Slashdot Mirror

I have no experience in this field but instead of asking her to blink her eyes, I'd ask her to move something that's easiest for her, in response to questions. Observe carefully. Maybe it's easier for her to wiggle her toe.

Here's an interesting article: http://www.bbc.com/news/health-20268044

Here are some European experts: http://www.coma.ulg.ac.be/

Good luck, and don't disconnect just yet...

And please post a follow up in a while.

I was under the impression that the manufacturing processes to make the power plant / batteries for *POPULAR BRAND OF HYBRID VEHICLE* released the equivalent quantity of CO2 into the atmosphere as would be saved by the reduced CO2 released by the hybrid drive over it's serviceable life.

That's neo-con disinformation, operating at several levels, that is being distributed by marketing organizations like CNW. Not only is it factually incorrect, it also implies CO2 is the most significant car exhaust pollution issue, which it certainly isn't, and ignores the fact that auto batteries are recycled (in the USA) at a rate exceeding 95%.

There's also the issue of "service life". We all heard the stories of how buying a new Prius battery would cost more than the car, and we'd have to do it every three years - yet I have 130,000+ miles on my ten year old battery pack and it has had zero maintenance and zero problems. Other people have gone 300,000 miles with no issues. Good quality electric motors, such as the traction motors in Japanese hybrids, have a 40 year service life before rebuilding - and if the bearings are replaced at the first sign of heat or noise brushless motors can last over a hundred years. I have an 80 year old electric fan in my house (it has hand-wound coils and hand-cut steel gears in the oscillating mechanism) and it works better than modern plastic chinese-made fans - pushes more air and uses less energy, because it's extremely well made. Service life estimates based on worst-case fantasies of hybrid haters are clearly not realistic.

The net being a loss to society, as the process for making the batteries released toxic elements not used in making regular combustion engine cars.

Again, this is factually incorrect. Even if you accept the ridiculous definitions of pollution and service life, it's still just plain not true, and has been repeatedly debunked in peer-reviewed literature and in journals. Of course the Wall Street Journal and Fox News will keep repeating absurd anti-environment propaganda forever, but those are not reality-based news sources.

THIS.

Modern-day Firefox is _WAY_ better then ancient Netscape which would segfault at fricken everything. The way it parsed and rendered HTML was laughable at best, you could actually animate loading a page by using multiple TITLE and BODY tags. You could even interleave them so they would animate at the same time, have a look at the source for this page:

http://www.montefiore.ulg.ac.be/~quinet/web/netscape-en.html

At a certain point, just refactoring the codebase isn't going to be feasible. Also, you might not like KDE4 for the UI but they made the framework a lot better. For instance, they introduced a better abstraction layer for audio and optimised the graphics library so more can be drawn in less time. Though for the past 6 years I can probably count the number of times I've used KDE on one hand.

Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself.

The graph was prepared by Robert A. Rohde, as the page clearly states; the dozen data sources used are fully referenced, and the criteria for their selection are stated. I'm not sure how that makes it intrinsically less reliable than Willis Eschenbach's personal interpretation of some speleothem data, but let's continue nevertheless.

Rather than trusting a political organization or whoever wrote that in Wikipedia, I prefer to look at the data myself. A zip file containing speleotherm data has thoughtfully been provided here:

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/05/26/in-which-i-go-spelunking/ [wattsupwiththat.com]

When I click the link to the zip file I get a 403 Forbidden. Never mind, let's pass to Eschenbach's graph, since in any case you don't mention what conclusions you yourself drew from looking at the data. As you say, the graph does look very convincing, because Eschenbach has directly equated delta18O values with temperature -- not done in the Nature paper he cites, for the simple reason that delta18O is not solely dependent on temperature (if it were, palaeoclimatology would be a lot easier).

