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I don't quite mind, if Google starts copying Wolfram Alpha we may get LCARS one day.

You asked for the series expansion of the Complete elliptic integral of the second kind about x=-1.

Did you mean the about x=1?

See search results for Complete elliptic integral of the first kind
See search results for series expansions
See more on elliptic integrals.

Great deals for:
Infinite Series Expansion by A.Abramovitz and G. Cook, $54.99, Amazon
Buy Tables of Integral Tranforms, G.Ivarovitznik MSU, $768.99, Ivory Tower
Calculus, Armitage, Johnson and Grant. $199.99 Wiley

===
P.S. Wolfram Alpha actually does this

I have heard stories of ham radio guys with cutting edge 1296 preamps and high gain mobile antennas blowing their preamps by driving down the street next to the airport full of hundred watt peak class 1090 MHz active transponders.

The 10 GHz LNA that I bought recently from DB6NT can't take more than 1 mW at its input. They specifically stress this point; a bad relay can blow the FET.

A common ham dish antenna for 10 GHz can have gain of about 30 dB. If two such dishes are pointed at each other and one transmits only 200 mW, the minimum safe distance between those dishes is:

FSPL (dB) = 20 log10 (d_in_km) + 20 log10 (f_in_MHz) + 32.44 -Gtx - Grx

Since we want to lose 23 dB (200 mW to 1 mW) the 'd' will be only 33.7 meters. Any closer and the amp burns up. This is actually well known in practice when hams show up with their microwave rigs and try them out in a parking lot. They are very careful to not point dishes to anything they don't want to cook :-) Many 10 GHz rigs run more than 200 mW; 3W is typical, but some do up to 10W (it just costs more.)

Radar operators also know to not point their radars at nearly objects. Some radars on civilian airplanes can't be ran on the ground - both due to radiation danger and due to the overload of the front end (burnination is optional but likely.)

Let's pick the temperature of Iceland, a nation claimed to suffer climate change particularly strongly on an independend site:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=temperature+in+Iceland+for+last+hundred+years [wolframalpha.com]

It seems the temperature is going DOWN, (from slightly _above_ 10oC to slightly _below_ 10oC in yearly mean) so my conclusion is that the earth is cooling down

What part of Global Warming don't you understand?

Jesus... I forgot the br tags

You seem to imply that the finding of _some_ scientists is the universal truth while the scientific community is far from agreeing on one particular point (as usual) and keeps publishing findings in every possible direction (up, down, stable) with the argumentation that thousands of years is the scale to look things on.
Unfortunately the dinosaurs didnt keep track of the weather
Ok, let me repeat the 'experience' those scientists apply: Let's pick the temperature of Iceland, a nation claimed to suffer climate change particularly strongly on an independend site:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=temperature+in+Iceland+for+last+hundred+years

It seems the temperature is going DOWN, (from slightly _above_ 10oC to slightly _below_ 10oC in yearly mean) so my conclusion is that the earth is cooling down and that thus, to preserve environment, humanity has to increase CO2 output to restabilize temperature on the old level.
I recommend building as many coal-fired plants as possible and reducing taxes on all vehicles with more than 10 literes of fuel consumption per 100 kilometers.

You seem to imply that the finding of _some_ scientists is the universal truth while the scientific community is far from agreeing on one particular point (as usual) and keeps publishing findings in every possible direction (up, down, stable) with the argumentation that thousands of years is the scale to look things on. UNfortunately the dinosaurs didnt keep track of the weather Ok, let me repeat the 'experience' those scientists apply: Let's pick the temperature of Iceland, a nation claimed to suffer climate change particularly strongly on an independend site: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=temperature+in+Iceland+for+last+hundred+years It seems the temperature is going DOWN, (from slightly _above_ 10oC to slightly _below_ 10oC in yearly mean) so my conclusion is that the earth is cooling down and that thus, to preserve environment, humanity has to increase CO2 output to restabilize temperature on the old level. I recommend building as many coal-fired plants as possible and reducing taxes on all vehicles with more than 10 literes of fuel consumption per 100 kilometers.

