So the difference comes down to the differences between the environmental impact of growing bamboo versus spinning fiberglass versus making carbon fiber.
Nicely done summary; succinct and to the point. Needs some expansion, though.
Growing bamboo: Removes CO2 from the atmosphere at a fast rate. With many techniques, there will be a net removal of CO2 for the complete manufacturing process.
Spinning fiberglass: Of itself, is carbon neutral. However the energy needed to melt the glass almost always comes from a CO2 producing industry (very little renewably sourced energy is used in making glass)
Making carbon fiber: The process itself produces a lot of CO2. The energy used in the processing comes almost entirely from fossil fuels.
Also note that the carbon in epoxied bamboo fiber materials is effectively sequestered for a few hundred years, even as it sits in landfills.
If you count older, simpler models, then yes: probably most climate models suggest more deserts. But if you ignore the models that were running on the limited computers of twenty years ago and look only at models that are still actually being used, then the story is very different.
However we already have seen that those models are too simplistic, this is no longer a matter of comparing one model to another. The reality is that the increase in both the number and severity of storms demonstrates that there is a lot more water in the atmosphere. It is the state changes of this water-- between vapor and droplets and ice-- that drives storms.
Now is there any way that author of parent post can convince me that he is not a shill for the oil interests or some other industry invested in maintaining the status quo? I'm willing to listen to that argument.
Do you really think all that water is going to stay in the oceans?
The rise in sea level has already increased the size of tide flats and salt marshes. Which are evaporation basins. Expect an increase in atmospheric water, some as vapor (which is a potent greenhouse gas) and some as cloud (increasing the Earth's albedo). How those opposing factors will play out is anyone's guess.
But this much is obvious: the increase in atmospheric water is going to increase PRECIPITATION! The worst flood damage from the loss of Antarctic ice is going to be inland, with destruction of cities and infrastructure from flooding rivers.
What about Fox, BBC, and all the other news shows?
So CNN is trying something new and risky by focusing all its assets on one story? Can you not just change the channel every now and then to get the other news of the day?
Let's see where this goes rather than bitching and moaning because CNN has broken free from the herd and is doing something the other news companies aren't doing. Maybe CNN is pioneering a new and better approach. Maybe they are just another pioneer that dies lost in the desert. Either way, everyone will learn something.
I don't watch CNN so I have no idea how sensationalized their coverage has been. HOWEVER any time you have several nations devoting so much of their resources in a joint effort that was cobbled together as rapidly as their response has been, that IS a major story. CNN was definitely doing the right thing in getting on this, and in following it.
That said, so far they may have missed much of the significance of what was happening. When elements of the USA armed forces and the Chinese armed forces act jointly under the direction of Australia, yes, there are definitely stories there. It might be that CNN missed the boat on where the focus should be. Or it might be that they have been preparing documentary coverage behind the scenes, while using the day to day "infotainment" coverage to pay the enormous daily costs of developing the larger, more noteworthy, stories.
I expect that in the upcoming months we will see a documentary or two describing how a multinational search effort was thrown together on a moment's notice. I think there must have been some fancy dancing going on between Generals and Admirals of different nations, and CNN has-- probably deliberately-- positioned its news-gathering assets where they can document the events as they were happening.
the physics prof who said cosmology was like biology before Darwin (in the post I was originally responding to in this thread), was just projecting?
The original quote:
"Cosmology is as mature as botany was before Darwin."
I have no idea what was meant by that. My suspicion is that the professor provided enough context in his lecture that these nine words conveyed a distinct meaning, but we don't have that context here and I won't speculate on what the intended meaning might have been.
To generalize my earlier statement: there are some things about the way the Universe is put together that are impossible to understand, and that has to be accepted. We can deal with this by recognizing that physics (and all sciences) create simplified mental models of reality that we can then play with to our hearts' content. Some of our models are well enough constructed that some of our playmates-- the engineers-- can build marvelous things. But don't confuse our ability to build castles made of sand with an understanding of what sand is. The best we can do is replace one crude model with another that is maybe a little less crude, but is still just a model; just a bunch of thoughts in the head that have no direct relationship to whatever is Out There.
You handle these by stating the blatantly obvious, that these phenomena are currently outside the realms physics works with, and then you move on.