Entertainingly, the very source that Eschenbach links to in support of his conversion factor states clearly: "Because [delta]18O may be modified by temporal changes in the oceanic moisture source and/or storm track trajectories, it is not possible to calculate temperature changes precisely (15). On the basis of present-day spatial [delta]18O-temperature relations, the magnitude of [delta]18O variability around the mean is probably too large to ascribe to changes in air temperature alone." (my emphasis)

So, 200-odd words into Eschenbach's "investigation", his entire methodology has been invalidated by one of his own references. This, presumably, is why he chose to publish his work on "wattsupwiththat" rather than in a scientific journal.

You can check our dedicated webpage.

It features downloadable binaries for windows and linux (thanks to wine).

http://orbi.ulg.ac.be/bitstream/2268/12087/1/Barnich2009ViBe.pdf There is the paper in question. I despise the fact that I still have to pay for papers in IEEE silos when I am in fact a member.
Yeah I could upgrade my subscription, but bah.

RANT.YML
rant:
information should be free

3) I don't allow any web based content to be a primary resource (stand alone), nor am I interested in seeing papers based on encyclopedias (only) either.

I agree with your other problems, but depending on your field, this one may be a bit short-sighted. In my field I would certainly accept a site like this papyrology database or the only existing translation of a 10th-century encyclopaedia to be a primary source, even though they're standalone. Of course it's always easy to find exceptions :-)

But obviously Wikipedia isn't a primary source, or even secondary: it's a tertiary source, as Halavais correctly points out in this transcript of an online chat with him, which strangely TFA doesn't link to (I find it much more informative than TFA itself).

I just wrote a Hidden Markov Model using the Viterbi Algorithm and did it from scratch in Java using WordNet and this page [wikipedia.org].

You could of saved yourself some time by just googling for the source code.

The depth of mercury used in LMTs is usually 0.5-1mm (reference), so it's more like 50-100 tonnes.

As others have pointed out below, mercury doesn't work anyway, and the liquids they're looking at are much lighter. Of course, if you're not using mercury, you need to find a way of aluminizing the surface of the liquid, so you still need to get some metal up there. But aluminum is light, and you only need a thickness of about 0.1 microns.

[TMB]

Obviously, a remedial class in Holocaust history is in order. Look carefully at these absolutely horrifying, chilling pictures of mass executions and torture. You are comparing Bush to this, this, and this? All innocent victims, mind you. In the photos from the first link, you see pictures of human medical experiments involving freezing, surgeries, and head-shrinking. Bush is against stem cell research, for crying out loud!

Please read up on Adolph Hitler so you don't embarrass yourself in public again. Hitler's Nazi party is responsible for the deaths of 11 million innocent people. There's simply no legitimate comparison to Bush in any respect whatsoever. Everything about the two men is different: politics, principles, priorities, religion, worldview, philosophies, leadership style, attitude, demeanor, relationships, sociability, values, likes, dislikes, etc, etc, etc.

The closest modern-day comparison to Hitler is probably Saddam Hussein. Arafat would take the title, except that he doesn't have much power anymore.

Obviously, a remedial class in Holocaust history is in order. Look carefully at these absolutely horrifying, chilling pictures of mass executions and torture. You are comparing Bush to this, this, and this? All innocent victims, mind you. In the photos from the first link, you see pictures of human medical experiments involving freezing, surgeries, and head-shrinking. Bush is against stem cell research, for crying out loud!

Please read up on Adolph Hitler so you don't embarrass yourself in public again. Hitler's Nazi party is responsible for the deaths of 11 million innocent people. There's simply no legitimate comparison to Bush in any respect whatsoever. Everything about the two men is different: politics, principles, priorities, religion, worldview, philosophies, leadership style, attitude, demeanor, relationships, sociability, values, likes, dislikes, etc, etc, etc.

The closest modern-day comparison to Hitler is probably Saddam Hussein. Arafat would take the title, except that he doesn't have much power anymore.

Obviously, a remedial class in Holocaust history is in order. Look carefully at these absolutely horrifying, chilling pictures of mass executions and torture. You are comparing Bush to this, this, and this? All innocent victims, mind you. In the photos from the first link, you see pictures of human medical experiments involving freezing, surgeries, and head-shrinking. Bush is against stem cell research, for crying out loud!