They do, but they have a stupid definition of "minimum security":

it's some small number of characters, at least one of which must be a number.

This is not a terribly onerous policy*, but iPods' screen keyboards do not have a number row. You have to switch to another page to input numbers, so people with iPods are going to tend to pick a specific subset of passwords with numbers - ones where all the numbers are together at either the beginning or the end.

I think that this may result in passwords that are actually less secure than the same length of just letters, even....

*although, until you start getting into 20+ char passwords, it turns out that adding one more character to the minimum length improves security by more than adding 10 more glyphs to the character pool....

What they should do is enforce a minimum password *strength*, and generate several passwords for using pre-defined rules which you can pick from (and which have been researched, so assuming random generation, their strength can be calculated), rather like the keychain works, actually...

The kinetic energy of 100 [short] tons moving at 80 mph would be 58 MJ. The energy of 4 MW during 30 seconds will be 90 MJ. So the numbers appear to be correct, plus or minus my guesses on the weight and speed and everything else.

The kinetic energy of 100 [short] tons moving at 80 mph would be 58 MJ. The energy of 4 MW during 30 seconds will be 90 MJ. So the numbers appear to be correct, plus or minus my guesses on the weight and speed and everything else.

Correct link: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+integral+of+2^58*2^%281.97e-08*t%29+from+0+to+x+equal+to+2^126

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=solve+integral+of+2^58*2^%281.97e-08*t%29+from+0+to+x+equal+to+2^126

It would take about 2.1 billion seconds (about 64 years) using all of the available computing power on the Earth, starting from this moment forward, assuming that the available processing power doubles every 18 months, and every computer were singularly dedicated to the task for the entire period, to crack AES-128 (yes, the 128-bit version) using the techniques described in this article.

Assumptions:

2^58 = total computer power in the world (the most powerful supercomputer can perform 2^53 operations per second, the whole TOP500 combined can perform 2^56)
2^126 = average number of operations to crack AES-128

it talks about the *chemical* reactivity of gold when the explanation was referring to the nuclear reactivity of gold. It then talks about the radioactive decay of gold when normal gold (Au196) doesn't decay at all. Not that I'm proposing the explanation is right, just that the rebuttal is wonky.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gold+&a=*MC.gold+196-_*Isotope-

1 gram of thorium is about 3 cents US and is a 4.4mm cube.

source

The sad thing is that a task of this magnitude requires great leadership. A trait which seems to lack severely in the US, as the current bickering over the debt ceiling has shown.

The sad thing is that a task of this magnitude requires great leadership. A trait which seems to lack severely in the US, as the current bickering over the debt ceiling has shown.

Not needing to pay $60+ a month to tether a mobile laptop legally would certainly be cool to companies and their short-range travellers / roaming techs. 12000 sqr miles is not that much really. It represents a rectangle 400 x 30 miles.

That's some odd gear you've got if the signal propagates in a rectangle. I think the reference you were looking for is a 62 mile diameter circle.

Maybe Wolfram has more servers? They seem to be working on the problem anyway... Can entropy be reversed? I asked google, but they just directed me to some dumb sci/fi story.

slight but measurable heating of the brain.

A modern cellphone emits on the order of 1 W of radiated power. That would take an hour and a half to heat an adult brain up by 1 Kelvin, but our brains are liquid cooled, so that just can't happen.

If an increase in the temperature of the brain causes cancer, then people who work outdoors in tropical countries ought to get a very high rate of brain cancers. They don't. People who get fevers more often than average ought to get a high rate of brain cancers. They don't. The average person's body temperature changes by 0.5 degrees C due simply to natural daily rhythms! That's the same amount of 'heating' as 45 minutes of cell phone use, every day.

The cellphone-cancer link is pure pseudoscience. It's not enough to come up with some vague correlation if every other verified theory tells us that it just can't happen. A mechanism for the cause has to be proposed (a model), and it has to be shown to be valid rigorously, using double-blind studies and falsifiable experiments. Nobody has come even close, and nobody should expect to be taken seriously until they do.

12 billion light years away means 12 billion years ago. That water will be scattered asunder by now.