Hell, physics cannot even handle ancient problems that are cracks in the bedrock of all western science. What is the reason that Pi is irrational (and don't just site one of the many different definitions of Pi as the reason: that is simply crippling your critical thinking ability with a blind belief in one or another tautology).
We live in a universe that we not only do not understand, but which we are innately incapable of ever completely understanding. So sayeth the Copenhagen convention on which much of modern physics is constructed: the best we can do is make simplified models and play with them. So get over it, and praise the engineers for being too concrete in their modes of thinking to be deterred by these impossibilities. For without the ability to occasionally say "in this situation, 3 is a good enough approximation of Pi", nothing would ever get built.
Doesn't physics have to come to terms with big issues like time and the fact that the laws of thermodynamics are statistical and show violations (fluctuation theorem, conservation of energy violated by dark energy and photons losing energy as they redshift)?
I don't see why. Sure, any theory of everything would have to account for that, and also answer the question of whether sacred cows fart in a sacred manner.
But we can do perfectly fine with multiple branches of physics that stay away from that problem, where each branch deals with only some aspects of reality. So long as we are mindful of the limitations of each mindset, and respect the ambiguous nature of the borders where one kind of physics butts up against some other kind, we have more than enough to play with to satisfy any theoretician. Within one problem space, we've got Newtonian physics which works peachy-keen. In another problem space we've got quantum mechanics. For the most part we only have to switch between one and the other without having to try to fit them together.
That sometimes means having to learn to dance really fast between different realities when trying to work close to that ambiguous border between two different physics. But with some training, the human mind is capable of some really fast footwork. For the most part, we can razzle-dazzle the problems well enough for the engineers to work with the results, being as how engineers go about doing their thing in relatively crude ways. ("At this scale, Pi is approximately 3", "Whether the glass is half full or half empty is beside the point: what is important is that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.") And it is the engineering that we live with. That is what flushes the toilets and puts things in orbit. So long as the branches of physics we play with in our minds support the engineers who make modern life liveable, it is all good.
As parent post points out, the insurance industry is HUGE, one of the largest industries in the USA.
And yet, insurance produces nothing: it is not manufacture. It does not provide services that facilitate manufacture, transport of goods, or merchant affairs. The insurance industry does nothing except provide a means for you to bet against yourself; it is an abased form of gambling that contributes not one penny toward creating wealth.
Since the government cannot outlaw it, the government should have total control over it. Being as how the insurance industry is the greatest threat to capitalism that the USA has ever faced, and one of the basic tenets of the USA government is that it should guard capitalism against threats.
The barycenter of any planet and the Sun is far outside the planet's surface. Excepting Jupiter, whose barycenter with the Sun is approximately coincident with the Sun's surface, the barycenters are all deep within the Sun.
This means that the solar induced tides, no matter what their strength might be, do not perturb the planet's orbit. Nor do they distort the planet's shape to the degree that lunar tides distort the Earth's shape (and significantly perturb its solar orbit).
The study of geologic processes on Earth will continue to be significantly incomplete until it is recognized that the Earth and Moon function as a binary planet. Not as bodies that can be understood in isolation.
One would think that the International Astronomy Union and other professional organizations of astronomers would recognize this, but-- alas-- their heads appear to be too full of empty space to concern themselves with what is going on beneath their feet.
No, you have not missed anything. You are parroting the "logic" of the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union. This is a true committee of fifteen members whose job it has been to decide on definitions of words. There was and is no science here. Nor was there any logic based on science; the logic was that of taxonomy: making pigeonholes to classify stuff. Nor was logic used in making the final determinations; what the pigeonholes were to be called was decided by vote. It was a "let's make new words" party, having nothing to do with astronomy, geology, or selenology. (See? It is both easy and fun to add words to the pseudoscientific jargon. Even scientists can do it!)
The Moon is considered a moon as the barycentre is within the Earth.
The barycenter of the Earth-Moon binary system (and that is a legitimate phrase) is always 1,000 miles below the lithosphere of the Earth, and 3,000 miles above the Earth's core. Quito, Equador, is a city on the equator. When there is a lunar eclipse on either the Spring or Autumn equinox at Quito, an interplanetary voyager arriving from Mars would find that Quito was 1,500 miles closer to the Sun than usual, but 12 hours earlier or later it was almost 1,500 miles further from the Sun than the navigator's first order approximation*. The communications officer of that interplanerary ship had better take into account the way the Earth spins about the barycenter of the binary system if he is to stay in laser beam contact with the Quito space port.
