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The problem is that car accidents are in general vastly under-reported by the media. Until the last couple years, the single most dangerous thing you did was to get into a car (surpassed only recently by drug overdoses). On average, about 1 in 102 people you know are fated to die in a car accident. Compare to the odds of some of the other things the media devotes a disproportionately high (or low) amount of coverage time:

Suicide: 1 in 91
Police killed on duty: 1 in 104 (1.1 million officers / (135 per year * 78 year lifespan normalization)
Homicide by gun: 1 in 285
Drowning: 1 in 1,086
Fire: 1 in 1,506
Choking: 1 in 3,138
Killed by police: 1 in 4,336 (325.7 million / (963 * 78 year lifespan)
Complications from pregnancy: 1 in 5,965 (325.7 million / (700 * 78 year normalization)
Terrorism in U.S.: 1 in 28,033 (325.7 million / (3277 * 78 year lifespan / 22 years sample))
Killed by deer: 1 in 34,797 (325.7 million / (120 * 78 year lifespan)
Gun accident: 1 in 8305
Lightning: 1 in 114,195
School shootings: 1 in 121,033 (325.7 million / (138 * 78 year lifespan normalization / 4 years sample))
Dog attack: 1 in 132,614
Plane crash: 1 in 205,552
Terrorism in U.S. excluding 9/11: 1 in 248,954
Shark attack: 1 in 3,690,101 (325.7 million / (43 * 78 year lifespan / 38 year sample)

If news reports were truly unbiased, you'd expect to see:

Roughly 3x as many reports about fatal car accidents than gun homicides.
5x as many reports of women dying from pregnancy than reports of terrorism fatalities (including 9/11, 77x without).
39x as many stories about people dying of choking on food, versus school shootings.
43x as many stories about fatal car accidents than police shootings.
91x as many reports about suicides than gun accidents.
Over 100x as many stories about people being killed by deer, than killed by sharks.

The truth is the media picks and chooses which stories they want to publicize, whether it be because of their unusual and provocative nature (e.g. Tesla crashes, plane crashes, school shootings, shark attacks), or to serve a political agenda.

I know of a man that would probably help you. He taught me calculus back in the 1980s. He wrote the book on Calculus along with another Prof in 1982. Much to my surprise, he's still around. Hell of a nice guy. Professor Gulick. His book I found to be well written. I think I still have his book and answer key around here someplace. Looks like he probably doesn't teach anymore. He has a secondary education mathematics scholarship that the University awards. The scholarship aims to support promising students in their pursuit of teaching mathematics in secondary school. Sounding like someone that would help? I think so. Worth a try if you want. I remember he was no nonsense with students. Very no nonsense. If someone pulled a fire alarm on a test day, we'd have the test in the parking lot. Even if it was raining. Not hard, we were getting wet though. He told us, this is the test day and we will have our test that day. We always did. He had office hours and you could actually talk to him, which was unusual. Most profs we had to talk to a TA, usually foreign born and hard to understand. Good luck and I hope you write a great book.

http://www.math.umd.edu/~dguli...

Well,
I bought my Archimedes from them ... or was the company still simply called Acorn then?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://www.cs.umd.edu/~meesh/...

Bees consume pollen from Bt corn. It seems to not affect them in the slightest, in terms of survival, weight, and colony performance. Study notes there are many fiddly-bits we could look into to determine if Bt-fed bees are identifiably-distinct from non-Bt-fed bees.

They fed these bees using pollen cakes wholly made of Bt corn pollen, so they have maximized the diet. The only bees with a distinct statistical outcome are those fed Imidacloprid (flea killer).

Do planetologists use the term "geology" when they're talking about another planet?

Technically, no, the proper term for the study of Mars planetary formation, mineral chemistry etc is areology.

It etymologically ought to be areology, but it turns out that having a different word for the geology of each planet was too cumbersome, so they are all lumped together as "Planetary geology."

  https://scienceandtechnology.jpl.nasa.gov/research/research-topics-list/planetary-sciences/planetary-geology-and-geophysics

  http://planetary-science.org/planetary-science-3/planetary-geology/

and geologists routinely use the term "Martian geology" and "geology of Mars"

  https://mars.nasa.gov/programmissions/science/goal3/

  http://planetary-science.org/mars-research/surface-geology-of-mars/

  https://www.exploratorium.edu/video/martian-geology-101

  https://www.geol.umd.edu/~jmerck/geol212/lectures/01.html

The Tomasulo scheduler?

https://www.cs.umd.edu/class/f...

the group espouses peaceful demonstrations.

"what do we want, dead cops. when do we want it, now". Would they be peaceful if the cops didn't enforce the peace and allowed anti-BLM protestors that are known to be violent to clash with them?

Few questions
Why stop at 9/11? What about the 90's, 80's and 70's? I am sorry but looking at a small piece of data to skew it to what you want to be is disingenuous considering the 6 year calm after 9/11. http://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/...

That only runs to 2010 but it very much puts into context what you are claiming. Or "Only 6% of
  groups that have attacked the United States are focused on a religious ideology". But from what I can tell, leftist ideology is popular among terrorists.

What is the point in only having a partial view of data?

Are you more concerned about a lone wolf or a group?

