You seem to be living in the fantasy world that everyone is strong and should be able to take punishment.
People are weak. They don't know how to cope. But they are still human beings and worthy of being cared for and protected. We should be outraged that this poor gay kid was driven to suicide.
This case is different that secretly filming your roommate having straight sex for exactly those reasons. Dharum Ravi exploited Tyler Clementi when he spied on him. He exploited his fears and insecurities.
Don't consider crimes like black boxes. The entire circumstances matter. The motives matter. Society had a role, no doubt. Tyler Clementi lamented that people on Ravi's twitter feed were disgusted by Clementi's relationship but not one of them called out Ravi and said that what he was doing was wrong. More than anything else, this is probably what drove him to suicide. He saw people unanimously disgusted by him with no defenders or anyone who opposed his privacy being violated. He had no faith that even if he changed roommates that conditions would get better. Think about that before you call him a coward again you fucking asshole.
Atheism is a religion. Atheism has everything in common with other religions. Set beliefs, morality, purpose in life, etc. Agnosticism is not a religion because it has no definite beliefs, morality or purpose. Atheism does.
No, the key difference is that religions appeal to the supernatural or some true essence to explain the universe, while atheism appeals only to the natural world. Atheism does not require some Daddy figure (or figures) nor does it need some essentialist background. It rejects those. Its beliefs are based on logic, something religions can't claim (except coincidentally).
If you read the article, you'd realize it was a very significant wake up call. Death was narrowly avoided because the reactor containment vessel was over-engineered compared to the typical design.
Are you talking about the reactor vessel or the containment? These are different things. The containment is designed to keep fission fragments from being released to the public following a design basis accident. It is typically a hemispherical shell made of about a 5 ft thickness of reinforced concrete attached to a concrete base mat and lined with a stainless steel shell. The reactor vessel simply houses the core, forms part of the primary coolant pressure boundary, has a flange for connection to the vessel head, and contains connections for the hot legs, cold legs, and safety injection system. The reactor vessel is typically carbon steel with a stainless steel liner that is heat treated to reduce any stress at weld points. The reactor vessel is one of many things that fits within a containment.
I guess that you fail to consider that the "shitload" of CO2 (from all sources, including man-made) account for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So if 0.5% constitutes a "shitload", what would you call the other 99.5%?
And since you brought up observations of Mars and Venus, perhaps you can explain how the recent warming trend has also been detected on Mars? That would lead the cause of warming to be something the planets have in common - the Sun. Empirical measurements show solar output higher, so wouldn't you think that the most likely explanation would be the most logical one, rather than simple-minded "explanations" of processes that we don't nearly understand?
First, the Earth's atmosphere consists of about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and trace other gases (including water of about 0.5% and CO2 of about 0.05%). Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, oxygen is not a greenhouse gas, and argon is not a greenhouse gas. Thus, of the 32 K greenhouse effect, CO2 plays a very important role. Water is the dominant greenhouse gas, but it primarily serves to amplify the effect of other greenhouse gases since warmer air can hold more water. Additionally, water isn't as significant as it may appear (having a tenfold higher concentration than CO2) because it will precipitate out at colder elevations. Thus, CO2 and methane are the primary greenhouse gases that are really driving the greenhouse effect (with their effect amplified by the water vapour).
Second, the possible effects of a slight increase in solar intensity have been noted. They are too small to account for the increase in atmospheric temperature if they exist. And even the largest potential effect could only account for about a quarter of the warming that has been observed.
Climate change isn't the theory. It is the effect. The theory is that greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the atmosphere of a planet. This has been well tested with small scale experiments and large scale observations (such as observing the atmospheric composition and temperatures of Mars and Venus). There are a lot of details that go into climate change, but the general idea is very common sense:
Step 1: Shine some light in the visible spectrum on an object through a gas that doesn't absorb a huge amount of energy at most of those wavelengths (for example, from any random object that you might see that has a 5780 K blackbody temperature). Step 2: Choose an appropriate gas (like CO2 or methane) that will absorb a lot of energy from the blackbody emissions of that object (Stefan's Law). Step 3: Watch the temperature of that gas rise.
