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Anecdotes? Whoa there, buddy, you're argument about a few people is clearly statistically significant! I guess we should discard what scientists say because it doesn't seem right to you.

Its a data point, and one shared by others. It's shared as well by universities, who are spending that money to retrain students and especially their parents

You want references? Need data? Of course in social matters what constitutes data is ephemeral but here goes:

http://counseling.uoregon.edu/...

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

http://news.fsu.edu/news/educa...

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/web/pag...

I can give you hundreds more, so label Universities as trolls and call each one irrelevant.

My anecdotes - and I can give you more - merely corroborate the larger experience. Point is, young adults come out with unrealistic expectations, have not been allowed to grow up and have trouble making their own decisions, and are prone to depression and disappointment, and their parents are the cause.

They are damaged goods, and will need a decade of trying to sort out what they should have learned since childhood. Don't blame your grandparents, and don't blame yourselves. But blame only goes so far, so ya gotta pick yourselves up and move on.

Sex without consent is rape. Period. No exceptions. University of Oregon website:

Rape is vaginal, anal and/or oral penetration without consent. Fondling is any sexual contact without consent. Consent is a free and clearly given yes, not the absence of a no, and cannot be received when a person is incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.

I shudder to think how many women you've raped.

Do you really think your father got a signed consent form from your mother before he fucked her?

And you wonder why you don't get laid...

Rape is vaginal, anal and/or oral penetration without consent. Fondling is any sexual contact without consent. Consent is a free and clearly given yes, not the absence of a no, and cannot be received when a person is incapacitated by alcohol or drugs.

I shudder to think how many women you've raped.

No it isn't: https://around.uoregon.edu/content/glaciers-melt-more-voices-research-are-needed.

In case you want to see his CV

https://honors.uoregon.edu/fac...

Here's the undergrad responsible, it seems. https://around.uoregon.edu/con...

This is the PI. I'm afraid it looks "legit". https://honors.uoregon.edu/fac...

My offer of an explanation is that we only have recently started living past that age.

Evolution's only driver for maximum age is how long it takes you to have kids and get them old enough to live without needing you anymore. Accordingly, modern technology (like sanitation) has allowed us to roughly double that max age and there is no reason to assume that it will stop there.

Well, the actual Nasa article talks about changes in mass, and stars pretty constantly eject material.

And this says:

This also means the massive stars (with masses greater than 1.4 solar masses) must shed most of their mass as planetary nebula or the final contraction to a white dwarf cannot be stopped by the degenerate electrons.

So, I'm more inclined to believe there is loss of actual mass going on.

It certainly sounds like changes in mass are part of the explanation for the mechanics of this. (Not that I claim to actually understand that.)

A cosmologist's 'dark matter' (non-baryonic) is different than an astrophysicist's 'dark matter' (baryonic). To an astrophysicist, the term 'dark matter' has historically meant matter that is not lit up. It is not reflecting ar emitting light. Also it is not blocking light from some other source. There is nothing exotic or strange about it. It is just in the dark and so it cannot be seen.

There were many observations of matter within the milky way, and within other large spiral galaxies that showed the velocity and orbits of matter were not explained by the mass that could be seen. We only saw mass in the visible light for a long time. The matter had to be emitting light, reflecting light, or blocking another source of light for us to see it in telescopes.

It was simply assumed that Einstein's theories of gravity were still correct and there just had to be more matter than we were seeing. It wasn't seen becuase it was dark, hence the name 'dark matter'. Nothing wierd or strange, just stuff we didn't see.

As time went on our observations expanded into more regions of the electromagnetic spectrum. We saw that there, indeed, was a great deal more matter emitting in the infra-red, radio, x-ray, and gamma ray spectrums. This has added greatly to the amount of matter that is known. There is much less missing mass on the intragalactic scale than there once was because we see more of it.

However, it is not enough. Here is a really good explanation.

And there is a new problem. We are now mapping the interaction of galaxies, and of huge groups of galaxies. And there does not seem to be enough matter in sight to fully account for there movements. Enter the cosmologists.

The first 'exotic' form of 'dark matter' was probably the neutrino. While once considered a very exotic beast, it is now considered rather mundane (at least the three known flavors are considered mundane). The neutrino is an almost massless particle that is electrically neutral and has such a small cross section that it hardly ever interacts with other matter. Neutrinos have mass, so they do feel the effects of gravity and due the the equal and opposite reaction thing, they contribute to the gravity that we, our sun, and all the starts in the galaxy feel. While a single neutrino is almost non-existent, the huge numbers of neutrinos within the boundaries of the galaxy actually do add up to an appreciable mass.