The number one ideology of terrorist attackers in the United States has been Environmentalism - the Animal Liberation Front and the Earth Liberation Front have performed hundreds of attacks, killing dozens, just by themselves.
45% of all US terrorist groups are Extreme Left Wing, while just 20% are Extreme Right Wing - and that's just political affiliation.
There's also the Puerto Rico separatist movements that performed a few dozen attacks, killing more than 20 people.

Puerto Rico Revolution, Symbionese Liberation Army, Animal Liberation Front, Omega-7, May 19th Communists... the list of left-wing groups goes on and on.

Source: US Government

The proposal to ban laptops from the cabins of planes appears to be attempting to take advantage of the following logical fallacies and cognitive biases:

• * Zero-risk bias: Prefer to reduce a small risk to zero, over a greater reduction of a larger risk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
• * Nirvana/Perfection fallacy: Prefer to abandon functional good for unachievable perfection. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
• * Identifiable victim effect: We respond more strongly to a single identified victim, than a faceless group of victims. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Remember that time they said they needed porno scanners? It turned out that the porno scanners didn't work. https://radsec.org/secure1000-... And, DHS upper management (Chertoff http://www.motherjones.com/moj... ) got rich off the sale of the porno scanners. This shows that we should not blindly accept TSA/DHS proposals.

The TSA success rate at finding known weapons and explosives is 5%. IE, they only find 1 out of 20: https://www.theguardian.com/co... This means that the laptop change will not actually make a difference to the real risk.

If they are worried that a well funded group will make explosives that look like a laptop, why would they only do laptops? Why wouldn't an attacker make explosives that look like a suitcase? A CPAP? A baby stroller? Why can't an attacker disguise explosives as a big enough item that it doesn't make any difference where it is on a plane? If they can't find an explosive shaped like a laptop, they are not going to find an explosive shaped like other things. Are they going to ban all carry-ons and checked items?

On the face, It seems looke like they have decided to increase their security theater.

While we wait for the TSA's analysis, lets review a few facts. Here are some reference pages on various types of death in the US:

• * https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...
• * http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Image...
• * https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs...
• * https://www.theguardian.com/us...

So, your chance of dying of various things in the US is:

• * US Citizen killed by terrorists from 2005 through 2014: (about 1 in 240K deaths.)
• * Killed by lightning in the US: (about 1 in 160K.) For every terrorism death, there are about 1 and 1/2 deaths by lightning.
• * Dying in a plane crash: (about 1 in 10,000) For every terrorism death, there are about 25 deaths by plane crashes
• * Being killed by police in the US: (about 1 in 2300) For every terrorism death, there are about 105 deaths by police
• * Drowning in the US: (about 1 in 1200) For every terrorism death, there are about 200 deaths by drowning.
• * Dying in a motor vehicle accident: (about 1 in 100.) For every terrorism death, there are about 2,200 deaths by motor vehicle accidents
• * Heart disease & cancer in the US: (about 1 in 7 deaths.) For every terrorism death, there are 35,000 deaths by heart disease and cancer.

There hasn't been a big increase in deaths by terrorism. Or laptop. Why aren't we banning laptops in order to protect people from lightning? It would make just as much sense.

It looks like you could show a decrease in deaths by

Here are some reference pages on various types of death in the US:

• - https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fasta...
• - http://www.nsc.org/NSC%20Image...
• - https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs...
• - https://www.theguardian.com/us...

So, your chance of dying of various things in the US is:

• - Heart disease & cancer in the US: (about 1 in 7 deaths.) For every terrorism death, there are 35,000 deaths by heart disease and cancer.
• - Dying in a motor vehicle accident: (about 1 in 100.) For every terrorism death, there are about 2,200 deaths by motor vehicle accidents
• - Drowning in the US: (about 1 in 1200) For every terrorism death, there are about 200 deaths by drowning.
• - Being killed by police in the US: (about 1 in 2300) For every terrorism death, there are about 105 deaths by police
• - Dying in a plane crash: (about 1 in 10,000) For every terrorism death, there are about 25 deaths by plane crashes
• - Killed by lightning in the US: (about 1 in 160K.) For every terrorism death, there are about 1 and 1/2 deaths by lightning.
• - US Citizen killed by terrorists from 2005 through 2014: (about 1 in 240K deaths.)

The TSA failure to find weapons and explosives rate is 95%. IE, they only find 1 out of 20: https://www.theguardian.com/co...

It looks like you could show a decrease in deaths by shutting down the TSA and spending the money on all kinds of other things. For example, you would probably save thousands of people every year, if you took the TSA's budget and used that money to give a daily carrot to everybody in America.

Of course, the future of the KID (Karrot Issuance Daily) agency is not all shiny orange. The yearly number of carroticides might even exceed the number of US people killed by terrorists. But, even factoring in the increase of death by carrot, there still would be tremendous net positive benefit.

Good shops require at least tone reviewer for each code change. This paper describes the effectiveness of code reviews based on previous studies https://www.cs.umd.edu/project...

https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs...

In the period 2004-20013 3066 Americans were killed due to terrorists, 2902 were killed in 9/11
In the period 2004 -20013 over 126,000 americans were murdered by americans.

If you remove 9/11 as a statistical outlier you have are 128 time more likely to be murdered than killed by a terrorist.If you assume half the people know their murderer you are over 60 times more likely to be killed by someone you know than by a terrorist.

