japanese word preserving the language? Why should anyone give French special "protecting the language" credit for stuff like that?

"sarrigue" can be used for opposum, automate is also a synonyme for robot etc

This isn't a "can I think of another word that can also accurately describe the term in question without having to use a loanword?" issue. It's "is it proper French to use these loanwords and do people frequently use them " issue.

Check out, say, an Icelandic newspaper. Search for vélmenni. Tons of hits talking about robots. Now search for robot. Still a fair number of its, but they're all things like the name of the movie "I, Robot", a reference to "which has been called "robot" in foreign languages", Shit Robot, Bad Robot, Robot Kitchen, and a ton of other proper names. Robot is simply not an Icelandic word.

Perform the same experiment with French. Let's say, Le Monde as the paper. First search, second search. Robot gets WAY more hits then automate. And the Robot hits are overwhelmingly legitimate hits, while a number of the automate ones look questionable (for example, the top hit just has "automate" in a long list of tags).

What you did basically is like saying "No no, English doesn't borrow slavic words, see, we can say "autonomaton" instead of robot if we want, see? So no borrowing here!"

These are of course just random examples. I can give you as many as you want, from as many countries as you want that don't include your incredibly broad "Using French words, Latin words, and Greek words are all still preserving the modern French language" criteria). What's French for beluga? Wikipedia says béluga; that's a Russian word (Icelandic: mjaldur). What's French for jungle? Wikipedia says jungle; that's a Hindi word (Icelandic: frumskógur). What about cotton / coton? That's Arabic (Icelandic: bómull). Cola / cola? That's west African (Icelandic: gos). And on and on. But I know that no matter how many I list, that will never be enough.

Don't get me wrong - Icelandic *does* have a lot of loan words. For example kaffi (coffee / café), gíraffi (giraffe / girafe), etc, there's lots. But I can't for the life of me find one where French decided to coin - and then actually predominantly use - a new native word where Icelandic didn't. And the difference is even more pronounced with modern technical terms / device names / etc - Icelandic usually seems to at least try, French almost never does; it seems to coin new "native" words very rarely. Certainly no more often than your average modern European language. So why the reputation as being so "protective" of the language?

So I don't see your point

The point is that the claim was false.

Yes you can use Tsunami in French (like you can do in English) but the phenomena is know in French as "raz-de-marée"

Unless Wikipedia is lying (and if it is, please go in and edit it), tsunami is the proper technical term for specifically a tsunami, while raz-de-marée is a sea flood of any type (for example, also including storm-driven coastal floods). The proper technical term in French is a japanese word having literally zero connection with France. The proper technical term in Icelandic is flóðbylgja (or if you want to be more precise, skjálftaflóðbylgja). In what way is having your proper technical term be a Japanese word preserving the language? Why should anyone give French special "protecting the language" credit for stuff like that?

"sarrigue" can be used for opposum, automate is also a synonyme for robot etc

This isn't a "can I think of another word that can also accurately describe the term in question without having to use a loanword?" issue. It's "is it proper French to use these loanwords and do people frequently use them " issue.

Check out, say, an Icelandic newspaper. Search for vélmenni. Tons of hits talking about robots. Now search for robot. Still a fair number of its, but they're all things like the name of the movie "I, Robot", a reference to "which has been called "robot" in foreign languages", Shit Robot, Bad Robot, Robot Kitchen, and a ton of other proper names. Robot is simply not an Icelandic word.

Perform the same experiment with French. Let's say, Le Monde as the paper. First search, second search. Robot gets WAY more hits then automate. And the Robot hits are overwhelmingly legitimate hits, while a number of the automate ones look questionable (for example, the top hit just has "automate" in a long list of tags).

What you did basically is like saying "No no, English doesn't borrow slavic words, see, we can say "autonomaton" instead of robot if we want, see? So no borrowing here!"

These are of course just random examples. I can give you as many as you want, from as many countries as you want that don't include your incredibly broad "Using French words, Latin words, and Greek words are all still preserving the modern French language" criteria). What's French for beluga? Wikipedia says béluga; that's a Russian word (Icelandic: mjaldur). What's French for jungle? Wikipedia says jungle; that's a Hindi word (Icelandic: frumskógur). What about cotton / coton? That's Arabic (Icelandic: bómull). Cola / cola? That's west African (Icelandic: gos). And on and on. But I know that no matter how many I list, that will never be enough.

Don't get me wrong - Icelandic *does* have a lot of loan words. For example kaffi (coffee / café), gíraffi (giraffe / girafe), etc, there's lots. But I can't for the life of me find one where French decided to coin - and then actually predominantly use - a new native word where Icelandic didn't. And the difference is even more pronounced with modern technical terms / device names / etc - Icelandic usually seems to at least try, French almost never does; it seems to coin new "native" words very rarely. Certainly no more often than your average modern European language. So why the reputation as being so "protective" of the language?

So I don't see your point

The point is that the claim was false.

Yes you can use Tsunami in French (like you can do in English) but the phenomena is know in French as "raz-de-marée"

Unless Wikipedia is lying (and if it is, please go in and edit it), tsunami is the proper technical term for specifically a tsunami, while raz-de-marée is a sea flood of any type (for example, also including storm-driven coastal floods). The proper technical term in French is a japanese word having literally zero connection with France. The proper technical term in Icelandic is flóðbylgja (or if you want to be more precise, skjálftaflóðbylgja). In what way is having your proper technical term be a Japanese word preserving the language? Why should anyone give French special "protecting the language" credit for stuff like that?

"sarrigue" can be used for opposum, automate is also a synonyme for robot etc

This isn't a "can I think of another word that can also accurately describe the term in question without having to use a loanword?" issue. It's "is it proper French to use these loanwords and do people frequently use them " issue.

Check out, say, an Icelandic newspaper. Search for vélmenni. Tons of hits talking about robots. Now search for robot. Still a fair number of its, but they're all things like the name of the movie "I, Robot", a reference to "which has been called "robot" in foreign languages", Shit Robot, Bad Robot, Robot Kitchen, and a ton of other proper names. Robot is simply not an Icelandic word.

Perform the same experiment with French. Let's say, Le Monde as the paper. First search, second search. Robot gets WAY more hits then automate. And the Robot hits are overwhelmingly legitimate hits, while a number of the automate ones look questionable (for example, the top hit just has "automate" in a long list of tags).

What you did basically is like saying "No no, English doesn't borrow slavic words, see, we can say "autonomaton" instead of robot if we want, see? So no borrowing here!"

These are of course just random examples. I can give you as many as you want, from as many countries as you want that don't include your incredibly broad "Using French words, Latin words, and Greek words are all still preserving the modern French language" criteria). What's French for beluga? Wikipedia says béluga; that's a Russian word (Icelandic: mjaldur). What's French for jungle? Wikipedia says jungle; that's a Hindi word (Icelandic: frumskógur). What about cotton / coton? That's Arabic (Icelandic: bómull). Cola / cola? That's west African (Icelandic: gos). And on and on. But I know that no matter how many I list, that will never be enough.

Don't get me wrong - Icelandic *does* have a lot of loan words. For example kaffi (coffee / café), gíraffi (giraffe / girafe), etc, there's lots. But I can't for the life of me find one where French decided to coin - and then actually predominantly use - a new native word where Icelandic didn't. And the difference is even more pronounced with modern technical terms / device names / etc - Icelandic usually seems to at least try, French almost never does; it seems to coin new "native" words very rarely. Certainly no more often than your average modern European language. So why the reputation as being so "protective" of the language?