Slashdot Mirror

Malaria causes more deaths

And that baffles me, since it's so readily cured with cheap tree bark or even a few hundred gin and tonics.

Why are we, and the kind Mr. Gates worried about a disease that's easily and cheaply cured (and even prevented?) And why are people still dying from malaria?

Bullshit. Plants absorb quite a bit of carbon from the ground. That's a lot of old carbon that's released there. They estimate about 30% of the plant is old carbon.

http://www.sciencenet.org.uk/database/earth/natura lenvironment/e00077d.html

The greatest stores of carbon are believed to be the world's oceans and fossil fuel reserves. On land, carbon is stored in ground litter, soils and plants. Forests are thought to contain about 80% of all above-ground and 40% of all below-ground terrestrial organic carbon.

And to clear it up, the lightbulb does seem to be a british development.

After you've read that, you'll need to get additional information on rechargeable batteries. Note that that page talks about nickel oxide batteries but the information applies to lead acid batteries such as you find in a typical UPS (and cars, for that matter).

It is also crucial to understand that the battery is an electric, not an electronic, device. So there's no way for the battery itself to report to your server that it is getting low on power. You'll need some after-market monitoring electronics hooked on there that will sense how the battery is doing and will function as a middle man to your PC.

Another important issue is sinewave capability. If your UPS can't put out a sinewave voltage, you should probably avoid it.

Can anyone add anything to that?

Gold is pointing out that carbon can be much deeper, and availability at the surface is dependent upon deep geology rather than past surface pools of muck.

No one has suggested that oil avaliability is dependant on 'past surface pools of muck'; I really don't understand where you are getting this from.

Why hydrocarbons should have been retained in the mantle when every other volatile has been effectively stripped (due to melting and cycling through oceanic crust) is unexplained.

Carbon in subducted rock has to go someplace. There are five possibilities:

• Carbon might sink and be lost (unlikely as it is less dense than nickel-iron)
• Carbon might be trapped and never rise (unlikely, as volcanoes often bring material up from subducted areas).
• Carbon might bubble up early in the process and leak right at the fault.
• Carbon might travel great distances under crust, whether dissolved in mantle material, in deposits under crust, or in lower levels of crust.
• Carbon might accumulate near subduction areas and push upward.

Gold's ignorance of the last 40 years of geology shines through; dismissing the entire science of petroleum geology is bad enough for a non-geologist, dismissing plate tectonics, standard planet formation theories, basic physics, and in fact anything that gets in the way of his theory is worse.

As an astronomer, he probably knows planetary formation and physics quite well. He does state that no gases were incorporated in Earth, so carbon, water, and nitrogen must have come from material within the planet. I don't know what he thinks happened to lighter elements during the Earth-shattering impact which created the Moon (my observation is that the Moon's density is significantly less than Earth, so much separation of dense material must have already happened before impact -- or dense material didn't splash high enough to stay in orbit).

Middle East has been greatly disrupted by tectonic activity (90 degree rotation is somewhat drastic), and obviously there are many faults to deeper areas. So the search for "source" rock has actually been the search for rock which met expectations near the reservoirs.

90 degree rotation is not very drastic.

And the fact that source rocks have been found, with appropriate thermal conditions and migration pathways is pretty strong evidence, especially as when these rocks are NOT found, there is no oil.

Biogenic origin theory does not explain finds where there are no expected formations. There are hundreds of producing wells in basement rocks, and some hydrocarbons have been found in rather unconventional areas. Gold has plenty of references to his experiences drilling in the Swedish impact ring. Anhydride Petroleum continues exploring the basement oil/gas which Hunt believes are part of the source of the Athabasca Tar Sands.

Have a read of this: Petroleum geology, Saudi Arabia. [sc.edu]

To read from Gold's site:

If the major volume of the Earth has never been molten, the mantle of the Earth underneath the crust must still contain the diversity of chemistry, the chemical energy sources and the sources of gases and liquids that would be the legacy of an accretion process from diverse and initially cold solids.

Except that mid ocean ridge basalts [which sample the mantle beneath effectively] exhibit an extreme uniformity of compositions. Basic physics also gives us raleigh numbers for the mantle indicating that it is well mixed.

So the same weak points along the Southeast Asia plate edges which cause volcanoes also cause hydrocarbons to become available near the surface.

No, the hydrocarbons are found in the back-arc settings. These are not 'weak points causing volcanoes', it's subducting slab dehydration melting the mantle above. Hawaii is not mentioned by Gold probably for the reason that it is known to have a deep component to it's magma and yet emits little or no methane.

1 it would be impossible to get those kinds of intense magnetic fields without using superconductors. Conventional conductors would melt with the kind of electrical current you would need.

2 unfortunately buckyballs don't seem to lubricate. but see that post on FLIR made with nanotechnology for more commercial nanotech products.

3 You want great 3d uses of holograms? Try imaging This technique could generalise for anything else you want to look at under a microscope in 3D. Cells. Fuel rods in a nuke reactor. the hologram captures all that data at the quantum level.

the application is commercial because there are hologram companies that sell equipment to other companies. If you want to get into it yourself for next to nothing look at this link and search for hologram

According to this site, the "velocity of propagation" of signals in the blue pair in CAT5 cable is 66% that of "c", the true speed of light. (A few percent of that is because of the twists -- if you completely straightened out the individual wires, they'd stretch longer than the original length of the cable)

Of course there's the difference between the speed of one electron vs. the speed that voltage changes (i.e. information) travel along the wire.