Now lets compare this to deaths in Iraq
https://www.theguardian.com/ne...
"The key figures IBC found are:
14,705 (13%) of all documented civilian deaths were reported as being directly caused by the US-led coalition. The report notes that
Of the 4,040 civilian victims of US-led coalition forces for whom age data was available, 1,201 (29%) were children"


And that was just for one year, over the same 9 years it could be higher than 150,000 deaths and climbing

The USA is much less a "hero" than you are led to believe.

And you wonder why people from these countries have a strong anti-US sentiment ?
Look how much hate the US has towards muslims, yet the deaths caused by them are insignificant compared to the number of muslims killed by US led forces.

And we all know what happened to OS/2 (or I suppose I presume we all know -- I guess you could be 16 or 17 years old and not know what happened back then. When did I start getting so damned old???)

You probably know the legend of the Pea Sea. I realized that it's been longer since the end of that story than the duration of the story itself...

Stupid SJW sockpuppet mods and AC posts can die in a fire. You pieces of shit force everyone to post as AC because of your downmod shitstorms. I take comfort in knowing that soon, you will be living in concentration camps and experiencing routine electroshock therapy to correct your deviancy (at least according to you).

THE 0.3% ARE THE CURRENT NUMBERS WITH 3M MUSLIMS OUT OF 318M AMERICANS!!! So Muslims are currently 1% of the population and Muslim terrorists caused 0.3% of the murders (for reference, there are 74M children in the US, and 25 accidental deaths by toddler every year is apparently unavoidable). 0.3% seems pretty fucking high for 1% of the population (that 0.3% of all murders doesn't take into account the other murders committed by Muslims for non terrorist reasons, like honor killings, or just plain old murder). So what the fuck do you think happens when we import another who knows how many "refugees" who we know 100% have been infiltrated by ISIS? At a minimum, that number goes up. Beyond that, Islamic terrorists 0.3% murder rate is only because they have not been more successful. If you get enough who want jihad and they reach critical mass, they will probably be more successful (see France). The 0.3% is cherry picked libtard propaganda that leaves out the biggest terrorist attack in the US (that happened 16 years ago, you dishonest little fucks).

There have been 510 islamic terrorist attacks on Americans since 1995 and 3576 fatalities and close to 10,000 injured. https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs...
http://www.thereligionofpeace....

There are about 16k murders in the US per year. Over half of all murders take place in the big liberal bastion cities, coincidentally. However, using that time year period, islamic terrorists accounted for 1% of all murders. The extremely reasonable concern that citizens like myself further realize that in 2001, after years of ignoring the Islamist threat, terrorism accounted for almost 20% of all murders. Thus, if you ignore the threat of radical Islam, it can and has accounted for much more of the murders in the US than the small fraction you dishonestly cite.

You libtards are living examples of reverse Darwinism. Your capacity for stupidity is limitless and 100 years ago you wouldn't have lived to adulthood, let alone reproduced. You would have been murdered by the first truly dangerous thing that you came across, and the rest of us would have been better off for it.

Thats the wrong question. The better question is: How much harm has the apparatus done to our freedoms and economy? Europe will no longer trust its data in our hands, and much of the world becomes more adversarial. Is nothing sacred anymore? I shutter to think of the day our thoughts can be digitized, stored, analyzed, and archived.

As for the "intelligence apparatus" and its usefulness... Please. To do what? Protect human life? Congress could save more human beings THIS WEEK in the US by banning tobacco and classifying nicotine a narcotic.

Deaths due to terrorism since 1995 in the US: 3,264 (source)
Deaths due to second hand smoke this week: 9,100 or 1,300 deaths every day (source)

I should mention that although smoking kills 10,000 people a week, I don't support banning it, since that would require taking away our liberties and freedoms. But so does government surveillance, and I would ban that. Its too expensive, doesn't protect all that much life, and tramples on our ideology.

Citation

Total fatalities due to terrorism in the USA (1995-2014): 3264

Total fatalities due to gun violence (2001-2013): 406,496 (source CDC)
Total fatalities due to automobiles (2001-2013): 501,462

So we really need to ban cars and guns?!

Of course it's a proof.

Not so fast. There are several mathematicians that don't necessarily agree with that statement. At least not in its strongest form. (We'll ignore the editor basing their argument on the wrong thing, of course being "satisfying" to a human has little bearing on the "proofness" of a mathematical argument).

In fact, whether computer generated proofs that are too large to check by human mathematicians are really proofs at all is a question that's alive (if not exactly well) in the mathematical community, and you'll find many mathematicians who will sneer at it. This based on the realisation that many so called proofs are wrong. The history of computer generated proofs and verifications in particular being littered with incorrect results (often due to a validation problem, rather than a verification problem, but the latter, due to bugs in the verifier are not unheard of). Hence, the need for some form of human verification. They don't call it "the social process of mathematics" for nothing. Like Jim Horning said: "A Proof is a repeatable experiment in persuasion." Now, if you need another computer to verify the first, you soon end up with a "it's computers all the way down-silly"-type of argument, that doesn't make more pure mathematicians feel exactly warm and fuzzy all over. (Us computer scientist we shrug and get on with it, but that's a different story.)