More significantly over the Earth's history is that its rotation around the barycenter raises tides. Not just the noticeable ones in the hydrophere, but large ones in the various layers of the atmosphere, and smaller, but significant, ones in the lithosphere. Geology has yet to develop an effective model on how the tidal strains on the lithosphere affect plate tectonics. But there can be little question that significant tidal forces are at work, alternately stretching and compressing faults.
In retrospect, what this august body of astronomers should probably have done is given their naming problem over to the experts who have recognized degrees in the appropriate field of study: these kinds of taxonomic decisions are better left to the linguists and other language experts. There are probably very few astronomers who have done any study of language arts at all. No wonder they bungled the thing so badly. They probably did not even know they were not doing astronomy any more.
*
I would not mind having someone check my geometry here. I think the difference is actually 3,000 miles (displacement of the Earth's center from the barycenter) but I'm going with the more conservative number.
Is it surprising that there is a difference in the behavioral history of a single planet and a similar planet that happens to be part of a binary planet system?
Hint: Venus does not have tides; has never had tides. Earth tides were a lot larger when Earth was young and the Moon was closer. They are still large enough to put a significant do-si-do waggle in the Earth's orbit about the Sun. Despite what dumb-ass astronomer conventions might say, when a satellite is so large that it deflects its primary from its orbit by 4,000 miles, you have a binary planet.
Why do so many Earth "scientists" fail to see that you cannot talk sensibly about Earth's mechanics without acknowledging the Moon's influence? Of course there is going to be a difference between the pot that sits on the stove undisturbed, and the one that is constantly stirred.
I guess a lot depends on what you define a "real camera" to be.
For me, any camera body + lens combo that costs more than $750 is unrealistic. That's more than I can afford to replace if I lose it while kayaking. I'm happy with bridge cameras, and there are advantages in being able to go from wide angle to telephoto without swapping lenses. It does mean that you have to rely on the firmware for narrow DOF, etc-- but it is a reasonable trade-off.
Quality bridge cameras ($300+ models) also have the ability to mimic a narrow depth of field. That can be very useful in wedding party photography, etc, where capturing candid portrait shots is critical to the photographer's success, and he will not have time to swap between lenses on his DSLR.
On my Fuji HS25EXR, the camera identifies the subject with its face recognition technology and takes 2 or 3 shots, The foreground is handled normally but the extra images are used to double or triple expose the background for the shallow DOF effect. Results are often quite good and can reduce the amount of post work by quite a bit.
Why would I want to ruin large parts of a good image with this effect?
Portrait photography.
Or any time when the presence of crap in the background degrades the photo. That candid picture of your Mom sharing a moment with your aunt would look great if it were not for the Ronald McDonald billboard in the background.
One advantage mentioned in TFA is that there are no combustibles in the ship's magazine. When you can treat your ammo the same way you treat the canned peaches, your ship has an incredible advantage over traditional warships.
Other advantages are longer range, simplified sight picture of a moving target (at 5,000 mph a truck 100 miles away is not going to move very far down the road), and pyrophoric behavior when depleted uranium is used in the projectile (in addition to the kinetic energy, you have the explosive behavior of releasing a burning hot cloud of uranium dust at the point of impact).
I'm guessing the muzzle flash is from part of the sabot. Maybe styrofoam peanuts, maybe a big coil of copper wire.
I'm not sure how much of this presentation has been photoshopped. The flight sequence doesn't look right-- if this was going at Mach 7, how come the background looks like something from an airplane at 100 mph?
I'm guessing the projectile is depleted uranium, judging by its behavior on impact. Is there anything new in the unclassified pages about the depleted uranium dust we deployed in Iraq during the Gulf War? Last I heard, the stuff was probably nasty, with effects lasting a decade or more.
Were they all played with the same catgut strings and horsehair bows? It isn't just the violin, you know.
I was once told that the best violin bows were made from seven year old palomino ponies who were in heat when the hairs were harvested. And the best violin strings were made from the guts of Upper East Side alley cats.
It might be escargot to some, but for me its just a mess of cooked snails.
On the contrary, there was lots of reason to suspect old code of being inefficient on new machines.