Now cosmologists are suggesting even more exoctic unknown particles, like WIMPS, to explain the missing mass. Some people feel that we should be examining new theories of gravity. Maybe on a very large scale gravity behaves differently. We do know that our theories of gravity are not complete. We do not have a good field theory of gravity that works with quantum mechanics. Continued experimentation involving things like the Higg's Boson will help to confirm some of these leading edge theories, and get rid of others. By determining the mass and energy of the particles that communicate the 'mass' field we will be putting constraints from the real physical universe around these theories.

The cosmology stuff is the wierd exotic 'dark matter' that inspires wierd science fiction ideas, but it will probably be needed to explain all of the missing mass. When some of these, currently, exotic particles are observed measured and fit in an overarching theory, they will seem much more ordinary, as the three known neutrinos are today.

No, it wasn't meant to be a replacement for savings, and you weren't supposed to get out what you put in. A small portion of the population was supposed to collect it, because most of them didn't live long enough to.

Not entirely true. I think you are including childhood mortality. If you made it to age 20 (working age) in 1935, the year that the Social Security Act was enacted, you could expect to live to be about 66 years old if you were a man, or 68 if you were a woman. This isn't a "small portion of the population", it is, by definition of being the average life expectancy, at least half the population.

Life expectancy has gotten longer but it has been a very gradual process and the taxes have increased over the years. The reason that the program is in trouble is because the taxes have not quite kept up, and politicians have been playing financial games with the savings for decades.

It is not uniquely North American.
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.or...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pu...

https://scholarsbank.uoregon.e...

Stereoscopic images are even better - especially when viewed using those polarized filter or shutter glasses:

http://lcni.uoregon.edu/~dow/Marks_photos/stereo_pairs/Apollo_moon/Stereo_pairs_of_moon.html

It's difficult to pin down an exact date.

• It could have been when we started re-electing Congressmen the vast majority of the time, no matter how unpopular they were.
• It could have been when gerrymandering made its debut.
• It could have been when political parties started, leading people to vote for their team rather than who they thought was the best candidate.
• It could have been when money started to mean more than votes.
• It could have been one of the many instances where we have traded liberty for security.

Whats even more interesting is that even the least dense gas in the sun, Hydrogen plasma, is compressed so ridiculously high because of the intense gravity that it's denser than lead. Think about that, and then think what the iron in the star must be like.

If you want to understand the process, read this:
http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/ast122/lectures/lec18.html

How about "All browsers have had keyboard shortcuts since the days of Mosaic"

Hell, for that matter lynx had nothing but keyboard shortcuts.

How about "All browsers have had keyboard shortcuts since the days of Mosaic"

That you can restore closed tabs in Firefox is news from 2006: http://lifehacker.com/210111/firefox-2-tip-undo-closed-tab-keyboard-shortcut

The last time I researched this (admittedly some time ago) they did send the pump laser signal down the fiber like this. There were two choices - send the pump signal down the same fiber as the signal, or down a different fiber that was physically joined/merged with the signal cables(s). It looks like that didn't work out, since Wikipedia agrees with you: Repeaters are powered by a constant direct current passed down the conductor near the center of the cable...

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/where/index.html http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/interstellar.html http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/voy_traj.jpg And you can simulate the entire flight and its current position in 3D at http://eyes.nasa.gov/

Just use plastic. The carbon footprint is lower than paper evidently. People think paper is better because it can decompose, but it doesn't in landfills buried under tons of other trash without air for the bacteria. And it doesn't really matter: litter is ugly but harmless compared to ocean acidification or climate change.

Ok, I'm skeptical too. Let's check it out! I apologise in advance for large numbers.

From this website I've got a figure of just over 4 million sq. kilometers of arable land in the United States. This website gives daily cross-year average sunlight falling on a square meter of ground as about 160 W. That's 640 x 10^12 W-days of power falling on the land, per day. Wikipedia cites that plants have a metabolic conversion efficiency of six per cent. This website cites a biomass-to-energy conversion efficiency of 20 per cent. So, if we assume that only 1 per cent of arable land was actually covered with plant, and then turned into electricity, total daily production would be 77 x10^9 W-days of power. This sounds like a lot; obviously there will be some more production and transport inefficiencies in there.

For comparison, the US consumes 1.39 x10^9 litres of fuel per day. According to Wikipedia, the energy density of petrol is 49.2 x 10^6 J/L, so that's 684 x10^12 J of energy per day... or, expressed in Watt-days (86400 seconds in a day), that's 7.91 x10^9 W-days of energy.