The essence of the problem is that when a government and media incite fear and paranoia in an undereducated society, and when the true prevalence of threats is already very low, all this does is magnify (in dramatic fashion) the incidence of false positives. And the government knows this, and exploits this, because they are able to leverage that fear to accumulate ever more draconian powers, until the government becomes a police state.

Exactly this. How many people have been victims of terrorist attacks in the US in the past 10 years? A quick check shows that there were 57 fatalities due to terrorism in the US from 2005 - 2014. (Source) Fifty seven in ten years. Even if we go from 1995 to 2014 (including the 9-11 attacks), there were 3,264. Since that's over 20 years, that means there's an average of about 163 fatalities in the US every year due to terrorism. And that's including 9-11 which was clearly an outlier.

At 163 a year, "occupant of special agricultural vehicle" results in more deaths than terrorism.

I saw on the news the other day, that students were saying they had been traumatized by someone writing in chalk "Trump 2016". I mean, I'm no Trump supporter, but seriously, traumatized?

Others have pointed out that the report was utterly false.

Still, look at how well the lie plays among self-righteous bigots with a persecution complex. And yet we still allow Trump and his ilk to spew this shit, because free speech. Astonishing, isn't it, how people will allow people such as yourself to fill yourself with ill-informed tripe, and yet you're the ones who are persecuted?

If you aren't for the latest gay agenda...

Respectfully: What The Fuck is a 'gay agenda'? Equal rights? Enjoying the same rights as everyone else everywhere?

or if you raise the concern that a certain group does seem to have most of the terrorist problem coming from their ranks....

Just say it, for fuck sake: MUSLIMS. You mean those dirty, rag-headed, gutteral, snarly, infidels who chop people's heads off and want to impose Shariah law on you and your loved ones? That's who you mean, right, when you spew mealy-mouthed phrases like 'certain groups'? How fucking precious.

And how fucking wrong. In the United States, Muslims terrorists are not more numerous than others. Historically, levels of terrorism in the US and Europe are down, not up.

well, you just cannot speak about that without repercussions. It isn't even just being shunned, but you are actively suppressed these days.

Goddamn right, you're being suppressed. If by 'suppressed' you mean 'told to shut your fucking yap until you derive at least the slightest clue about the subject you keep ranting about'.

Look at how many comedians these days, won't do shows on college campuses anymore....

Okay, that one is a fair cop. People on both sides of the political spectrum are way touchier than they've a right to be.

That said, I would treat them to the same derision I'm showing you if they failed to adhere to the facts and basic logic.

Theres major concern that any dissenting speech is being supressed, if it goes even remotely against the new social agenda.

For as long as the 'new social agenda' constitutes actually caring about the truth, and upholding basic human rights and equality under the law... then Fucking A Right, nothing deserves—even remotely—to go against the new social agenda.

... and for as long as the 'new social agenda' is a bunch of gluten-free, artisanal hipster snowflakes busy enabling and affirming themselves while old Brooklyn cries in shame, then they can go get fucked too.

Even what used to be common sense has no place in the public square these days.

Bigotry used to be common sense for far too long and for far too many people. It deserves to die a death, and those people who perpetuate it deserve to be told to shut their cake-holes.

Look, I get how you feel, but dude, seriously, your views are not just wrong, they're hurtful and harmful. Not to people's precious feelings—to their lives. When you oppose the 'latest gay agenda', you're sentencing some very good friends of mine to not being able to hold a loved one's hand in the hospital. You're saying that someone who devoted their life to caring and tending for a home shoul

Since 9/11, American deaths by terror have averaged about 12 per year worldwide. That puts terrorism right up there with lightning strikes.

Even if there were a 9/11 class attack in the US every year, it wouldn't hold a candle to drunk driving deaths. -- but drunk driving deaths don't make the news because they're so common. It's the fallacy of the news cycle -- to be national news it has to be rare. More common threats of tragic death don't make the news because they've become so blase.

If we're going to have our civil rights watered down, it should, at the very least, be because of a real threat. The courts should be asked to set aside the news reports and demand that the FBI quantify the reality of the threat compared to normal everyday issues. If apple is forced to create this app, the app and it's ilk are going to creep into everyday use by law enforcement and other entities -- here, Russia, China, Iran, Syria and pretty much every dictatorship you can think of.

Would you consider it justified to force Apple to create this app and set this precedent to investigate a drunk driver?? Even though a drunk driver is far more of a threat to you and your family? It's time to put this whole terrorism hysteria into proper perspective. We shouldn't continue to allow it to be used to nibble away at our freedoms until there is nothing left -- especially for a 'threat' that is more of a PR issue than a statistical reality.

Drunk drivers kill about 10,000/year (200/year of that kids).
The Tobacco industry kills almost half a million people a year -- and that's for profit. Eve second hand smoke kills about 40,000 people per year. ... That's more per month than died in 9/11 -- and you can argue that those 40,000 are innocent lives. They never made a choice to smoke. Many of them made a conscious decision to avoid smoking.
about 50,000/year die from concussion related injuries.

Even if you include 9/11, over the 20 years from 1995 to 2014 terrorism only accounts for 175 deaths per year. That's not even a BLIP compared to gun deaths. I'll bet you can find more Americans killed per year by NRA members involved in mass shootings (too esoteric to be able to find stats on that one) than you have terror deaths including 9/11.