I wonder if a cosmologist could check the validity of that statement because it seems to neglect universe expansion. Looking online at APM 08279+5255, its redshift is 3.911. Plugging that into wolframalpha indicates the the lookback time is 12bn years, but that the "actual" distance at this time is nearly 23.7bn lightyears. Redshift: http://cdsweb.u-strasbg.fr/cgi-bin/bibobj?2008A%26A...479..703G&APM+08279%2B5255 Wolfram: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=redshift+z%3D3.911&a=FSelect_**LookbackTimeFromRedshift--

Of course not, they entered it into Wolfram Alpha which turned up that it had previously been used for The Odessa File by Frederick Forsyth...

Not when they cannot perform simple geometrical calculations.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=triangle+with+sides+0.4592+meters%2C+0.6+meters%2C+0.6+meters

180 degrees, not 181, should be the sum of all internal angles.

Heard of rounding?!?!

Not when they cannot perform simple geometrical calculations.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=triangle+with+sides+0.4592+meters%2C+0.6+meters%2C+0.6+meters

180 degrees, not 181, should be the sum of all internal angles.

Just turn in your geek card.

Please show us how you get any triangle with either more or less than 180 degrees as the sum of all internal angles.

You're assuming malice. But the most likely thing is that they used Wolfram Alpha to search for "CDF" instead of using Google or Ixquick. ;)

Similar cluelessness abounds in their comparison chart which claims e.g. that HTML5 is incapable of a "dynamic document hierarchy" while "Readers can dynamically open and close chapters and sections in CDF documents. CDF also supports hierarchical, tab, slide, flip, opener, and other document organizations."

Not when they cannot perform simple geometrical calculations.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=triangle+with+sides+0.4592+meters%2C+0.6+meters%2C+0.6+meters

180 degrees, not 181, should be the sum of all internal angles.

Can you imagine how long it would take to toss even a single gig of data onto 360k floppy disk? The funny part would be how much money you would waste by sitting in front of a computer switching disks every 60 seconds or so and then writing labels for them all, and sticking them on (straight of course or you have to carefully peel it off and put on a new one).

Lesse.. wolfram alpha says just over 4 weeks (assuming an 8 hour work day) http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=60gib+%2F+360kib+*+60+seconds

For a total of 174,763 floppies. That would be a stack of floppies (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=174763+*+2mm) ~350 meters tall, or just taller (1.2x) than the Eiffel Tower.

Might be easier to just buy a bunch of TB hard disks and put them in a Raid 5 configuration (with hot spares of course) and be done with it.

I love renewable, clean energy, I do, but I wish journalists remembered enough junior school level mathematics to understand why technology like this will not be replacing coal, oil, and nuclear power any time soon. This is a positive step forward, but lets not pretend it's going to solve the looming energy crisis.

Lets do some back-of-the-envelope maths to understand why:

The specs of the Oyster 2 say that it generates a peak output of 800kW and has a length of 26 meters. Of course, you can't put them exactly side-by-side, not all locations are suitable, and 800kW is the maximum burst power output, not the average power, but lets just use optimistic numbers for the moment.

I can't find power usage numbers for Scotland, but the average citizen of Great Britain uses 5218.2 W total, factoring in indirect energy use (oil, coal, manufacturing, etc...). Multiply that by the population of Scotland, which is apparently 5.2 million people, and you get a reasonable sounding 27 GW of power usage.

This means that the total length of coastline needed to generate that amount of power using technology like the Oyster 2 is: 5218.2 W * 5,200,000 * 26 m / 800,000 W = 882 km.

That doesn't sound too bad relative to Scotland's 11,800 km of coastline, but that's counting every little bay, nook, cranny, and island. The coastline of a country depends on how you measure it. Wave energy comes from big waves created in the ocean, so a much more reasonable estimate for the coastline is the perimeter of a circle with the same area as the land mass. For Scotland, this is a mere 995 km, from which we may as well subtract the 95 km land border with England, leaving 900 km.

This means that the estimate of 882 km of needed wave power generators is 98% of the available coastline. Oops.