Do you get the gist? It isn't rocket science. If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Greenhouse gases aren't a concern because they reflect sunlight, they are a concern because they reflect infrared. The Sun emits in the visible spectrum because its surface has a temperature of about 6000 K. The Earth's surface has a temperature of about 300 K, thus it emits infrared.
If the Ares I design is to be replaced, it would be by the Delta IV Heavy, not the Falcon 9 Heavy. The Delta IV Heavy is already flying, its payload fairing size is an almost perfect fit for the Orion spacecraft, and it uses the RS-68s that are planned to be used on the Ares V. NASA would also be extremely skeptical of the Falcon 9 Heavy because it would be using a total of 27 Merlin engines in its first stage! The failures of the N1 rocket (with 30 engines) would make any high engine rocket a tough sell. The Falcon 9 may work, but I'd be very surprised if the Falcon 9 Heavy is ever built. Man-rating a rocket like that would be well-nigh impossible.
There are going to be setbacks. Mistakes will be made. For the most part these rocket surgeons do the job, on time.
Personally, I'd like to see them re-engineer the Saturn V. Didn't it run linux?
Why should we worry about setbacks? The Delta IV Heavy is launching just fine and could have easily done the job. All that they would have had to do would be the man-rating of the spacecraft and the redesign of the fairing. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy has a lot of upgrade potential. Cross feeding propellant and adding additional strap-on boosters could easily double its capacity. And should I also mention that you can shut off the engines on the Delta IV if you have a problem (which might be convenient when you are transporting humans who don't like to explode when malfunctions occur).
You also have a conceptual error. The problem is with the Ares I, not the Ares V. The Ares I is a crappy 25 tonne rocket that is being built because it will provide pork to Utah. The Ares V, which also supplies pork to Utah, is the 130 tonne ultra heavy lift rocket that is in the same class as the Saturn V.
Speaking as a physicist, physical insight is always increased when you look at a broader problem. Studying cyclones only on the Earth is like trying to understand gravity while limiting your observations to distances between the ground and the height of a tree. You can come up with a great linear gravitational potential function, but you will never understand the physical significance of gravity. Only when you look at the broader problem do you begin to understand how gravity actually works. From there you can make assumptions, develop the math, and use it as a stepping stone to jumpstart other ideas, like classical electrodynamics (which itself provided the stepping stone for the complete rewrite of gravitational theory).
The benefits of studying weather patterns and geology outside of the narrow range that we observe on the Earth could be enormous. By observing the bizarre, we might be able to gain some insight into the mundane. These cyclones are a perfect chance. We have a pretty good idea on how cyclones work on the Earth, but the cyclones on Saturn are a mystery. By unraveling how these cyclones work, it should be possible to make a much more robust theory on how all cyclones will work.
A 40 KW nuclear reactor is about the tiniest nuclear reactor imaginable. I'm sure NASA isn't considering it because of its power density or its mass. Each one of the solar panel assemblies on the ISS could potentially generate 32 KW. The problem is the 28 day lunar 'day.' Solar power plants on the moon will see a significant drop in power during the lunar night (about 100% of rated power at most locations except perhaps the poles). Therefore, long duration missions would require batteries. Supplying 40 KW for 14 days would require massive batteries (and also more than 80 KW of solar arrays). Based on my back of the envelope calculations, you would need something about 3 times the size of the Fairbanks Battery Backup. Additionally, nuclear power is more scalable. Knowledge gained with operating tiny nuclear reactors on the Moon could also be used with larger reactors that far outstrip any potential competition by solar power.
You are correct when you note that the melting of sea ice isn't the primary method that will cause sea levels to rise. In this century, the main reason that sea levels will rise will be due to the thermal expansion of the oceans. But in the next century, it is expected that the melting of the ice cover over Greenland and Antarctica will have a significant effect.
