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Detailed info about the lahar that buried Herculaneum: Lahars in Campania

On the other hand, vesuvius destroyed Pompeii with a nuée ardente (glowing avalanche) and pyroclastic flow, not a lahar. A lahar is a mixture of water, mud, rocks, and possibly ice. A nuée ardente is a cloud of volcanic gasses and ash so hot they glow. When the ash comes to a rest, it is often so hot the individual particles fuse to become solid rock. A pyroclasitc flow is a mixture of gasses, ash, pumice, glass (obsidian) shards, and rock flowing down the side of a volcano.

Volcanic and Geologic Terms

Yeah, I had fun with it, too. I first wrote "ever recorded in history", then I thought to myself, "wait a minute, was Krakatoa bigger, or not?" Yeah, it probably was. Then I wondered if the explosion of the island of Thera/Sanotorini in the Aegean sea might have been even bigger --- although nobody actually seemed to have recorded that, as few records survive from that time. Hard to say. I finally settled on the phrase you liked so well. But it is very lame, as phrases go, isn't it? I should have left the "ever" off, at least.

Yeah, I had fun with it, too. I first wrote "ever recorded in history", then I thought to myself, "wait a minute, was Krakatoa bigger, or not?" Yeah, it probably was. Then I wondered if the explosion of the island of Thera/Sanotorini in the Aegean sea might have been even bigger --- although nobody actually seemed to have recorded that, as few records survive from that time. Hard to say. I finally settled on the phrase you liked so well. But it is very lame, as phrases go, isn't it? I should have left the "ever" off, at least.

Its an idea I've heard mentioned before (can't remember where) and on the face of it, seems like a good one. However, I'm not so certain it would be a cheap method of disposal. If I remember my college geology, most of the subduction zones are under water, which would raise the cost of drilling the disposal hole. Also there tend to be earthquakes along plate boundaries (including subductions zones) which might collapse the disposal hole, making re-drilling necessary.

Also there there tend to be volcanoes associated with subduction zones -- would this mean there's a risk of particularly radioactive magma?

Given that nuclear power plants use Uranium as the fuel, and the half-lifes of the main isotopes range from 244,000 years to 4,500,000 years, and that you need 10 times the half-life to be sure...

Don't think I'll wait for it myself...

Mt. Asama in Japan (near Nagano) has been erupting the last few weeks. Check out this short video of a continuous stream of ash leaving the top. Some of it reached Tokyo!

The reason? To make the defendant more menacing.

This may be a troll, however there was an instance of manipulation of cover photos of news magazines during the O.J. Simpson debacle^H^H^H^H^H^H^Htrial that may have helped shape public opinion.

You can't kill everything and everybody unless ~100% lived near the coast AND the water rises faster than people can run including those at the limit of the sea level rise! As for hot spots, like Yellowstone, Google the term "flood basalts" and you will get an idea of what has gone on in the past. See http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/no rth_america/yellowstone.html for example. Notice the mention that the calderas get younger toward the east. This ties in with plate tectonics due to ocean floor spreading at the mid-atlintic ridge. If you want to put some models together to test the possiblity of "The Flood" and the likelihood and nature of future catastrophes, understanding plate tectonics is vital. It's bigger than evolution is. Predictions and observations, that is what makes for a good theory. The only Diluvian stories that make some sense at all are those who interpret the Bbiel less than literally. such as a local inundation.

There are no known active volconoes on Venus. Like Mars there are many extinct volcanoes, however I was talking about active volcanoes and active life.

The question of past life and past volcanoes is separate.

That's an urban myth propagated by Ronald Regan.

Just use a cheap microcontroller, perhaps a PIC. They are pretty simple to get the hang of, just a handful of RISC instructions, and they're cheap. All the protocol information is available readily

There's no two wires you can just connect on a ps2 plug to create a "loopback" that would work. The ps2 protocol is a two way protocol that involves the transfer of data back and forth. It doesn't simply detect a keyboard by seeing if a circuit is completed; in fact, the computer doesn't even generate the clock for the ps2 device. They keyboard itself is generating the clock.