My point is that the courts should be asked to ignore the media hype, and decide this issue based on the REAL, factual threat that terrorism poses to the average American (roughly none ) when deciding how important it is for Apple to break protection of every I-Phone in America.

The FBI accuses Apple of playing the PR game. Apple should turn that gun on the FBI and ask them to prove the actual threat that they claim to be mitigating. -- ignoring the Media hype over 'Terrorism'.

After the ubiquitous laser warning sign we also need a sign like "do not touch the hologram with the remaining arm" !

The question is: what makes you superior in being able to prepare your child for their future life?

That's your question, not mine. As a person who has goe through the public school system, as well as a person who's son has gone through the public school system, I've seen that it is so royally fucked up and has been for a long time, and is only getting worse.

Which makes your "question" silly. Because I can ask the same question of the public schooll system, and it fails miserably. That bar is terribly terribly low.

As a side note in terms of preparing people for life, having a major altercation with an authority figure in itself can be a good life learning.

Kewl! It is the logic that kids should be allowed to get addicted to crystal meth because that teaches them that there are some bad drugs out there, and will do them some good. And furthermore, that getting sent to jail, maybe becoming bubba's favorite anal insertion target, is teaching them a valuable lifes lesson.

The world is an absolute shithouse place full of idiots and sometimes idiots in power. Isolating people from these realities is not necessarily the answer, and I say that as someone who got suspended for defending myself at school.

Who is isolating? This is avoidance of that shithouse world, at least until the little one will need to commit an actual crime to be arrested for it. What good is knowing that there are assholes out there when you have a felony on your police blotter, and can't even be a full citizen.

That taught me a very valuable lesson about authority figures and who can be trusted to do what's "right".

I had my share of stupid problems myself. Fortunately, it was during an age when a kid might get expelled for three days instead of a night in lockup. Its odd, I look at this system as abusing children, and you seem to take joy in turning children into criminals so they'll know something about life. Maybe we need to start charging babies with criminal offenses when they make a mess in their diapers. Teach them important life lessons, you know. Here's what you apparently approve of - as far as I can tell, because I would want my children to avoid this, and you want them to experience this:

http://ccjs.umd.edu/sites/ccjs...

Be my guest. I'll pass on that.

You should look into MOND.

"Dark matter" as an effect is very well established. It is a sign of a failure in our models of physics. That failure could be in the microphysics (thus, various particle models, such as WIMPs), or in the macrophysics (i.e., in general relativity, the model for gravity, which is modified by theories such as MOND).

Now, as it happens, these sorts of galaxy cluster collision observations are probably the strongest test of MOND type theories - it is hard to see how a failure of gravity would get separated from the matter causing the gravity. MOND is not yet firmly ruled out, but it does look a lot less plausible.

The real issue with that question is that it's impossible to answer. Even if you get a "spaces" person, try to get them to agree on the number of spaces. A coworker loves 2 spaces which is flat out wrong to me. Too hard to read. I've met people into 3 or 4 spaces.

This study looked at 0, 2, 4, and 6 spaces, and concluded "From our results, we suggest that the optimal level of indentation is 2--4 spaces." Surely a study could be done to determine if there is any significant difference between 2, 3, and 4 spaces.

I'm a tabs man myself largely because they allow developers to display the indentation at their preferred level. For that matter, the IDE should be able to display braces and spaces according to the user's preferences for viewing and editing, automatically converting to and from a canonical form for source control.

Routine solar wind experiments don't look for Nitrogen, but there is plenty of it there. The data linked below isn't adjusted for sensitivity differences. The solar wind composition, high speed streams especially, is expected to be essentially the same as that of the source nebula for our system. The nebula came from an exploding star which makes our sun second (or later?) generation, resulting in added heavy elements.

http://umtof.umd.edu/pub/full_...

The Genesis mission collected samples from the solar wind to return to Earth for more precise analysis. Not all made it, but in spite of a crash landing in Utah, some good science resulted.

http://genesis.lanl.gov/public...

As to it taking less fuel to get to mars then the moon... How? Just explain how that is possible.

Aerobraking. The vast majority of your spacecraft's fuel and cost is spent getting out of Earth's gravity well. If you've burnt enough fuel to get into a lunar transfer orbit, it takes just a little bit more to escape Earth entirely and go to Mars. But to *land* on the Moon, you need to spend more fuel to slow down and stop on the surface. To land on Mars, you just need a heat shield, because Mars has an atmosphere you can use to slow down.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

So that's reason #1 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.

I'm quite certain you could "throw" things from the moon to the earth. So the return trip wouldn't even take fuel. You could literally just give it a push.

Unless you can throw things at 2.4 kilometers per second, no. The Moon's gravity is less than the Earth's, but it's still serious business. You need quite a bit of fuel to take off from the Moon. You need fuel to take off from Mars too, but Mars's atmosphere has carbon dioxide: bring a little hydrogen with you (or use the local water) and a source of energy (solar panels or a reactor) and you can synthesize methane and oxygen fuel while you're there. No need to carry fuel for the trip home!

http://www.geoffreylandis.com/...

Reason #2 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.

[Mars's atmosphere] is not enough to appreciably reduce radiation to the surface.