The main fear over losing sea ice, especially over the North Pole, is that it will reduce the salinity in the oceans and partially disrupt certain thermohaline circulations. The largest worry is that the Gulf Stream will reduce and rapidly cause an extensive regional climate change in northern Europe. Ireland and the UK would be hit the hardest since they have latitudes over 50 degrees.
How did this comment get modded +5? It didn't once talk about actual timescales or carrying capacity. Do Slashdot moderators really know this little about how the planet will respond to global warming?
Yes, as the CO2 concentrations increase, plant respiration will become more efficient and some locations will see denser plant growth. But at the same time, some of the most efficient places on Earth for plant life will become converted to grasslands or deserts, releasing their stored carbon by plant decay. And the rapid rise in CO2 will also cause acidification in the oceans which will counteract much of the positive gains in biomass due to temperature rises. But in any case, these numbers are really insignificant. There is about 600 Gt of carbon in all of the biomass on the planet. There is about 760 Gt in the atmosphere. There is about 37,000 Gt dissolved in the oceans. There is about 10,000,000 Gt stored in sediments on the ocean floor. And there is about 40,000,000 Gt stored in limestone.
Any description of changes in CO2 needs to take into account all three carbon cycles: the organic carbon cycle, the inorganic carbon cycle, and the geochemical carbon cycle. To the climate scientists who have actually done the calculations with knowledge of all three cycles, there is virtually no support that plants and algae are going to have any significant effect. The consensus is that the method that CO2 will eventually be removed is by slow sedimentation. The efficiency of this will be slightly reduced by increased weathering of carbonates and will be almost completely unaffected by the organic carbon cycle. The timescale for optimists is several thousands of years.
Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand. Science is full of unexplained holes that theories postulate answers for. 500+ years ago scientists thought the earth was flat. Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding. My 2 cents.
There was a brief period after the loss of Greek natural philosophy from ~500 to ~1000 CE that some (but not all) Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat. Other than that, the only time that some prominent Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat was prior to Socrates. On the other hand, Chinese philosophers believed the Earth was flat until the 17th century.
It is important to note that Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophy had a significant effect on people believing that the Earth was a sphere. It is not an understatement to say that Aristotelian cosmology and its derivatives were the dominant cosmologies over the last 2,500 years of human history. And those forms of cosmology cannot work without a spherical Earth.
This entire flat-Earth argument was invented in the 19th century to try to make it look like our ancestors were idiots during the "Dark Ages." It has been discredited many times. I strongly suggest you read this entry as well as studying Aristotelian cosmology (and how medieval scholars and clergy interpreted it) to understand how many of ancestors thought about the universe.
And how do you propose we convince every non computer geek in the world that this is a good idea? Further are you going to pay for the math classes virtually everyone will need?
Your idea fails the mom test miserably...
I'm not proposing to do so. I only said I'd prefer it. In any case, the only way you can do a smooth transition is to train people on both systems until the people who won't/can't learn the new system die out. Humans have gone through many different systems from base-4, base-8, base-10, base-12, and even base-60. We have settled on base-10 even though it has no significant advantages over many other systems.
Converting to another base is significantly more difficult than converting unit systems and it would probably take a century or more to complete if it were desired. But in any case, I'm not going to say that it is impossible (your 'mom' argument by ignorance). It is possible to use more than one numeral system as anybody that has learned to look at a non-digital clock or measured in degrees/minutes/seconds knows.
Why does dividing by 10 matter so much, anyway? Because you have 10 fingers?
Because we use a base 10 counting system for most calculations. Having a measurement system that is highly compatible with the numeral system most humans use makes sense.
Really, we should be trying to move to a system of measure that is base 2.
Really? Go ahead and tell your mother you came 1011 miles to see her - I'm sure she'll be impressed.
I'd prefer that we used a hexadecimal system. It is large enough for brevity but also can readily be converted to binary for simplicity. The only advantage a base-10 system has over hexadecimal is that most people have 10_(10) fingers so they know how to count to 10_(10). If they were smart, they'd know how to count to 0x3FF (1023_(10)).