Here is my recommendation if you are sending the keyboard to be colo'd or something. Do what I do. Take apart a real keyboard, dremel a small hole in the back of the case, use packing tape to tape the small chip inside a real(new) keyboard inside the case and run the ps2 cable outside to plug into the ps2 port.

Read more about the ps2 protocol here.

Chris Benard

Really though they should just call it J 3.5g/$50, and pass it down the line, take a puff hold it in, every thing is fine. Nobody has ever been confused by that, oh... wait...

Well, if I'm understanding what you're trying to do, you've got both software and operating system options, as well as a whole bunch of hardware solutions.

Of course, you can also enable a screensaver password, and have the screensaver running all the time, configure the BIOS not to allow booting from the floppy drive, and use password access to the BIOS to disallow unauthorized changes to it.

It sounds like your easiest (read: less time to deal with and less worry of hacking headaches) solutions is just to toss the suckers into one of those cabinets listed above. Hell, you can build the cabinet yourself for under $100, if you're any good with power tools and have a spare afternoon.

It's interesting to see Tannenbaum's influence on Senn:
"I have to be upfront with you, I am a fair newbie at Minix. I have been using Linux since the 0.9 kernel (downloaded via ftp on VMS in 90s) and have a fairly decent background in Unix - solaris, sco, bsd, etc. I got interested in Minix back around the same time too, but I had success with Linux and stayed with it. I got reminded of Minix the other day when Andrew Tanenbaum posted his response to the 'Brown' book - pure enlightenment - http://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/brown/."[emphasis added]

Here is some more background infoon the genesis of the project.

Unfortunately, someone discovered an error.
And the paper was withdrawn.
Since the corresponding harmonic series is less than 2,
perhaps the old fox will prove that it's unprovable.

*unregistered_Pi

I'm not a geologist, so I've no idea whether the waste would stay in a blob encased in many feet of lava, dilute throughout the entire magma, or dilute enough to spread it around but not enough to make lava non-hazardous (from a radioactivity point of view, at least!)

I can well see that there would be legitimate concerns, though. I even wonder if there's been any significant research into the behaviour of magma and lava in these respects.

Oh, and incidentally, it would appear that normal lava is no more radioactive than normal rocks.

--

IANAGeologist, and seeing how this is modded funny, I don't know if you're being serious, but it made me think of something that maybe someone could answer-

Is the metor that hit the earth and killed off the dinosaurs in any way to the breakup of pangea? Like, is it possible that the entire crust could have solidified into one piece and then the meteor came and fractured it, setting the continents adrift? The site of impact looks pretty central to this diagram...

The island's only about a mile and a half across; using this picture and the webcam image, it's pretty obvious where the camera has to be to within about a quarter-mile.

One unfortunate thing about polution is that the wind blows it everywhere. A coal factory darkens the skies in antartica no matter if it's location is in Denver, Stockholm, or Bejing.

Really? I didn't know fumes from a smokestack in Denver, Stockholm, or Beijing could be auto-magically multiplied to effectively blanket an entire continent in a swatch of life-choaking pollution. C'mon people, stop believing the FUD! You don't like it when Microsoft does it to your precious Linux, why be any different about our planet??? Volcanoes alone produce more pollution and life killing destruction in one eruption than all the many years of our little tiny cars coughing spent fossil fuels into the air.

There's a frozen lake of fire at Hawaii's Volcanoes National Park. Apparently it's still liquid a few hundred feet below the surface, but you can walk across the top. I didn't see any flying pigs when I was there, couldn't even find a flying Nene.

HowTo: remote logging in Linux

Might be worth offering a web-application sometime, you could host lots of peoples' offsite logs, just like remote backup except without the bandwidth.

Other than that, looks like you'll need a spare PC.

I don't have any books on hand, but I think it was a volcanic eruption - the one that is now currently Yellowstone, I think. (Yes, Yellowstone is a super volcano - the largest in the world in fact.)