There are a lot of real world factors not being included in these estimates, but the 10-to-1 ratio here indicates to me that the energies involved are of a comparable scale; if we devoted 10 per cent of arable land to agriculture, we could (with highly efficient processes), conceivably put a sizable dent in our energy usage.

Ok, I'm skeptical too. Let's check it out! I apologise in advance for large numbers.

From this website I've got a figure of just over 4 million sq. kilometers of arable land in the United States. This website gives daily cross-year average sunlight falling on a square meter of ground as about 160 W. That's 640 x 10^12 W-days of power falling on the land, per day. Wikipedia cites that plants have a metabolic conversion efficiency of six per cent. This website cites a biomass-to-energy conversion efficiency of 20 per cent. So, if we assume that only 1 per cent of arable land was actually covered with plant, and then turned into electricity, total daily production would be 77 x10^9 W-days of power. This sounds like a lot; obviously there will be some more production and transport inefficiencies in there.

For comparison, the US consumes 1.39 x10^9 litres of fuel per day. According to Wikipedia, the energy density of petrol is 49.2 x 10^6 J/L, so that's 684 x10^12 J of energy per day... or, expressed in Watt-days (86400 seconds in a day), that's 7.91 x10^9 W-days of energy.

There are a lot of real world factors not being included in these estimates, but the 10-to-1 ratio here indicates to me that the energies involved are of a comparable scale; if we devoted 10 per cent of arable land to agriculture, we could (with highly efficient processes), conceivably put a sizable dent in our energy usage.

Well, if you've got admin access to a decent sized network, go install NetDot, which gives you a visualization of all your gear & how it's connected at the physical & logical level, and will draw nice little network maps for you showing the paths between devices on the fly.

First, if you are going to challenge others to do research, please be so kind as to show yours to back up your statements. So far what I've read from you has been almost all vague fundamentalist opinion.

The world you speak of where people were so altruistic and helpful, where villages came together to help each other out is exactly what those progressives and liberals have been trying to bring back. The problem with looking back and trying to compare it to today is that the numbers just don't work. The United States of America is not a small country anymore, it has grown into a very large country with very large and real global issues. You cannot run a large country like a small one. Population density has dramatically changed since times when small towns had to be somewhat self reliant. (population density from 1790) Life expectancy has risen rather dramatically as well.

So you have a growing population, longer life...how do you propose we take care of all these people? Hopeful charity? Part of the role of Government is to smooth out the dips during rough times. it is also to help promote beneficial rises to "fill the coffers" so to speak for the next dip. It is very hard for a community to invest in helping the poor and needy when they don't have the capability to do so.

If we are on the edge of social collapse, it is more because the government did not perform its role in protecting society from economic threats. People or business that cared little about the population of the country, but just took its monetary resources and left it wounded. Government, at its best, should limit the effect of greed on society; channel it, use it to protect the Society, grow the Society, and allow the Society to be free enough to live with dignity, freedom, and happiness.

Unfortunately, Greed won.

Here's a great law review article written by Jean Sternlight of UNLV's Boyd School of Law discussing the impact of the recent case--AT&T Mobility, LLC v. Concepcion, 131 S. Ct. 1740 (2011)--that paved the way for companies like Paypal and Amazon to impose arbitral class action waivers in their consumer contracts.

As others may have pointed out, the most effective (and direct) remedial measure here would involve amendment by Congress of the Federal Arbitration Act. Partisanship and regulatory capture by big business may render this option unworkable for now. In that case, changing the composition of the high court justices, coupled with nationwide reports of the deleterious effects of the Concepcion decision, could allow for SCOTUS to agree to hear a similar case in which Concepcion's holding could be narrowed or abrogated.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunlight) says there's 1.361 KW per square meter of solar irradiance.

Sigh. That's actually the figure for the amount of solar power passing through 1 m^2 of sectional area in space at the orbit of earth. The amount reaching the ground is considerably less. In fact, averaged across the complete land and water surface of the earth over a full 24 hours, accounting for weather, the actual figure is more like 164 W/m^2. With a conversion efficiency of 15%, that works out to an average electricity production of 25 W/m^2.

That's still an awful lot of power. Just don't be disappointed if the actual figure is closer to 245,667 GW than your figure of 13,374.104 GW.

You are much too optimistic. The amount of solar power hitting the ground does not come anywhere near to 1361 W/m^2 average, 24x7. That figure actually represents the amount of solar power occluded by one m^2 of the earth's cross section in outer space. Considerably less than that reaches the ground, even ideally. And it is zero at night. It is much reduced when you average the daytime period even in good weather. It is further reduced by bad weather. It is still further reduced as you get further from the equator. The true average figure os solar energy reaching the ground is closer to 164 W/m^2.