Pick up the Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. The lab manual might also be helpful. The Art of Electronics is basically the electronics Bible for physicists and a popular introductory text for electrical engineers.
For technical electronics work (like soldering or cable assembly) you will probably want to find a specific book (the Navy electronics manuals would be very helpful).
I'm pretty sure the laws of physics require that nuclear waste be less energetic than nuclear fuel. That is a poor phrasing. Yes, if you take into account the binding energy per nucleon of iron and take the difference with something like U-235, nuclear fuel will have more stored energy than nuclear waste (which will be in between on the graph). This is one of the reasons that nuclides like U-235 are used as nuclear fuel.
But this is a poor descriptor of what people care about when they talk about waste. What is important is the activity which is defined as A = lambda * N, where lambda = ln 2 / t_1/2 and N is the number of atoms of a certain isotope. The activity tells you how many decays are occurring per second. As the half-life gets longer, the activity drops. U-235 has a half-life of ~700 million years. U-238 has a half-life of over 4 billion years. Co-60 has a half-life of only 5 years. This means that if you produce 60 g of Co-60 in your core, you would have to have 30000 tonnes of U-235 to have the same activity (not that your core would ever use 100% U-235 or even 10% U-235). Those 60 g of Co-60 or 30000 tonnes of U-235 would have an activity of 70000 curies. This is just one nuclide. In a real core, the activity of the middle-term and long-term fission products rapidly becomes larger than that of the initial fuel.
I have always liked to run my xterms with white (0xffffff) as the foreground and blue4 (0x00008b) as the background. If you have an X server running, check it out with: xterm -bg blue4 -fg white&. I always have it aliased by default.
I especially like this scheme when I have to look at code for hours at a time.
Does anybody know why the *GREEN* NYC logo is not... err... green? So it will go with the black background on the web site. Though technically, due to the infinity symbol, it should be blue.
Let's see... William Shatner has the ability to randomly pause; if you roll a 13 on a 13-sided die, he pauses and in spite of looking ridiculous, he is miraculously unharmed by any attacks for an entire round. Also, every round, he gains experience points through sleeping with every non-human female currently in play.
:-D
Actually it isn't a pause, it is a timestop spell that was put on Kirk by Charlie Evans when he wouldn't give into Charlie's pleas and let a Thasian ship take him away. At any time Kirk speaks a 5+D10 second timestop spell is randomly cast (intelligence save every 5 seconds) which always confuses the hell out of him. This is why it always appears that he is rushing to catch up with what he said before 'pauses'.
The human body is not a machine, and we cannot even come close to mimicking one, let alone thousands to millions. Why isn't the human body a machine? I'll grant that we can't mimic it but that doesn't mean that the systems of the body aren't mechanical in nature. Would you argue against using titanium rods to help with fractures, the use of plastic joints to replace failed joints, or other technologies that attempt to repair some mechanical failure in the body (including the use of micro-robots to perform surgery)?
On a more ethical standpoint, being interested in Medicine and Machines myself, I feel this is going in the opposite direction of what I hope for medicine. Distancing doctors from patients, and life from reality may prove a nasty combo. Ethical? I'm not sure that word means what you think it means. You are advocating an almost superstitious view of how medicine should work. I'd be curious which ethical theory you are using to suggest that our modern advances in medicine are going in the wrong direction.
I think the first solution should be to rush into production the superconducting electric grid part of the Grid 2030 project
I don't think this is realistic with current technology (although I haven't been keeping an eye on what is state of the art).
Superconductors are limited in the amount of current they can carry. IIRC high temperature superconductors are particularly poor in this respect as well as not forming very good wires. But liquid He is so expensive, rare, and energy costly to produce that "normal" temperature superconductors aren't going to be efficient either.
Tim. The Albany Project (pdf) used a high temperature superconductor that was cooled with liquid nitrogen and the cable was able to carry a significant load (several times higher than that of conventional high voltage cables).