Much of that old code used clever techniques, highly rewarded when they were developed, to fit the software to the limitations of those ancient machines. When you have 48 K of core, and that is all you've got, you choose algorithms that can be written in tiny loops that will fit, and you use re-entrant techniques so that the code that is already in place for the date calculation can be re-used to calculate part of the return on investment, depending on the state of a one bit flag tucked into some other process. That could save seconds, or even minutes, by avoiding loading new code from tape. You optimize the size of the Hollerith card decks, to decrease the number of boxes that have to be hauled around on hand trucks, and the hours needed to read and compile the cards to tape.
It was much more important that the program could be compiled to tape in the 11 pm to 5:30 am time slot than how efficiently it would perform during the workday. Workday performance enhancements could be added in later revisions.
Above post proves that some persons are willing to pay a lot more for the same tools as those who use the best practices of resource management.
And that some people cannot make the distinction between effective workflows and good tools.
It is easy to be inefficient on a Linux box. Move that user to a Mac or Windows box, and a strange thing happens. He will be just as inefficient when measured by time. However he will be much more inefficient when measured by total cost of his output.
In conclusion, the easy way to increase the inefficiency in a workflow is to buy expensive computers for the most inefficient personnel. This stimulates the economy. The cost of this stimulation is borne by the companies that use this tactic and shows up as a decrease in competitive advantages. But it is all done for the greater glory of Apple and Microsoft so it is all good.
And yet, still doing the job and saving the company from the cost of purchasing a new(er) truck. Much as Win98 or even DOS boxes can save a ton of money in similar, specialized, situations. Which is why it is a good car analogy. For those who need car analogies.
There are lots of farms that use trucks that were new in the 1950s to haul stuff to and from the fields. I once had a summer job at a seed cleaning plant that used a 2 ton 1938 Ford flatbed truck to move pallets of grass seed from the cleaning operation to the warehouse, a quarter mile away. That truck had not been on a paved road in decades, first and third gear were shot, it was always parked on a hill at overnight because the starting motor was too weak to turn crank the cold engine; it had to be jump started in the morning. We routinely overloaded it with up to 8 tons, but it would chug between the two buildings at all of 5 mph.
Continuing to use WinXP or even Win98 in situations that require nothing more is a no brainer. When the hardware wears out, either placing an order with the local computer refurbisher for a rebuilt box of the same vintage, or jumping to Linux on a new box with the ancient OS and its apps running in a VM, would work just fine.
The magic words in parent post are "via VMware"). Running the original OS in a VM under a solid Linux distro is an inexpensive solution for many upgrade issues. The VM can be set up to keep the WinXP, Win98, or WinNT isolated from sources of infection while distros like RH/Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu have excellent patch and upgrade management systems.
In both cases, a possible low cost upgrade that would probably provide a fix good for a decade or two is to get contemporary hardware, install an industrial grade Linux distro, and install Win98 or WinNT in virtual machines under the Linux shell. As far as the critical Windows apps are concerned, they would see the same environment they are in now. Except that the new hardware would be a lot faster.
If there is something basically wrong with this approach, I'm sure it will be mentioned in following comments. Along, almost certainly, with a lot of Windows fanboi crap about how this can't possibly work since you aren't spending any money (except for the better hardware).
Slashdot Mirror
So the difference comes down to the differences between the environmental impact of growing bamboo versus spinning fiberglass versus making carbon fiber.
Nicely done summary; succinct and to the point. Needs some expansion, though.
Growing bamboo: Removes CO2 from the atmosphere at a fast rate. With many techniques, there will be a net removal of CO2 for the complete manufacturing process.
Spinning fiberglass: Of itself, is carbon neutral. However the energy needed to melt the glass almost always comes from a CO2 producing industry (very little renewably sourced energy is used in making glass)
Making carbon fiber: The process itself produces a lot of CO2. The energy used in the processing comes almost entirely from fossil fuels.
Also note that the carbon in epoxied bamboo fiber materials is effectively sequestered for a few hundred years, even as it sits in landfills.
Bamboo manufacture is usually pretty green.
If you count older, simpler models, then yes: probably most climate models suggest more deserts. But if you ignore the models that were running on the limited computers of twenty years ago and look only at models that are still actually being used, then the story is very different.
However we already have seen that those models are too simplistic, this is no longer a matter of comparing one model to another. The reality is that the increase in both the number and severity of storms demonstrates that there is a lot more water in the atmosphere. It is the state changes of this water-- between vapor and droplets and ice-- that drives storms.