With a typical conversion efficiency of 15%, that makes 25 W/m^2 of averaged electricity production.

"Netdot is an open source tool designed to help network administrators collect, organize and maintain network documentation."

https://osl.uoregon.edu/redmine/projects/netdot

https://osl.uoregon.edu/redmine/projects/netdot/wiki

"Netdot is an open source tool designed to help network administrators collect, organize and maintain network documentation."

https://osl.uoregon.edu/redmine/projects/netdot

https://osl.uoregon.edu/redmine/projects/netdot/wiki

I always love to look up the context for quotes. So tell me...where did this quote come from? When did the word "treated" get "added" in? Obviously, the word "treated" is the source of all the consternation, with folks jumping to believe that the word implies sending skeptics away to hospitals (as cpu6502 alleges). Where is the proper context, so that we may determine what capacity "treated" was being used in?

Let's start with the Register. (lol, half a step above the Daily Mail!)

"Resistance at individual and societal levels must be recognized and treated"

Which links to the university press release

"Resistance at individual and societal levels must be recognized before real action can be taken to effectively address threats facing the planet from human-caused contributions to climate change."

Which links to this presentation.

"What social factors drive ongoing environmental degradation? Existing scientific conversations have generally failed to include psychological understanding of individual behavior, or sociological insights regarding culture and social organization. This session highlights key psychological and sociological concepts essential to understanding social inaction. We integrate research on relational trust, social normative beliefs and cultural and political-economic constraints on pro-environmental action."

I ctrl-f'd for "treat" but found nothing except the original Register quote. I also ctrl-f'd for "hospital" and found nothing. And the original Register "quote" wasn't even quoting her.

I've been using a Network Documentation Tool (Netdot) for a while now. It is still in active development but certainly useful. It can easily be adapted to networks outside of academia. They implement feature requests pretty often too. https://osl.uoregon.edu/redmine/projects/netdot/wiki

Our beer got taste

Oakshire Brewery: 5 minutes away.

our cheese is not just a barely edible plastic

Rogue Creamery and Tillamook: Both 3 hours away.

our food isn't genetically manipulated

Horton Road Organic: Just one of many CSAs in town.

the soda contains real sugar

I cut out soda at the same time I cut out GMO food and other 'fake foods'. So high five to you on that one :)

the women are the easiest in the world

Debatable. There's something about 9 months of rain that causes promiscuity when the sun finally arrives.

the pot is so cheap just anyone can smoke it...

Not Legal, but not exactly rare either if you're into that sort of thing.

Lumping all of the states into a blanket statement like that is akin to me making claims about 'All of Europe'; They're bound to be inaccurate and make me look ignorant.

Here's a more scholarly run down of the topic:
http://www.law.uoregon.edu/org/oril/docs/12-1/brittingham.pdf

> True, Dark Matter, like Dark Energy, is just a placeholder name for something that we _think_ is there.

FTFY.

Probably will get modded down, but if you "knew" it, then you would be able to prove it exists. Since no one has seen it, touched it, tasted it, smelt it, or felt it, therefore it is a mathematical kludge, aka, the aether of the 1900s. (Yes, I'm aware of http://www.nasa.gov/home/hqnews/2006/aug/HQ_06297_CHANDRA_Dark_Matter.html )

Ergo, while said more politely, "it falls out of the math", which will allthough appear quite reasonable at first, given the current limitations of understanding gravity / light / mass & energy, it is still one a big hack-job based on one assumption after another, namely:
  a) that there is only one type of gravity and
  b) gravity is universal (which is a little preposterous / pretentious to base how the WHOLE universe works based on one tiny little planet.)
  c) redshift is accurate (ARP has interesting evidence that calls into question this assumption)

This prof. provides a half-decent summary though:
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/1999/ph123/lec08.html

I have the equivalent of an AS degree in physics, and you have no idea what you're talking about. The Earth most definitely is in thermal equilibrium. Take, for example, these notes from the University of Oregon that states that "earth wants to stay in thermal equilibrium". If we produced thousands of petawatts of power from fusion, we could warm the Earth. The Earth would respond by emitting more radiation and cooling down. What is happening instead is that increased greenhouse gasses are causing less radiation to be radiated into space, causing warming. It's very simple physics, and all these effects were predicted by Arrhenius over 100 years ago.

The mind reels.

The emptyness of space never really got to me. What really baked my noodle was looking at a series of stars appear on my screen from a brown dwarf, past our star, and upwards to red giants like Betelgeuse.

Then I saw stars that made Betelgeuse look like Mercury compared to our Sun and I felt like I fell through the floor.