Once costs are the same as that of power from the grid then people will use this. It will help the environment and energy security. The only worry is that peak power production will still have to deal with night-time demand. We need to look at efficient, cheap energy storage. I think the first solution should be to rush into production the superconducting electric grid part of the Grid 2030 project. Being able to efficiently transport power across the country would significantly increase the stability of the electric grid which would allow more solar and other renewable energy projects to come online. This would also be a lot cheaper efficiency-wise and capital-wise than the massive civil engineering projects that will be required for pumped storage. It would also give a lot more flexibility in the use of peaking plants for nighttime use. Until an efficient electric grid is implemented where you can easily and economically transport electricity thousands of kilometers (such as with a high voltage DC grid or a superconducting electric grid) you are still going to need tons of local peaking plants and your renewable energy plants (excluding hydropower) are only going to occasionally cut into the load of your base load plants which will make them less economical. The Albany superconducting line seems to be working well so it is time that a larger system is implemented.
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You seem to be living in the fantasy world that everyone is strong and should be able to take punishment.
People are weak. They don't know how to cope. But they are still human beings and worthy of being cared for and protected. We should be outraged that this poor gay kid was driven to suicide.
This case is different that secretly filming your roommate having straight sex for exactly those reasons. Dharum Ravi exploited Tyler Clementi when he spied on him. He exploited his fears and insecurities.
Don't consider crimes like black boxes. The entire circumstances matter. The motives matter. Society had a role, no doubt. Tyler Clementi lamented that people on Ravi's twitter feed were disgusted by Clementi's relationship but not one of them called out Ravi and said that what he was doing was wrong. More than anything else, this is probably what drove him to suicide. He saw people unanimously disgusted by him with no defenders or anyone who opposed his privacy being violated. He had no faith that even if he changed roommates that conditions would get better. Think about that before you call him a coward again you fucking asshole.
Atheism is a religion. Atheism has everything in common with other religions. Set beliefs, morality, purpose in life, etc. Agnosticism is not a religion because it has no definite beliefs, morality or purpose. Atheism does.
No, the key difference is that religions appeal to the supernatural or some true essence to explain the universe, while atheism appeals only to the natural world. Atheism does not require some Daddy figure (or figures) nor does it need some essentialist background. It rejects those. Its beliefs are based on logic, something religions can't claim (except coincidentally).
If you read the article, you'd realize it was a very significant wake up call. Death was narrowly avoided because the reactor containment vessel was over-engineered compared to the typical design.
Are you talking about the reactor vessel or the containment? These are different things. The containment is designed to keep fission fragments from being released to the public following a design basis accident. It is typically a hemispherical shell made of about a 5 ft thickness of reinforced concrete attached to a concrete base mat and lined with a stainless steel shell. The reactor vessel simply houses the core, forms part of the primary coolant pressure boundary, has a flange for connection to the vessel head, and contains connections for the hot legs, cold legs, and safety injection system. The reactor vessel is typically carbon steel with a stainless steel liner that is heat treated to reduce any stress at weld points. The reactor vessel is one of many things that fits within a containment.
I guess that you fail to consider that the "shitload" of CO2 (from all sources, including man-made) account for a tiny fraction of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. So if 0.5% constitutes a "shitload", what would you call the other 99.5%?
And since you brought up observations of Mars and Venus, perhaps you can explain how the recent warming trend has also been detected on Mars? That would lead the cause of warming to be something the planets have in common - the Sun. Empirical measurements show solar output higher, so wouldn't you think that the most likely explanation would be the most logical one, rather than simple-minded "explanations" of processes that we don't nearly understand?
First, the Earth's atmosphere consists of about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% argon, and trace other gases (including water of about 0.5% and CO2 of about 0.05%). Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas, oxygen is not a greenhouse gas, and argon is not a greenhouse gas. Thus, of the 32 K greenhouse effect, CO2 plays a very important role. Water is the dominant greenhouse gas, but it primarily serves to amplify the effect of other greenhouse gases since warmer air can hold more water. Additionally, water isn't as significant as it may appear (having a tenfold higher concentration than CO2) because it will precipitate out at colder elevations. Thus, CO2 and methane are the primary greenhouse gases that are really driving the greenhouse effect (with their effect amplified by the water vapour).