Yellowstone and Toba's eruptions have been devastating, but they are not the most destructive. Flood basalt erruptions have that distinction:

• Columbia River Flood Basalts cover about 165,000 km^3
• Deccan Traps, India covers around 500,000 km^3. This occurred about 65 million years ago and is a more convincing second event to have finished off the dinosaurs than a second meteor strike.
• The Siberian Traps cover 2.5 million km^3 and formed about 250 million years ago, corresponding with the Permian-Triassic Boundary, and the largest mass extinction we know about. There is a theory that there may have been a meteor strike around the same time. If true it's an interesting coincidence.

Apparently just 75,000 years ago Lake Toba was the site of the biggest eruption in the last 2 million years. This site even provides a comparison to Yellowstone.

This eruption may not have caused more than local and marginal extinctions, but it certainly seems to have had a significant impact on the early expansion of homo sapiens sapiens who within 10,000 years had made it across a significant stretch of open sea to reach Australia. And that, of course, produced many extinctions.

Okay, "somebody took some core samples and here's what they found." Although there appears to be a temporal relationship to ice-trapped CO2 levels and a change in human history, there's not enough data in evidence to prove a causal relationship between them. That's the whole point of my first post- there are too many confounding influences and insufficient data to draw real conclusions.

Krakatoa happened in that time period. Other volcanoes were also active.

There are also other sources of CO2 as well.

It may well be better to cut the corn like you would for silage and use the entire plant for mash, then use the increased energy production to heat to mix. I'm just speculating though, I haven't fact one to back up that guess

I may not know much about growing grain, but I do know a thing or three about fermenting it :-) As an educated guess, I'm going to say that corn cobs, leaves, and stalks are going to have about as much sugar content as a pile of lawn clippings. Lawn clippings are not noted for thier fermentability :-) My guess is that chopping it into silage is going to be a waste of energy. You might be able to extract methanol from the stalks via destructive distillation but this would not give you a positive energy yield unless you're using solar power to do it. Your best bet is probably to sun-dry the waste and burn it to fuel the mashing and distallation processes.

So, now the question is, how much alcohol can we get out of a bushel of corn. I've never brewed with corn, but I'll assume it's going to work about the same way as brewing with barley.

The first step is to malt the grain -- allow it to start to germinate and then dry it out. We'll assume that the energy cost for malting is negligible since we'll be using sun-drying. The germination process releases enzymes which starts to break the unfermentable starches down into fermentable sugars. Once we have our malt we crush it in a mill. You're going to need some energy to run the mill, but not a huge amount. Since what we need is kinetic energy, we can power the mill the old-fashioned way: with wind or water.

A quick search of the net shows that a bushel of corn weighs 47 lbs. To make mash, we have to add (room-temperature) grain to hot (but not boiling) water, so we'll either need a solar hot water heater or we'll need to burn some of our dried waste. Cooking the mash is going to require several stages of heating & cooling in order to extract and convert as much of the starch & sugar as possible, so we're going to need an energy source for this too, but to make it easy let's say we'll need to hold the mash at an average of 150F for 4 hours. We're going to lose about 2 gallons of our mash (evaporation and absorption by the grain), but then add in about another 6 to rinse (sparge) the spent grain hulls, so our final product here is going to be about 16 gallons of raw wort. Since we don't care what it tastes like, we can skip some steps and save some energy, but still the mashing process is fairly energy intensive.

We pitch some yeast into our 16 gallons of wart and let it do it's thing. Let's assume that our final product after fermentation is going to be 14 gallons (after losses for sediment & evaporation) at a concentration of 8% alcohol. We'll have to boil all this liquid off in our still -- very expensive energy-wise. If we figure we want our end product at 160 proof (80% alcohol), our maximum theoretical yield is going to be 1.4 gallons per bushel; real-world yield would probably be closer to 1.3. I could be way off on my calculations, but I'd bet even money that you'll get at least 1 gallon per bushel.