Don't believe me? Here's another source that states that the total exploitable power available near the shore (ignoring overheads, inefficiencies, etc...) is 18.5 kW/m, which works out to 16.7 GW. In practice, there's no hope of achieving anywhere near 100% of that. The maths for solar and wind power is similar, for much the same reasons.

The inevitable conclusion of this kind of trivial mathematics is that densely populated countries would have to pave over huge fractions of their land with solar cells, put wind farms on every hilltop, and surround much of their coastline with wave generators to even begin to approach their present power needs, let alone future growth.

Don't think biofuels like ethanol or biodiesel help either, the most efficient plants are only 9% efficient at best, in ideal tropical conditions, and that's not factoring in the energy overheads of fertilizer, harvesting, and conversion!

Meanwhile, a nuclear power plant with an output of 1 GW requires a mere hectare of land area, which is why nations that have leadership with some common sense are planning on building more nuclear power, not less.

On the bright side, I live in Australia, where we have plenty of land, coastline, sunlight, coal, and uranium. This all sounds like someone else's problem to me! 8)

I love renewable, clean energy, I do, but I wish journalists remembered enough junior school level mathematics to understand why technology like this will not be replacing coal, oil, and nuclear power any time soon. This is a positive step forward, but lets not pretend it's going to solve the looming energy crisis.

Lets do some back-of-the-envelope maths to understand why:

The specs of the Oyster 2 say that it generates a peak output of 800kW and has a length of 26 meters. Of course, you can't put them exactly side-by-side, not all locations are suitable, and 800kW is the maximum burst power output, not the average power, but lets just use optimistic numbers for the moment.

I can't find power usage numbers for Scotland, but the average citizen of Great Britain uses 5218.2 W total, factoring in indirect energy use (oil, coal, manufacturing, etc...). Multiply that by the population of Scotland, which is apparently 5.2 million people, and you get a reasonable sounding 27 GW of power usage.

This means that the total length of coastline needed to generate that amount of power using technology like the Oyster 2 is: 5218.2 W * 5,200,000 * 26 m / 800,000 W = 882 km.

That doesn't sound too bad relative to Scotland's 11,800 km of coastline, but that's counting every little bay, nook, cranny, and island. The coastline of a country depends on how you measure it. Wave energy comes from big waves created in the ocean, so a much more reasonable estimate for the coastline is the perimeter of a circle with the same area as the land mass. For Scotland, this is a mere 995 km, from which we may as well subtract the 95 km land border with England, leaving 900 km.

This means that the estimate of 882 km of needed wave power generators is 98% of the available coastline. Oops.

Don't believe me? Here's another source that states that the total exploitable power available near the shore (ignoring overheads, inefficiencies, etc...) is 18.5 kW/m, which works out to 16.7 GW. In practice, there's no hope of achieving anywhere near 100% of that. The maths for solar and wind power is similar, for much the same reasons.

The inevitable conclusion of this kind of trivial mathematics is that densely populated countries would have to pave over huge fractions of their land with solar cells, put wind farms on every hilltop, and surround much of their coastline with wave generators to even begin to approach their present power needs, let alone future growth.

Don't think biofuels like ethanol or biodiesel help either, the most efficient plants are only 9% efficient at best, in ideal tropical conditions, and that's not factoring in the energy overheads of fertilizer, harvesting, and conversion!

Meanwhile, a nuclear power plant with an output of 1 GW requires a mere hectare of land area, which is why nations that have leadership with some common sense are planning on building more nuclear power, not less.

On the bright side, I live in Australia, where we have plenty of land, coastline, sunlight, coal, and uranium. This all sounds like someone else's problem to me! 8)

I love renewable, clean energy, I do, but I wish journalists remembered enough junior school level mathematics to understand why technology like this will not be replacing coal, oil, and nuclear power any time soon. This is a positive step forward, but lets not pretend it's going to solve the looming energy crisis.

Lets do some back-of-the-envelope maths to understand why:

The specs of the Oyster 2 say that it generates a peak output of 800kW and has a length of 26 meters. Of course, you can't put them exactly side-by-side, not all locations are suitable, and 800kW is the maximum burst power output, not the average power, but lets just use optimistic numbers for the moment.