Second, the possible effects of a slight increase in solar intensity have been noted. They are too small to account for the increase in atmospheric temperature if they exist. And even the largest potential effect could only account for about a quarter of the warming that has been observed.
Climate change isn't the theory. It is the effect. The theory is that greenhouse gases raise the temperature of the atmosphere of a planet. This has been well tested with small scale experiments and large scale observations (such as observing the atmospheric composition and temperatures of Mars and Venus). There are a lot of details that go into climate change, but the general idea is very common sense:
Step 1: Shine some light in the visible spectrum on an object through a gas that doesn't absorb a huge amount of energy at most of those wavelengths (for example, from any random object that you might see that has a 5780 K blackbody temperature).
Step 2: Choose an appropriate gas (like CO2 or methane) that will absorb a lot of energy from the blackbody emissions of that object (Stefan's Law).
Step 3: Watch the temperature of that gas rise.
Do you get the gist? It isn't rocket science. If you add a shitload of CO2 to the atmosphere, the temperature of the surface of the planet is going to rise.
Greenhouse gases aren't a concern because they reflect sunlight, they are a concern because they reflect infrared. The Sun emits in the visible spectrum because its surface has a temperature of about 6000 K. The Earth's surface has a temperature of about 300 K, thus it emits infrared.
If the Ares I design is to be replaced, it would be by the Delta IV Heavy, not the Falcon 9 Heavy. The Delta IV Heavy is already flying, its payload fairing size is an almost perfect fit for the Orion spacecraft, and it uses the RS-68s that are planned to be used on the Ares V. NASA would also be extremely skeptical of the Falcon 9 Heavy because it would be using a total of 27 Merlin engines in its first stage! The failures of the N1 rocket (with 30 engines) would make any high engine rocket a tough sell. The Falcon 9 may work, but I'd be very surprised if the Falcon 9 Heavy is ever built. Man-rating a rocket like that would be well-nigh impossible.
They did lose a crew. Apollo I during pad testing.
The Apollo 1 fatalities were not due to the rocket. Additionally, Apollo 1 wasn't mounted on a Saturn V, so the comparison is moot.
There are going to be setbacks. Mistakes will be made. For the most part these rocket surgeons do the job, on time.
Personally, I'd like to see them re-engineer the Saturn V. Didn't it run linux?
Why should we worry about setbacks? The Delta IV Heavy is launching just fine and could have easily done the job. All that they would have had to do would be the man-rating of the spacecraft and the redesign of the fairing. Additionally, the Delta IV Heavy has a lot of upgrade potential. Cross feeding propellant and adding additional strap-on boosters could easily double its capacity. And should I also mention that you can shut off the engines on the Delta IV if you have a problem (which might be convenient when you are transporting humans who don't like to explode when malfunctions occur).
You also have a conceptual error. The problem is with the Ares I, not the Ares V. The Ares I is a crappy 25 tonne rocket that is being built because it will provide pork to Utah. The Ares V, which also supplies pork to Utah, is the 130 tonne ultra heavy lift rocket that is in the same class as the Saturn V.
Speaking as a physicist, physical insight is always increased when you look at a broader problem. Studying cyclones only on the Earth is like trying to understand gravity while limiting your observations to distances between the ground and the height of a tree. You can come up with a great linear gravitational potential function, but you will never understand the physical significance of gravity. Only when you look at the broader problem do you begin to understand how gravity actually works. From there you can make assumptions, develop the math, and use it as a stepping stone to jumpstart other ideas, like classical electrodynamics (which itself provided the stepping stone for the complete rewrite of gravitational theory).
The benefits of studying weather patterns and geology outside of the narrow range that we observe on the Earth could be enormous. By observing the bizarre, we might be able to gain some insight into the mundane. These cyclones are a perfect chance. We have a pretty good idea on how cyclones work on the Earth, but the cyclones on Saturn are a mystery. By unraveling how these cyclones work, it should be possible to make a much more robust theory on how all cyclones will work.