And when you look at this image: http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/images/compare_star_sizes.gif and realize that that large red one next the Sun is Betelgeuse, you will get an idea of just how absurd it looked.

But I never got the sense of insignificance that most people say you should fell when looking at the universe. The sizes boggled me, but never in a way that made me feel insignificant, it almost had the opposite effect on me, which I suppose is a bit weird.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/papers/Walker_leidenfrost_essay.pdf

just look at the graph

Sorry, I didnt specify I meant the graph on page 2, not the one when you open the pdf

just look at the graph

no carbon dioxide

Actually, that's one of the very few problems you won't have trying to raise plants on Mars, considering it makes up 95% of the atmosphere. Even despite the greatly lower atmospheric pressure, it has more CO2 per unit surface area than Earth.

Of course, everything else you mentioned, along with the lack of oxygen, is pretty accurate

FYI, a "reference" is not necessarily a link. So long as it specifies the title and author of the work, it's still a valid reference - JFGI. Or check a local library.

Since this, apparently, poses an insurmountable challenge to some people, here is a direct link to the text of the work in question (PDF).

Stars are a bit far to resolve, and these stars are about the size of the earth, so no pictures of this will be available in your lifetime. But assuming you accept that we understand physics and can simulate what things look like, please visit http://astro.fit.edu/wood/visualizations.html. This is not new. It's called the Roche lobe and is simply an equipotential surface. Here's an image from a textbook http://physics.uoregon.edu/~jimbrau/BrauImNew/Chap20/FG20_22.jpg

What, never?

COBE.

But yes, 7 papers a month is... excessive.

http://www.uoregon.edu/~ftepfer/SchlFacilities/TireSwingTable.html

Its already done Now "roof area" is for a house, to cut that down a bit. A 10' long car has about 30 sq feet of hood and roof. But when comparing to gasoline, be sure to factor in that IBEs are inefficent and your eletric motors will do more for your energy.

I'm not saying you can power the car this way, only that it would help with driving enjoyment.

Some studies suggest Federal dams are mostly resonsible for drop from 16 million to 300,000 wild fish per year

Everything has problems: there is no perfect solution to energy. Considering the horrible state of the World's fisheries and wild Salmon (farmed Salmon has its own issues), I say dams are not an option where the Salmon are migrating unless a way ( fish ladders don't work well at all) is developed.

I can't comment on other fish.

For extra good measure, fit a booster rocket to it, so we can fire it off into deep space once we're done with it.

Sorry, but this is a fairly good example that you aren't properly factoring in the issues that the OP was raising. Carrying the fuel necessary to propel a craft to escape velocity increases its mass significantly. You would never do that for the sole purpose of decommissioning a craft (generally you destabilize its orbit and cause it to burn up in the atmosphere)

The logical comparison would be between this method, and just having those same solar panels on the ground. Solar radiation is only about 30% stronger in LEO (low earth orbit) vs. the surface The additional launch, maintenance, and infrastructure costs combined with the losses due to microwave transmission may not be outweighed by the additional power generation just from having the things in space.

Check it out! http://atomoptics.uoregon.edu/~zoinks/

One of my friends got her degree in Linke's lab: http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/res_ratchet.html .

If the front page at Linke's lab is related to whatever inspired the article: I bet they're trying to make a microscopic fan (with an external power source) as a linear motor, not a perpetual motion machine. They're not trying to scavenge the power from the heat. They're trying to move the hot molecules around.

Such a fan could be in the form of a structure of electrodes on the top of the chip which moves the coolant by creating intermittent sloped potential wells, using the brownian motion from the heat to accomplish part of the motion of the surrounding coolant.

You'd still be providing the energy to move the molecules when you create and then dissipate the potential wells. You make a "traench with a sloped bottom", the molecules fall into it and slide to one end, you raise the bottom of the hole, lifting them, and they scatter, with some of them ending up over the NEXT trench location next time. No free lunch - you provided the energy to move them by lifting them out of the potential well when you demolished it.

I suspect that they are using brownian ratchets for the motors, rather than trying to move the molecules directly, because they found a way to implement the former efficiently.

But I'd like to see how it works and what makes it better than creating a similar array of stepwise-moving potential wells ala charge-coupled devices. More efficient? Fewer drivers? Sloped potential wells easy to make using triangular or other interesting electrode shapes? Larger structures that can be fabricated at current semiconductor feature sizes?

PDF alert!

http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/papers/Reimann97_PhysRep.pdf

One of my friends got her degree in Linke's lab: http://www.uoregon.edu/~linke/res_ratchet.html . She was good at explaining the ratchets, and one of the things always stressed was that they don't work in thermal equilibrium---by definition!. In any case, Linke's website has good explanations.