According to this guy, the actual movement of electrons is VERY very slow through a normal wire, on the order of centimeters per hour.

What about superconductors?

I didn't have tons of luck Googling, but I found a message board posting that states that the electron drift rate is much higher in superconductors.

And then there's this physics Q&A about why electrons don't travel at actually the speed of light.

- Peter

But the Hubble telescope is 375 miles from earth, while the moon is 240,000 miles from earth. If it can only resolve a 1-cm object at 50 miles, then the smallest object it can resolve at this distance is about 50 km (30 miles). I seem to recall the lunar landers are a little smaller than this.

Well, according to this article, the computer monitor part isn't nearly as big a deal as it used to be, since new monitors use much less power and therefore emit much less radiation. And not just the "low radiation" ones either -- all of them. I'm betting that the same could be said of TVs, since the technology is essentially the same.

Also, I believe that monitors only emit various types of EM radiation, at levels that are, by all accounts, perfectly safe. This "radiation" is of course completely different from the (significantly bad) stuff emitted by A-bombs and the like.

There are more possible states of a go board than the current estimated number of atoms in the universe. I think storing that may be a little more than 5 years off.

Current estimates are between 10^76 and 10^79 atoms in the universe

The number of possible moves in a go game starts at 361, and goes down by roughly one per move. Thus the upper limit on go states is near 361! which is around 10^750. This puts perfect Go a little out of reach. More on AI Go

Earths mag field periodically reverses too, which could cause all sorts of mischief such as affecting climate.

Nature reported that the magnetic field off the southern tip of Africa has already flipped. Anomalies like these have already reduced the strength of the planet's magnetic field by about 10 percent.

Some guy at sciencenet
Dept. of Energy's Ask a Scientist

As you can see, the speed they give varies between a few mm/sec and a few m/s. This basically depends on what assumptions you make when setting up the calculation. A few cm/sec is just a handy order of magnitude estimate.

Putting pico in front of a unit is simply easier than writing 0.000 000 000 00x (or twelve figures before the decimal point) before your number and putting micro in front of a unit is a short way of writing 0.000 00 (or 6 figures before the decimal point) before your number. So one micro has 1 000 000 or one million pico units in it. [ source]

So as you can see, MicroBSD, referenced in this article, takes 1,000,000 times more space than PicoBSD. Using compiled-assembly /bin utils, combined into one executable which checks $0, such as busybox--one is able to strip down the OS to fit on a 1.44Mbps floppy disc. I would suppose MicroBSD is aimed to fit on a 700MB CD-RW, with the ~600MB left over for user files thanks to the rewritability of RW media. As you can see, there is a large gap between Micro and PicoBSD, each fills their own niche.

Unlike photons, electrons have mass. Nothing with mass moves at anything close to the speed of light.

What is the speed of electrons down a copper wire?

On the topic of slavery: It isn't legal. Therefore your comment is idiotic and pointless. Were it legal, then that would be a perfectly sensible comment to make.

Of course, slavery, though I see you would prefer not to admit it, is a clear-cut issue by comparison. Skin colour is a lousy reason to differentiate between people - basically down to differences in the number of melanin granules in the keratinocytes.

On the other hand, abortion comes down to whether or not one makes the difference between a 50 million million cell organism and a couple of cells with potential.

You ever had a wet dream? Ever wasted a sperm? Seems irrelevant, frankly - who the hell cares about sperm? I know... it's fertilised, so it's different... but anyway.

I'm glad you sympathise with rape victims. :)

But as for 'adoption'...

Pregnancy is not an easy thing. It causes irreparable strain on the body. It is not something to take lightly. Think about that rape victim who you sympathise with (remember, rape causes depression, guilt, and feelings of helplessness), coping with the attack, morning sickness, headaches, back aches, breathing problems, insomnia and permanent fatigue, together with the fact of nine months' disruption of their lives and probably large medical bills to pay, all to finance the poor unfortunate child sown by a particularly evil male.

Pregnancy is a shock to the body. It is not something that one can merely 'let happen' over nine months.

Some women - like me - have problems such as heart disease or high blood pressure that essentially mean that pregnancy is unlikely to be safe more than once or twice, and invariably end in Caesarian section. My mother has the same problem; her first pregnancy nearly killed her and did kill the baby. That's a lot to chance even in a loving relationship with a supportive partner...

Probably it seems to you that all this is an overreaction, which is fine; personally, rape and its aftermath changed my opinion a little on this - though fortunately I didn't have to consider abortion. The fact is, even given all of these factors most rape victims choose against abortion anyway - but that still leaves a good percentage who choose otherwise. I feel that it should be their choice. It's not a decision to be chosen lightly, in either direction.

In a way, though, you're right - if one follows your conclusions on the beginning of life, at least. There should be a better way. I wish there was. Abortion is moderately barbaric and often causes about as much depression as the original rape... But that better way would involve not requiring the mother to carry the child to term... whilst removing the guilt of killing. I look forward to seeing somebody invent it.

Mu metal is often used in electronic test equipment to shield components from magnetic fields.

--