Oh, but it is. Mars's atmosphere is thick enough to shield radiation about as well as several inches of concrete, reducing radiation exposure by a factor of 2-3. It's also further from the Sun than the Moon, which reduces solar radiation by a factor of 2. Neither of these effects are enough on their own: you're right that Mars habitats will have to be underground too. But going outside is noticeably safer.

http://www.lpi.usra.edu/lunar/...

Reason #3 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.

Mars's atmosphere doesn't provide complete radiation shielding, but it does provide complete protection from meteorites up to about 1-2 meters in diameter.

https://janus.astro.umd.edu/as...

Reason #4 why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.

And finally, the Moon has craters and lava flows and that's all. Mars has those, plus volcanoes and canyons and ice caps and wind and clouds and storms and snow and glaciers and sand dunes and landslides and groundwater and river valleys and maybe an ancient ocean and maybe, once upon a time, life. Why? Because Mars has an atmosphere.

Reason #5 -- the most important one -- why Mars's atmosphere isn't a joke.

As to why not do it on earth? That question doesn't even make sense.

It was a rhetorical point, not a serious proposal. I'm saying that if you're going to spend your whole life hiding in a sterile burrow, does it really matter that you're on another planet?

For the record, none of these ideas are my own. I'm quoting chapter and verse from "The Case for Mars" by Robert Zubrin. Zubrin's got his problems -- he's a little too casual about the radiation dangers, for instance -- but IMO it's a good starting point for any serious discussion of colonizing the solar system.

http://www.amazon.com/Case-Mar...

It's a good thing that drones are perfectly secure.
I guess they're not all bad. I wonder how much science could be done with drones?

Seeing that solar wind contains a number of elements, it might be interesting to look at the solar images, at 193 angstrom aka 19.3 nm in particular, leading up to sighting of ice crystal halos in our sky visible around the sun or moon. Maybe some atmospheric sampling can be done around that time. There are birds and apple trees with fungal issues in California. They're easily controlled in modern times, but that have been events around solar maximum of locusts. Some eat them and their a good source of iron. Is it possible they thrive when there is trace iron introduced into the atmosphere from the solar wind?

Besides hydrogen, not listed, there are heavier elements including iron, and oxygen in the solar wind. It COULD produce water. There's more than just those fast electrons and protons that get the attention. Could algae/lichen grow in the atmosphere fed by minerals from the solar wind?

http://umtof.umd.edu/pub/full_...

It's a good thing that the radio links to drones are perfectly secure. I suppose take the voltaged-tuned tuner module from an old VCR or television to make the swept-frequency part of a spectrum analyzer. It would be good to see that your drone is using a quiet frequency. Just put the down-converter in front of some receiver guts, or a software defined radio. Sweep the tuning voltage in sync with a scope horizontal scan or graph plot. Old satellite LNBs or LNCs could be modified to sample higher frequencies.

Well there were once billions of Passenger Pigeons, the meat in the matter of Pigeon Pie. But they went extinct about 100 years ago. Was it the over hunting? Was it the same fungus that made what's now Orange County California switch from vineyards to citrus crops around 1883? Was the fungus caused by dust from the Krakatoa eruption?
Or did the minerals in the solar wind cause the fungus, and the plasma driven magnetic jolts stimulate the volcanic activity?
Some claimed that there weren't high latitude notilucent clouds until Krakatoa, but other writings including some cited by Charles Hoy Fort refuted that. He looked at many off events and doubted the quick judgements of the day. People thought meteors came from volcanoes on Earth or the Moon. Failure to consider the sun as one of the sources persists to this day. He through out all sorts of ideas, some pretty silly, but his writings mention a vast number of sources. Most of those from the 19th century have been scanned and are online. There's something different about atmospheric anomalies from an area when man had nothing in the air to explain them away with. For some fun, check out the texts or audiobooks of Charles Hoyt. Although he's gotten the most modern attention (and a biased wikipedia summary) from the nutty UFO crowd, give the silly notions some slack. Skip whacky conclusions and study the data. After all, in the 1800's some were honestly looking for a planet vulcan with an orbit inside that of Mercury to explain those spots seen on the sun... Meteors and other events were recorded in credible journals, even a president saw rocks from the sky. Consider the possible role of space weather. Could comets be from condensed solar material? The outer part of the sun is similar to the nebula material our planets were made from.

Will the drones make a good replacement for Passenger Pigeons? Some might like the hunting, but they'll need to go into something other than pie. What can you build from the pieces??

https://archive.org/details/bo...

http://umtof.umd.edu/pub/isoto...

So government supporting marriage hurts marriage? Wow that is so nonsensical it's maddening.

So what's your explanation for these trends?

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

So government supporting marriage hurts marriage? Wow that is so nonsensical it's maddening.

So what's your explanation for these trends?

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

So government supporting marriage hurts marriage? Wow that is so nonsensical it's maddening.

So what's your explanation for these trends?

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

http://www.vanneman.umd.edu/so...

The hum that helps to fight crime (ENF) Electrical Network Frequency analysis

"For the last seven years, at the Metropolitan Police forensic lab in south London, audio specialists have been continuously recording the sound of mains electricity.

It is an all pervasive hum that we normally cannot hear. But boost it a little, and a metallic and not very pleasant buzz fills the air. ...

"The power is sent out over the national grid to factories, shops and of course our homes. Normally this frequency, known as the mains frequency, is about 50Hz," explains Dr Alan Cooper, a senior digital forensic practitioner at the Met Police.