So, given these (admittedly rough) calculations, at 125 bu/acre yield of corn, we'll be able to produce about 163 gallons of alcohol per acre. If we assume alcohol is 2/3 as efficient as diesel, given your figures we'll need at least 10 gallons of alcohol per acre to run the tractor -- call it 13, so our net yield is 150 gallons. To produce this we'll have had to have vaporized about 1,800 gallons (6800 litres) of water. Since vaporizing water takes 2260 Joules/gram (2.2 MJoules/litre), we've expended about 15,000 megajoules of energy just in the mashing and distallation processes to produce 150 gallons of usable fuel; this gives us 100 MJou

Back in WW2, the RAF had a huge ammo depot called the Fauld.

On November 27, 1944, there was an accident and it blew up.

This is the supposedly the largest non-nuclear explosion in recorded history.

In related news, the release schedule of Duke Nukem forever seems to follow the half-life of Uranium-234

why, oh why they don't they remove the most fucking stable thing in my fucking PC...

If the PS/2 port on your board is the most stable part of your machine, you have serious issues. Send that machine to me, I'll fix it for you.

I bet the PS2 keyboard I'm using is older than you bitch.

IBM released the PS/2 connector in 1987; that keyboard is definitely not older than I am.
A little history lesson

Who's the bitch? Anonycow :)

Do you really think that sending letters (and why the fuck not email?) to these so-called representatives actually applies "pressure" to them? HA! The only things that pressures them are the money they get from their corporate masters and the advice they get from their PR reps.

This particular drone happens to have no funding from the RIAA, so he saw a chance to manipulate a public issue to his benefit.

I am beggining to think that our only solution lies in this song...

How do you get rid of nasty infections? Autoclave! Heat things up enough to smoke out all those nasty hoomins and things can get back to normal around here.

As for volcanos, it looks like the production of CO/CO2 in eruptions can have an effect on global warming. It turns out, however, that the ash/SO2 released into the atmosphere has a cooling effect. It also helps scatter sunlight, allowing for more robust tree growth which leads to more carbon being taken out of the atmosphere.

So, all we need to happen is for the Yellowstone (NetBSD) volcano to erupt (supposed to be violent enough to wipe out hoomanity) and fill the skys with enough ash and SO2 to bring on Fimbulwinter to slow down global warming. Or have a big rock smack into the Indian Ocean.

will never figure it out?

There are theroys about how mars once had river beds and Volcanos i would love to see a closer look of these

(How about a Your Cow Online Section? )

This "news" is pretty old. There was even a Learning Channel (or Discovery) show a couple of years ago about the idea of "supervolcanoes", one of which could rest beneath Yellowstone and one (Toba) that, they think, blasted ~70K years ago, causing global average temperatures to drop and nearly causing our species to become extinct. Interesting stuff.

LCD screens aren't completely transparent and they have to be extra bright to make up for it.

Here is a link to more information about lcd displays

lcd transistor

Errrr....

Whats this then?

http://volcano.und.nodak.edu/vwdocs/volc_images/im g_fuji.html

--
Dreamweaver Website Templates

Volcanoes spew more sulfur dioxide than every man-made source combined.

Citation, please? This page, for example, says

Andres and Kasgnoc (1997) estimated the time-averaged inventory of subaerial volcanic sulfur emissions. There inventory was based upon the 25 year history of making sulfur measurements, primarily sulfur dioxide (SO2), at volcanoes. Actual measurements of subaerial volcanic sulfur dioxide emissions indicate a time-averaged flux of 13 Tg/yr sulfur dioxide from early 1970 to 1997. [Note: a Tg is equal to 10E12 grams]. About 4 Tg come from explosive eruptions and 9 Tg is released by passivedegassing, in an average year. When considering the other sulfur species also present in volcanic emissions, a time-averaged inventory of subaerial volcanic sulfur emissions is 10.4 Tg/yr sulfur.