Please read up on Adolph Hitler so you don't embarrass yourself in public again. Hitler's Nazi party is responsible for the deaths of 11 million innocent people. There's simply no legitimate comparison to Bush in any respect whatsoever. Everything about the two men is different: politics, principles, priorities, religion, worldview, philosophies, leadership style, attitude, demeanor, relationships, sociability, values, likes, dislikes, etc, etc, etc.

The closest modern-day comparison to Hitler is probably Saddam Hussein. Arafat would take the title, except that he doesn't have much power anymore.

In fact, when talking about turntables, get an old turntable, and a biggish pizza pan. Fill it up with mercury (or engine oil, if mercury is hard to find), set the turntable to turn. Above the turntable at some distance, depending on the radial velocity, but as CCD (or your webcam, if you haven't got a CCD). This will give you a quite nice and big telescope, and if you've got a good CCD, you can go quite deep.

Let me know if you see something interesting! :-)

Well, building a largish dedicated telescope is one thing, but I would rather start researching a possibility that would be much more useful, namely building a network of Liquid Mirror Telescopes. A liquid mirror telescope has a mirror of mercury that is rotating, forming a near-perfect paraboloid as it rotates. Obviously, you can't tilt the telescope, so you can't track objects like conventional telescopes, and you can't look wherever you like, you can only look straight up. The field is also pretty small, but if you put a lot of LMTs on different longitudes and latitudes, you will be able to scan most of the sky. And since LMTs come at the prize of 1/100 of the cost of a similar size of a conventional telescope, you can build a lot of them. So, say we start mass manufacturing (several hundred) 8 meter LMTs and place them all over the place.

This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.

There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well... :-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.

This should be done by international agreements, and the data should be put in public domain. It would not only be useful in looking for NEOs, but all kinds of monitoring projects, e.g. Gravitional Lens monitoring (which is my research area), Gamma Ray Burst follow-ups, the list is long. Of course, short exposure times is a problem with LMTs too (90 secs), but that can be fixed by combining nights.

There are substancial technical problems connected with a global network of LMTs, first, we don't know how the mercury will behave (turbulence in the atmosphere is a problem, now you might get turbulence in the mirror as well... :-) And, you won't see adaptive optics like you see on e.g. VLT on an LMT). Another problem is the huge amount of data produced, and how to treat it and give every potential user access to it. These are problems that must be overcome, but I believe that it should be possible to do, and definitively more worthwhile than building dedicated instruments for NEO search.

There is currently an international collaboration to construct a 4m-class liquid mirror telescope. Interesting idea based on a simple principle of fluid mechanics. There have even been mutterings about placing a larger version on the moon. The main problem with LMT's is the limited directionality they have. They do seem to be okay for survey work, though.

Attention all faithful Slashdot viewers! It seems that somewhere in the U.S. today, some dude did something bad that you should all be really mad at. We must make sure that these dudes stop doing bad stuff so we can be happy. It would be a real travesty to see backwater America (read: Everywhere inbetween L.A. and New York) lost to the rednecks, ignorants, simpletons and retards! So write to all your congressmen and tell them to make sure doesn't happen!
Over and out.

Attention all faithful Slashdot viewers! It seems that somewhere in the U.S. today, some dude did something bad that you should all be really mad at. We must make sure that these dudes stop doing bad stuff so we can be happy. It would be a real travesty to see backwater America (read: Everywhere inbetween L.A. and New York) lost to the rednecks, ignorants, simpletons and retards! So write to all your congressmen and tell them to make sure doesn't happen!
Over and out.

Attention all faithful Slashdot viewers! It seems that somewhere in the U.S. today, some dude did something bad that you should all be really mad at. We must make sure that these dudes stop doing bad stuff so we can be happy. It would be a real travesty to see backwater America (read: Everywhere inbetween L.A. and New York) lost to the rednecks, ignorants, simpletons and retards! So write to all your congressmen and tell them to make sure doesn't happen!
Over and out.