I can't find power usage numbers for Scotland, but the average citizen of Great Britain uses 5218.2 W total, factoring in indirect energy use (oil, coal, manufacturing, etc...). Multiply that by the population of Scotland, which is apparently 5.2 million people, and you get a reasonable sounding 27 GW of power usage.

This means that the total length of coastline needed to generate that amount of power using technology like the Oyster 2 is: 5218.2 W * 5,200,000 * 26 m / 800,000 W = 882 km.

That doesn't sound too bad relative to Scotland's 11,800 km of coastline, but that's counting every little bay, nook, cranny, and island. The coastline of a country depends on how you measure it. Wave energy comes from big waves created in the ocean, so a much more reasonable estimate for the coastline is the perimeter of a circle with the same area as the land mass. For Scotland, this is a mere 995 km, from which we may as well subtract the 95 km land border with England, leaving 900 km.

This means that the estimate of 882 km of needed wave power generators is 98% of the available coastline. Oops.

Don't believe me? Here's another source that states that the total exploitable power available near the shore (ignoring overheads, inefficiencies, etc...) is 18.5 kW/m, which works out to 16.7 GW. In practice, there's no hope of achieving anywhere near 100% of that. The maths for solar and wind power is similar, for much the same reasons.

The inevitable conclusion of this kind of trivial mathematics is that densely populated countries would have to pave over huge fractions of their land with solar cells, put wind farms on every hilltop, and surround much of their coastline with wave generators to even begin to approach their present power needs, let alone future growth.

Don't think biofuels like ethanol or biodiesel help either, the most efficient plants are only 9% efficient at best, in ideal tropical conditions, and that's not factoring in the energy overheads of fertilizer, harvesting, and conversion!

Meanwhile, a nuclear power plant with an output of 1 GW requires a mere hectare of land area, which is why nations that have leadership with some common sense are planning on building more nuclear power, not less.

On the bright side, I live in Australia, where we have plenty of land, coastline, sunlight, coal, and uranium. This all sounds like someone else's problem to me! 8)

He probably got around 160mS (milliSievert) in total, which even spread on several years is quite a lot (you normally get 4mS annually. Up to 50mS/year if you're a radiation worker) (calculation, data)

A long time ago, people played with mercury using their bare hands.
This was on the order of 1,000+ times more than the 0.004 grams you're talking about.

Granted, it's not something you'd want to drink, but in the quantities you mentioned, it's harmless.

Mercury can be turned to radioactive gold if you can get the right isotope (Mercury 194). That will decay to Platinum 194 (stable) in about a month with 99.9999% of the radioactivity gone. If there's an efficient way to do this, there is a financial incentive to make Hg scarce.

I think you mean mebibytes per second.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=500+gigabytes+per+hour+in+megabytes+per+second

I'm not asking as a percentage of GDP, I'm asking per-person.

Back of the envelope:

160,000,000,000 / (population of GBR) = $2585 per year, per person. On average, UK people pay an extra $200 or so per month in taxes for their health care.

No, the total expense is $200/mo per person. That includes private insurance, country-club detox for pop stars, sports medicine for footballers, plastic surgery for their wives, etc.

I'm not asking as a percentage of GDP, I'm asking per-person.

Back of the envelope:

160,000,000,000 / (population of GBR) = $2585 per year, per person. On average, UK people pay an extra $200 or so per month in taxes for their health care.

Yes, because that will make the region even more stable.

Take Saudi Arabia, very religious, monarchy and they've invested a lot of money into cutting edge weapons, AWACS, F-15s, Eurofighters, oh and medium range ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Now we don't know if they bought the warheads, but it's safe to assume they did, as protectors of Mecca and Medina and all that.

http://geimint.blogspot.com/2009/02/saudi-arabias-ballistic-missile-force.html

Now take that nation which which is very reliant on oil, the petroleum sector accounts for roughly 45% of budget revenues, 55% of GDP, and 90% of export earnings, and has a rapidly expanding youth population who have been used to expanding GDP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Saudi_Arabia#Economic_overview
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=age+pyramid+saudi+arabia
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+saudi+arabia

And take away a big chunk of the GDP, how do you think that is going to play out in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the Russian Federation? All oil exporters who have or may have atomic weapons and technologically advanced conventional militaries?