Volcanoes and other natural processes release approximately 24 Tg of sulfur to the atmosphere each year. Thus, volcanoes are responsible for 43% of the total natural S flux each year. Man's activities add about 79 Tg sulfur to the atmosphere each year. In an average year, volcanoes release only 13% of the sulfur added to the atmosphere compared to anthropogenic sources.

so either

1. your claim is incorrect;
2. the claim on that page is incorrect;
3. volcanoes may emit more sulfur dioxide but, if you take all sulfur emissions into account, more comes from man-made sources;
4. you're referring to pre-1970 data;
5. you're referring to post-1997 data.

Nice little theory you have, been one the assumptions behind it is horribly flawed, namely:

The amount of greenhouse gases released by a single volcanic eruption puts all our greenhouse emissions to shame.

Human's cause approx. 150 times the amount of CO2 to be released each year as volcanos. (Link)

Wrong. Volcanic emissions of CO2 are approx. 150 times less CO2 than humans. (Link)

Can't wait for the resulting ads (preferably featuring some redneck ranting on and on about how he hates Macs...)

I have a cactus in my office that never gets natural light (I keep my window shaded to prevent glare on my monitor). In fact, I don't water it either. I don't know how, but it still looks as healthy as the day I bought it (almost). I googled and found this site about caring for cacti.

I started out with punch-cards on the HP-2000 in the mid-1970s... Yes, I remember! ;-)

At the time the AT-style keyboard connector was put on PCs (early 1980s), nobody ever dreamed we'd be having roomfuls of these things all cabled up to a single monitor/keyboard/mouse.

But the AT-style ("old" style) keyboard ports were hot-swappable.

(Again, this was back in the days when IBM did something and everybody followed.)

No. The PS/2 came out in the late-1980s if memory serves. But the industry standard remained "old style" keyboard plugs up until just a few years ago... say 96~97. By that time, IBM was just another player in the commoditized PC industry.

No, the industry-wide switch did NOT happen just because IBM came out with the PS/2. It happened a decade later. I bought my last "old-style" motherboard in 1998, which was just about the time when they were starting to get scarce (well, here in Taiwan anyway). (And I bought it specifically because I already had a KVM switch for the old-style keyboard (w/ serial mouse) and had a couple of machines still in service that didn't even have PS/2 ports.

The kind of switching talked about here just wasn't envisioned, and in fact, would have been considered insane.

Hmm... no, when the changeover actually occurred (late 1990s) this kind of switching was already commonplace. And the price of any serial device had already dropped more-or-less to commodity levels. (Hell, by that time we didn't even have to ask whether or not it had a 16550A chip!)

Actually, the most sensible explanation I've heard so far is that RS-232 is half-duplex and PS/2 is full-duplex. But I don't even know if this factoid is accurate... let alone why it would make a significant difference with stuff like kbds and mice...

But eventually technology catches up, and the marriage of USB with keyboard/mouse permits the right thing to happen.

Yes, I'm planning to buy a USB kbd and KVM soon. I need to upgrade my systems anyway, now that the new Debian is out... just busy with other shit lately...

Frankly, by the time this "sea-change" occurred, there was plenty of reason to anticipate losing the connection to any given input device, and yet nobody ever thought to upgrade the PS/2 protocol to make it hot-swappable. That's what always made me wonder what those motherboard designers were smoking... ;-)

Anyway, what's done is done. Just gotta deal with it... I'm just curious about the motivation behind it. And I still don't have a satisfactory answer... :-/

--jrd

PS: Here's some info on PS/2 ports that might be of interest to folks who know more about electronics that I do...

Sorry about replying to myself but i found a relavent link about insect movement:

http://www.ndsu.nodak.edu/entomology/topics/moveme nt.htm

I would have to say that you just went to a bad university. I'm an undergraduate at North Dakota State and am currently in the mathematics REU at Louisiana State, and I couldn't disagree with you more about reducing mathematics to rote memorization. I TA'ed a trigonometry class last fall, and our students were expected to understand how things worked and were given problems that required them to apply the trig they learned to a tangible problem. Yes, introductory mathematics courses do require a lot of "memorization," but that memorization should be accompanied by understanding. Sure it's one thing to know a theorem's statement, but to understand how to use it is another thing altogether.