A 40 KW nuclear reactor is about the tiniest nuclear reactor imaginable. I'm sure NASA isn't considering it because of its power density or its mass. Each one of the solar panel assemblies on the ISS could potentially generate 32 KW. The problem is the 28 day lunar 'day.' Solar power plants on the moon will see a significant drop in power during the lunar night (about 100% of rated power at most locations except perhaps the poles). Therefore, long duration missions would require batteries. Supplying 40 KW for 14 days would require massive batteries (and also more than 80 KW of solar arrays). Based on my back of the envelope calculations, you would need something about 3 times the size of the Fairbanks Battery Backup. Additionally, nuclear power is more scalable. Knowledge gained with operating tiny nuclear reactors on the Moon could also be used with larger reactors that far outstrip any potential competition by solar power.
You are correct when you note that the melting of sea ice isn't the primary method that will cause sea levels to rise. In this century, the main reason that sea levels will rise will be due to the thermal expansion of the oceans. But in the next century, it is expected that the melting of the ice cover over Greenland and Antarctica will have a significant effect.
The main fear over losing sea ice, especially over the North Pole, is that it will reduce the salinity in the oceans and partially disrupt certain thermohaline circulations. The largest worry is that the Gulf Stream will reduce and rapidly cause an extensive regional climate change in northern Europe. Ireland and the UK would be hit the hardest since they have latitudes over 50 degrees.
How did this comment get modded +5? It didn't once talk about actual timescales or carrying capacity. Do Slashdot moderators really know this little about how the planet will respond to global warming?
Yes, as the CO2 concentrations increase, plant respiration will become more efficient and some locations will see denser plant growth. But at the same time, some of the most efficient places on Earth for plant life will become converted to grasslands or deserts, releasing their stored carbon by plant decay. And the rapid rise in CO2 will also cause acidification in the oceans which will counteract much of the positive gains in biomass due to temperature rises. But in any case, these numbers are really insignificant. There is about 600 Gt of carbon in all of the biomass on the planet. There is about 760 Gt in the atmosphere. There is about 37,000 Gt dissolved in the oceans. There is about 10,000,000 Gt stored in sediments on the ocean floor. And there is about 40,000,000 Gt stored in limestone.
Any description of changes in CO2 needs to take into account all three carbon cycles: the organic carbon cycle, the inorganic carbon cycle, and the geochemical carbon cycle. To the climate scientists who have actually done the calculations with knowledge of all three cycles, there is virtually no support that plants and algae are going to have any significant effect. The consensus is that the method that CO2 will eventually be removed is by slow sedimentation. The efficiency of this will be slightly reduced by increased weathering of carbonates and will be almost completely unaffected by the organic carbon cycle. The timescale for optimists is several thousands of years.
Really? For science I rather find the more we understand, the more we realize we don't understand. Science is full of unexplained holes that theories postulate answers for. 500+ years ago scientists thought the earth was flat. Scientific theories only hold out until something else comes along with more facts that change our understanding. My 2 cents.
There was a brief period after the loss of Greek natural philosophy from ~500 to ~1000 CE that some (but not all) Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat. Other than that, the only time that some prominent Western natural philosophers thought the Earth was flat was prior to Socrates. On the other hand, Chinese philosophers believed the Earth was flat until the 17th century.
It is important to note that Platonic and Aristotelian natural philosophy had a significant effect on people believing that the Earth was a sphere. It is not an understatement to say that Aristotelian cosmology and its derivatives were the dominant cosmologies over the last 2,500 years of human history. And those forms of cosmology cannot work without a spherical Earth.
This entire flat-Earth argument was invented in the 19th century to try to make it look like our ancestors were idiots during the "Dark Ages." It has been discredited many times. I strongly suggest you read this entry as well as studying Aristotelian cosmology (and how medieval scholars and clergy interpreted it) to understand how many of ancestors thought about the universe.
I'd prefer that we used a hexadecimal system.
And how do you propose we convince every non computer geek in the world that this is a good idea? Further are you going to pay for the math classes virtually everyone will need?