Any digital recording made anywhere near an electrical power source, be it plug socket, light or pylon, will pick up this noise and it will be embedded throughout the audio.

This buzz is an annoyance for sound engineers trying to make the highest quality recordings. But for forensic experts, it has turned out to be an invaluable tool in the fight against crime.

While the frequency of the electricity supplied by the national grid is about 50Hz, if you look at it over time, you can see minute fluctuations. ...

Comparing the unique pattern of the frequencies on an audio recording with a database that has been logging these changes for 24 hours a day, 365 days a year provides a digital watermark: a date and time stamp on the recording.

Philip Harrison, from JP French Associates, another forensic audio laboratory that has been logging the hum for several years, says: "Even if [the hum] is picked up at a very low level that you cannot hear, we can extract this information."

It is a technique known as Electric Network Frequency (ENF) analysis, and it is helping forensic scientists to separate genuine, unedited recordings from those that have been tampered with."

- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...
- http://cryptogon.com/?p=32789

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Met lab claims 'biggest breakthrough since Watergate'
Power lines act as police informers

- http://www.theregister.co.uk/2...

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Noisy, muffled, incoherent recordings are an audio engineerâ(TM)s worst nightmare, but all too often they contain vital evidence in criminal trials. Itâ(TM)s the job of the forensic audio specialist to extract that evidence.

- http://www.soundonsound.com/so...

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(discussion forum) Electrical network frequency analysis, Mains frequency variations detectable in digital audio recordings?

- http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/f...

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Met Police use electrical 'hum' to solve crimes

The Metropolitan Police is using the "hum" of background noise produced by mains electricity to help solve crimes, it has been disclosed.

- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...

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Related Research
- http://www.ece.umd.edu/~ravig/...

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Engineers Use Electrical Hum To Fight Crime

- http://science.slashdot.org/st...

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Howâ(TM)s the 60Hz coming from your wall?

- http://hackaday.com/2012/07/24...

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Detecting Edited Audio

- https://www.schneier.com/blog/...

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Dating Recordings by Power Line Fluctuations

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We've determined equilibrium temperatures in a simple example, so let's solve a more general example.

Jane's concerned that the enclosing plate is bigger than the heated plate. But Earth's mean radius is 6371 km, and the effective radiating level is ~7 km higher, so these surface areas are only ~0.2% different. Of course, in a thought experiment this difference can be made arbitrarily smaller. Despite Jane's protests, this doesn't change the fact that enclosing the heated plate makes it warmer.

More importantly, I treated the plates as blackbodies where absorptivity alpha = 1 and emissivity epsilon = 1. This is a reasonable approximation for plates made of carbon nanotube arrays (PDF) which have alpha = ~0.99955. But more conventional plates have alpha and epsilon considerably less than 1.

The next step is to treat the plates as graybodies where absorptivity and emissivity are independent of wavelength, so they appear gray. Kirchoff's Law states that absorptivity = emissivity for graybodies.

MIT calculates heat transfer between graybody plates using an infinite sum of emission, reflection and absorption. Using my variable names, their final expression is:

net heat flow = sigma*(T_h^4 - T_c^4)/(1/epsilon_h + 1/epsilon_c - 1) (Eq. 2)

(Again, Eq. 2 looks better in LaTeX, but hopefully this version is legible.)

At equilibrium, net heat flow equals the electrical input. Note that MIT's Eq. 2 reduces to my Eq. 1 for blackbodies where epsilon_h = epsilon_c = 1.

Suppose the plates and chamber walls are made of oxidized aluminum with emissivity = 0.11. In this case, Sage solves Eq. 2 for a constant electric input of 29.6 W/m^2, which is lower than before because aluminum doesn't radiate as well as a blackbody.

Using Eq. 2 and the same reasoning as before, fully enclosing the heated plate warms it to the same equilibrium temperature of 235F (386K). Fully exposing the plate to the cosmic microwave background radiation cools it to 13F (263K), which is lower than before because the CMBR is a blackbody and aluminum chamber walls aren't.

So even for graybody plates, MIT's mainstream physics refutes Dr. Latour's nonsensical claim that the enclosed heated plate remains at 150F. They also use this equation to explain how thermos bottles insulate drinks, and describe the same radiation shields used since at least

Wow, you cite a bunch of theory and numeric papers, and label them as "demonstrated". You could at least find an experimental paper, e.g. demonstrating some of the effects in 2008 by experiment... oh, but that is the same group as here. To be fair though, experimental work goes back to the mid 90s, and this group has been involved in that work for 15 years now. There has been considerable improvement in the work since the original theory predictions and early experiment work in the 90s, where now using multiple lasers has given a lot more flexibility and control over propagation.

Here's a link to the press release from UMD with some links to the professor's web site.

http://cmns.umd.edu/news-events/features/2356

Fixing the no-hot-link issue. This is the device.

Rosetta has the Osiris CCD camera onboard, which can take 4 megapixel images (2k x 2k). Unfortunately, the data transfer speed is at best 1K/second, which is going back to the days of 14K modems. Since it's been a decade between the time that the satellite was launched in 2004, and the present day, huge advances in image compression size have taken place. So the researchers will want to upgrade all the compression algorithms. Think how much web browsers have improved in a decade.

http://pdssbn.astro.umd.edu/ho...