I'm not really sure if the person asking the question just wants a familiarity with mathematics through, say, calculus or if abstract mathematics is a desired area to learn. However, starting at a CC is probably adviseable to get through college algebra, trig, and calculus. After that, I'd suggest at least a couple courses from a university. An introduction to mathematical logic and proof (and set theory) is important for any further reading. Most universities have the so-called "bridge courses" and they vary in their worth. However, if you've been out of school for awhile, it would be worth it to find and take one. After that, I (being a dedicated discrete mathematician) would suggest an area of discrete math such as graph theory or combinatorics. (There are several good books out there, or you could find classes to take.) They're very approachable, even if they have too many definitions. After that, head onto some other math along the lines of abstract algebra and real analysis (this is where you really learn what calculus is all about).

Mathematics is a fascinating subject with many diverse areas to explore. Check them out, find out what you like, and then pursue it. If you're not going for a degree, steer clear of areas that don't interest you, but don't hesitate to read a book or take an intro course in that area. You might be surprised that you like it.

Mitch

There is certainly no "legitmate" reason why anyone would come in at non-peak hours and reposition the monitor to a convienient viewing angle

You're right. Most people doing that at 3AM are playing games :P

Pray tell, why exactly is viewing porn considered an ethics violation at your lab?

Well, pr0n and mp3z and e-harassment etc. are against the university computer policy, especially if done on the public lab computers. Not my rules.

Face it, you're just another tech staffer who feels power in his belly and likes the taste of it too much.

Huh? I suppose technically I'm a "tech staffer", although my actual job is writing Java for geologists. I just heard about this story from friends who work the clusters here, and it amused me. And that feeling in my belly is probably steak.

Internet2 is already so fucking saturated by Morpheus, Gnutella(esque), P2P stuff in general that it's not hardly worth it for *serious* traffic anymore. I'm at a school which trumped I2 as the next best thing since breast implants, and now we're seeing about 70-90% of our traffic devoted to T&A flicks, mp3, and movies. Not that I give a fuck, but then again, I didn't spend $2 million to trench the fucker in.

You wanna see some fucking waste? It's a graph from a typical school show their internet usage. Assume I2 usage for the P2P apps is *much* great.

No, it doesn't. Your source on that claim is probably Dixie Lee Ray's book _Trashing the Planet_, or Rush Limbaugh's frequent quoting of it, or somebody else's quoting (or mis-quoting) of Rush. Dixie Lee Ray unfortunately got a few of her facts and calculations wrong, and the resulting misinformation has been bouncing around the net ever since. For a correction, um, try this FAQ. Here's the relevant snippet:

" Is the recent warming caused by volcanic activity?

Volcanoes have a dual effect on climate. In the short term, they exert a net *cooling* effect due to their emissions of sulphur dioxide. The cooling effect depends on the composition of the volcanic emissions (particularly sulphur content) and on the location of the volcanoes (high latitude volcanoes tend to have a greater effect. The cooling effect of some of the most important recent volcanoes is provided by Volcano World.

Volcanoes do also emit CO2, and massive eruptions in the past have emitted enough CO2 to cause climate change. However, in the recent climatic record, volcanic emissions have been much lower. Gerlach (1991) estimated a total global release of 3-4 x 10E12 mol/yr from volcanoes. Man-made (anthropogenic) CO2 emissions overwhelm this estimate by at least 150 times. Analyses of temperature changes over the past 1000 years also show that the rise in temperature this century can't be explained by solar or volcanic activity."

Here are just a few router stat graphics from my university. As you can see, Kazaa/Morpheus is 85% of the outbound traffic!! Inbound isn't quite as bad, only 63% or so.

Here are just a few router stat graphics from my university. As you can see, Kazaa/Morpheus is 85% of the outbound traffic!! Inbound isn't quite as bad, only 63% or so.