Your idea fails the mom test miserably...
I'm not proposing to do so. I only said I'd prefer it. In any case, the only way you can do a smooth transition is to train people on both systems until the people who won't/can't learn the new system die out. Humans have gone through many different systems from base-4, base-8, base-10, base-12, and even base-60. We have settled on base-10 even though it has no significant advantages over many other systems.
Converting to another base is significantly more difficult than converting unit systems and it would probably take a century or more to complete if it were desired. But in any case, I'm not going to say that it is impossible (your 'mom' argument by ignorance). It is possible to use more than one numeral system as anybody that has learned to look at a non-digital clock or measured in degrees/minutes/seconds knows.
Why does dividing by 10 matter so much, anyway? Because you have 10 fingers?
Because we use a base 10 counting system for most calculations. Having a measurement system that is highly compatible with the numeral system most humans use makes sense.
Really, we should be trying to move to a system of measure that is base 2.
Really? Go ahead and tell your mother you came 1011 miles to see her - I'm sure she'll be impressed.
I'd prefer that we used a hexadecimal system. It is large enough for brevity but also can readily be converted to binary for simplicity. The only advantage a base-10 system has over hexadecimal is that most people have 10_(10) fingers so they know how to count to 10_(10). If they were smart, they'd know how to count to 0x3FF (1023_(10)).
Pick up the Art of Electronics by Horowitz and Hill. The lab manual might also be helpful. The Art of Electronics is basically the electronics Bible for physicists and a popular introductory text for electrical engineers.
For technical electronics work (like soldering or cable assembly) you will probably want to find a specific book (the Navy electronics manuals would be very helpful).
But this is a poor descriptor of what people care about when they talk about waste. What is important is the activity which is defined as A = lambda * N, where lambda = ln 2 / t_1/2 and N is the number of atoms of a certain isotope. The activity tells you how many decays are occurring per second. As the half-life gets longer, the activity drops. U-235 has a half-life of ~700 million years. U-238 has a half-life of over 4 billion years. Co-60 has a half-life of only 5 years. This means that if you produce 60 g of Co-60 in your core, you would have to have 30000 tonnes of U-235 to have the same activity (not that your core would ever use 100% U-235 or even 10% U-235). Those 60 g of Co-60 or 30000 tonnes of U-235 would have an activity of 70000 curies. This is just one nuclide. In a real core, the activity of the middle-term and long-term fission products rapidly becomes larger than that of the initial fuel.
I have always liked to run my xterms with white (0xffffff) as the foreground and blue4 (0x00008b) as the background. If you have an X server running, check it out with: xterm -bg blue4 -fg white&. I always have it aliased by default.
I especially like this scheme when I have to look at code for hours at a time.
Let's see... William Shatner has the ability to randomly pause; if you roll a 13 on a 13-sided die, he pauses and in spite of looking ridiculous, he is miraculously unharmed by any attacks for an entire round. Also, every round, he gains experience points through sleeping with every non-human female currently in play.
:-D
Actually it isn't a pause, it is a timestop spell that was put on Kirk by Charlie Evans when he wouldn't give into Charlie's pleas and let a Thasian ship take him away. At any time Kirk speaks a 5+D10 second timestop spell is randomly cast (intelligence save every 5 seconds) which always confuses the hell out of him. This is why it always appears that he is rushing to catch up with what he said before 'pauses'.Next story, please. That is only because you failed your Will save. Much like a tarrasque, she has a Frightful Presence.
I don't think this is realistic with current technology (although I haven't been keeping an eye on what is state of the art).
Superconductors are limited in the amount of current they can carry. IIRC high temperature superconductors are particularly poor in this respect as well as not forming very good wires. But liquid He is so expensive, rare, and energy costly to produce that "normal" temperature superconductors aren't going to be efficient either.
Tim. The Albany Project (pdf) used a high temperature superconductor that was cooled with liquid nitrogen and the cable was able to carry a significant load (several times higher than that of conventional high voltage cables).