This. He's not the only one though.. People like V. S. Subrahmanian looking at Computational Analysis of Terrorist Groups are only going to go deeper into this field, and it's only a matter of time before they apply this work to us. We're well on our way to a whole second foundation of them. (I leave it to the reader to draw parallels between various world governments and the old galactic empire, because it'll be different governments depending on your viewpoint.)

This. He's not the only one though.. People like V. S. Subrahmanian looking at Computational Analysis of Terrorist Groups are only going to go deeper into this field, and it's only a matter of time before they apply this work to us. We're well on our way to a whole second foundation of them. (I leave it to the reader to draw parallels between various world governments and the old galactic empire, because it'll be different governments depending on your viewpoint.)

"The foam strike was not observed live. Only after the shuttle was orbiting Earth did NASA's launch imagery review reveal that the wing had been hit. Foam strikes during launch were not uncommon events, and shuttle program managers elected not to take on-orbit images of Columbia to visually assess any potential damage. Instead, NASA's Debris Assessment Team mathematically modeled the foam strike but could not reach any definitive conclusions about the state of the shuttle's wing. The mission continued"

NASA management choose to ignore reports of a foam strike, as they ignored previous problems with the O-Rings ..

'NASA engineer, Rodney Rocha .. said he tried at least half a dozen times to get the space agency to make the requests. There were two similar efforts by other engineers. All were turned aside. Mr. Rocha (pronounced ROE-cha) said a manager told him that he refused to be a "Chicken Little." The Columbia's flight director, LeRoy Cain, wrote a curt e-mail message that concluded, "I consider it to be a dead issue"`

very old neutron stars are basically just lumps of cold very old neutrons.

Probably more accurate to say 'will be' rather than 'are'. I don't think the Universe is anywhere near old enough to have cold neutron stars.

A few interesting points about neutron stars here.

for someone that says they used to teach about the subject.

here's why you can know I am not making up my credentials...I really have done the work I claim

there are volumes of research that have already been done about *buttons* however you want to define the concept

also, why research *where* to put a button with that funciton? you should **let the user have the option** to have the button or where to locate it! as for where to put the button by default, by necessity it has to be on the edge somewhere, after that, since almost all languages read from right to left, virtually all users (except those that read hebrew as their primary language) would **expect** to see the 'start' button on the **left side of the screen**

You absolutely do not need to do anything more than a **simple literature review** and apply some basic technical design theory...that's to arrive at 'either top or bottom of left edge'

so that's two fairly similar options...from there let the design team decide!!!

*and of course let the user have the option to change the location at will or remove completely*

back to your question about 'buttons'......Ben Shneiderman's work is industry-standard here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_Shneiderman

Here's a link his University page: http://www.cs.umd.edu/~ben/

I'm not claiming Shneiderman is the magic bullet to all design questions, or that his design conceptualizations are fundamental to the industry...he made significant positive contributions...but his concepts are too linguistic-based 'make X more visible' sometimes & marketing people just have their way with it...

One of Shneiderman's major contributions, starting in the early 1980s, was formalizing a way to academically analyze all the research in computing across disciplines about things like 'how to design a good button'

Designing the User Interface is a current text written by him that is used in 100s of universities nationwide & globally. (btw don't pick him apart to me...i have my quibbles...) He ends up with very linguistic-based heuristics mostly, but if you combine his ideas with more formal language from true cyberneticists like Claude Shannon and Norbert Weiner then you can get some highly quantifiable data...

But regardless...Shneiderman's concepts are industry standard...how they are applied in the lab...well that's up to the researcher!

All of what M$ did with their 'Start' button was covered by Shneiderman in the 80s & continued to refine iteritively since then...

That may cover Larry Flynt, for better or worse, but it won't cover Geoffrey Portway .

Bullshit. See the UMD policies on university ownership of faculty sponsored research products: http://www.president.umd.edu/policies/iv320anew.html

Baltimore is following the lead of Maryland which, earlier this year, became the third open law state,

WTF? Maryland law (both statutes and COMAR) has been on-line for years.

And Baltimore City code has also been on-line for a while.

Maybe this is a nicer interface or something, but pretending that putting laws on-line is some kind of breakthrough is counterfactual.

I forgot to mention the most important part -- the majority of the flight is done very low:

Power required is shown for rotor height of 60 cm (2 ft) above the ground. The 60-second duration flights will be flown as close to the ground as possible to increase ground effect advantages.

http://www.agrc.umd.edu/gamera/gamera2/gamera2-rotor-blades.html

Who watches the watchers?

Congress is supposed to watch the watchers. The voters are supposed to watch Congress.

Emphasis on "supposed to," both instances: The only thing those in Congress are watching are their account balances and poll numbers. The only thing (most) voters are watching are their televisions*.

* I haven't looked up them up, but I doubt C-SPAN's numbers are "up there." (Further, it's been my observation that even when C-SPAN is airing unfiltered, uninterrupted, and otherwise uncontaminated coverage of a high-profile government event, many (if not most) people still opt for the distorted version of events offered by CNN, Fox, MSNBC, et al.)

There's a CMS lego model too: http://www.physics.umd.edu/rgroups/hep/LegoCMS/