Yes, because that will make the region even more stable.

Take Saudi Arabia, very religious, monarchy and they've invested a lot of money into cutting edge weapons, AWACS, F-15s, Eurofighters, oh and medium range ballistic missiles that can carry nuclear warheads. Now we don't know if they bought the warheads, but it's safe to assume they did, as protectors of Mecca and Medina and all that.

http://geimint.blogspot.com/2009/02/saudi-arabias-ballistic-missile-force.html

Now take that nation which which is very reliant on oil, the petroleum sector accounts for roughly 45% of budget revenues, 55% of GDP, and 90% of export earnings, and has a rapidly expanding youth population who have been used to expanding GDP

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Saudi_Arabia#Economic_overview
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=age+pyramid+saudi+arabia
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gdp+saudi+arabia

And take away a big chunk of the GDP, how do you think that is going to play out in Saudi Arabia, Iran, or the Russian Federation? All oil exporters who have or may have atomic weapons and technologically advanced conventional militaries?

There are something like 250 million cars in the US

Technically there is only 136 million cars, 254 million is the number of all vehicles in US in 2007: http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=number+of+vehicles+in+us

Not to mention op stated "that a single large container ship emits as much greenhouse gasses in a day as all the cars in US do in a year", correct me if wrong but the citation states 15 of these ships equals that.

You're wrong. The citation states that 15 ships equals all the cars in the world. Considering that out of 254 million vehicles in US, only 136 million are actually cars - it only takes 3 ships to pollute as much as all the cars in US.

Also, I thought that all md5's had been cracked before, however it seems not so. So, I decided to calculate how many gb such a table would AT LEAST have to be. Well, I was quite surprised. Unless there's collisions or my math is fucked, that's quite a lot!

You do know, that the rainbow tables doesn't store the hash of each and every password, right?

Instead you take one password, hash it, map the hash to a new password, hash that, repeat 10.000 times or so and store the original password and the final hash in the table. In other words 10.000 passwords in one entry. I guess you could call that 10.000 "collisions".

When you want to do a lookup, you check if the hash is in the table, if not, map it to a password, hash that and check that in the table. Continue mapping to password and hashing until you get a hit.
When you do, take the original password from the entry and hash+map it until you got the hash, you were trying to look up and you got the password you were looking for.

If you want a small rainbow table, you "just" have to make the chains longer. Unfortunately the lookup will take a longer time, if you do.

So, they didn't even salt the md5 hashes. How lazy does this "security" firm want to be?

Also, how simple do some of these passwords want to be? LOL "infragard26j" are you kidding me? Come on IBM, lift your game!

Here's a copy of the exposed file on PasteBin

I've noticed that the "cracking" method of choice was just "see if these are known values in public rainbow tables". Which, many of them were. Huzzah!

Also, I thought that all md5's had been cracked before, however it seems not so. So, I decided to calculate how many gb such a table would AT LEAST have to be. Well, I was quite surprised. Unless there's collisions or my math is fucked, that's quite a lot!

Seems Unveilance, the company which had its CEO's private emails leaked, has responded and sort of, also authenticated the hack too. Unveillance Official Statement

This question got me curious, so I did a little homework. What are the odds of a building in Maryland being struck by a tornado during its lifetime?

Found an AMAZING website: The Tornado History Project, which has statistics for all recorded tornadoes in the U.S., integrated with Google Maps and with a spreadsheet export function. So I grabbed the stats for every historical tornado in Maryland, used the site's track width and length data to find out the area of land affected by each one, and added them all up. The usual caveats about rounding error, reporting bias, etc. apply.

The result: about 43 square km of Maryland has been hit by tornados in the last 60 years. The area of Maryland is 32,000 km^2, so the odds of a random patch of land in Maryland being hit by a tornado over a 60-year period are roughly 1 in 750. (60 years happens to be roughly the useful life of your average building.)

Is this risk high enough to be worth redesigning the building for? I guess it depends on the consequences of loss. It's not a negligible risk, but if the data is backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't worry about it myself. I can think of plenty of other buildings in the area whose loss would be more of a concern.

This question got me curious, so I did a little homework. What are the odds of a building in Maryland being struck by a tornado during its lifetime?

Found an AMAZING website: The Tornado History Project, which has statistics for all recorded tornadoes in the U.S., integrated with Google Maps and with a spreadsheet export function. So I grabbed the stats for every historical tornado in Maryland, used the site's track width and length data to find out the area of land affected by each one, and added them all up. The usual caveats about rounding error, reporting bias, etc. apply.

The result: about 43 square km of Maryland has been hit by tornados in the last 60 years. The area of Maryland is 32,000 km^2, so the odds of a random patch of land in Maryland being hit by a tornado are roughly 1 in 750.

Is this risk high enough to be worth redesigning the building for? I guess it depends on the consequences of loss. It's not a negligible risk, but if the data is backed up elsewhere, I wouldn't worry about it myself. I can think of plenty of other buildings in the area whose loss would be more of a concern.

I think you need to square distance in that equation (G*M1*M2/r^2). That gives a factor of 199 instead of 75,000. Wolfram Alpha

D'oh!

Well spotted.

The mass of the earth cancels out, use slightly better estimates on the distances, reverse the ratio since we want moon:sun. Then the only mistake is that tidal forces are inversely proportional to the distance cubed. This gives us the expected result.

I think you need to square distance in that equation (G*M1*M2/r^2). That gives a factor of 199 instead of 75,000. Wolfram Alpha

The sun also causes tides.

I would expect so, but my hasty back-of-the-envelope (read: Wolfram Alpha) says that the Moon's influence is about 75 thousand times larger.

IANAA, so please point out how I'm wrong but bear in mind that just saying "you're wrong" isn't at all helpful.

Considering how remote and sparsely populated many of those regions are

Errr...

population density

Sure there are valleys with almost no population. But they aren't very far from some of the densest populated areas on earth.

340 undecillion, 282 decillion, 366 nonillion, 920 octillion, 938 septillion, 463 sextillion, 463 quintillion, 374 quadrillion, 607 trillion, 431 billion, 768 million, 211 thousand and 456.
Courtesy of WolframAlpha.com

"An ultra-low-power standby supply controller with 10mW no-load capability"

So we want to go from having the switch disconnect power to the lights, to adding 10mW for EVERY lightbulb in existence...how the HELL is this part of a 'Green Wave' in helping me manage power consumption in my house?

Presume I have 50 bulbs in my house. At 10mW, we're talking 2.5W of always-on baseload draw. Multiply that times 75 million (rounded down from the 75.11 million Wolfram Alpha gave me): 2.5 * 75,000,000 = 187,000,000W of 'IDLE' power drawn so I can 'make the most of energy savings in the home.'

HA!

Source:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=houses+in+america
(It gave a 2009 count of owner-occupied housing units)

Your math is completely wrong, and your claim is too. You're a dumbfuck.

"An ultra-low-power standby supply controller with 10mW no-load capability"

So we want to go from having the switch disconnect power to the lights, to adding 10mW for EVERY lightbulb in existence...how the HELL is this part of a 'Green Wave' in helping me manage power consumption in my house?

Presume I have 50 bulbs in my house. At 10mW, we're talking 2.5W of always-on baseload draw. Multiply that times 75 million (rounded down from the 75.11 million Wolfram Alpha gave me): 2.5 * 75,000,000 = 187,000,000W of 'IDLE' power drawn so I can 'make the most of energy savings in the home.'

HA!

Source:
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=houses+in+america
(It gave a 2009 count of owner-occupied housing units)

And that's not even a blip on the 17 km/s that Voyager I is coasting along at. That's 163,198.8 mph for those who are metric-challenged.

Er, no, try 38,028 mph. Even off the top of your head, you know 20 km/s == 72 000 km/h, so the answer has to be in the ballpark of 36 000 mph.