Now is there any way that author of parent post can convince me that he is not a shill for the oil interests or some other industry invested in maintaining the status quo? I'm willing to listen to that argument.
Do you really think all that water is going to stay in the oceans?
The rise in sea level has already increased the size of tide flats and salt marshes. Which are evaporation basins. Expect an increase in atmospheric water, some as vapor (which is a potent greenhouse gas) and some as cloud (increasing the Earth's albedo). How those opposing factors will play out is anyone's guess.
But this much is obvious: the increase in atmospheric water is going to increase PRECIPITATION! The worst flood damage from the loss of Antarctic ice is going to be inland, with destruction of cities and infrastructure from flooding rivers.
What about Fox, BBC, and all the other news shows?
So CNN is trying something new and risky by focusing all its assets on one story? Can you not just change the channel every now and then to get the other news of the day?
Let's see where this goes rather than bitching and moaning because CNN has broken free from the herd and is doing something the other news companies aren't doing. Maybe CNN is pioneering a new and better approach. Maybe they are just another pioneer that dies lost in the desert. Either way, everyone will learn something.
The missing plane story IS newsworthy.
I don't watch CNN so I have no idea how sensationalized their coverage has been. HOWEVER any time you have several nations devoting so much of their resources in a joint effort that was cobbled together as rapidly as their response has been, that IS a major story. CNN was definitely doing the right thing in getting on this, and in following it.
That said, so far they may have missed much of the significance of what was happening. When elements of the USA armed forces and the Chinese armed forces act jointly under the direction of Australia, yes, there are definitely stories there. It might be that CNN missed the boat on where the focus should be. Or it might be that they have been preparing documentary coverage behind the scenes, while using the day to day "infotainment" coverage to pay the enormous daily costs of developing the larger, more noteworthy, stories.
I expect that in the upcoming months we will see a documentary or two describing how a multinational search effort was thrown together on a moment's notice. I think there must have been some fancy dancing going on between Generals and Admirals of different nations, and CNN has-- probably deliberately-- positioned its news-gathering assets where they can document the events as they were happening.
the physics prof who said cosmology was like biology before Darwin (in the post I was originally responding to in this thread), was just projecting?
The original quote:
"Cosmology is as mature as botany was before Darwin."
I have no idea what was meant by that. My suspicion is that the professor provided enough context in his lecture that these nine words conveyed a distinct meaning, but we don't have that context here and I won't speculate on what the intended meaning might have been.
To generalize my earlier statement: there are some things about the way the Universe is put together that are impossible to understand, and that has to be accepted. We can deal with this by recognizing that physics (and all sciences) create simplified mental models of reality that we can then play with to our hearts' content. Some of our models are well enough constructed that some of our playmates-- the engineers-- can build marvelous things. But don't confuse our ability to build castles made of sand with an understanding of what sand is. The best we can do is replace one crude model with another that is maybe a little less crude, but is still just a model; just a bunch of thoughts in the head that have no direct relationship to whatever is Out There.
You handle these by stating the blatantly obvious, that these phenomena are currently outside the realms physics works with, and then you move on.
Hell, physics cannot even handle ancient problems that are cracks in the bedrock of all western science. What is the reason that Pi is irrational (and don't just site one of the many different definitions of Pi as the reason: that is simply crippling your critical thinking ability with a blind belief in one or another tautology).
We live in a universe that we not only do not understand, but which we are innately incapable of ever completely understanding. So sayeth the Copenhagen convention on which much of modern physics is constructed: the best we can do is make simplified models and play with them. So get over it, and praise the engineers for being too concrete in their modes of thinking to be deterred by these impossibilities. For without the ability to occasionally say "in this situation, 3 is a good enough approximation of Pi", nothing would ever get built.
Doesn't physics have to come to terms with big issues like time and the fact that the laws of thermodynamics are statistical and show violations (fluctuation theorem, conservation of energy violated by dark energy and photons losing energy as they redshift)?
I don't see why. Sure, any theory of everything would have to account for that, and also answer the question of whether sacred cows fart in a sacred manner.
But we can do perfectly fine with multiple branches of physics that stay away from that problem, where each branch deals with only some aspects of reality. So long as we are mindful of the limitations of each mindset, and respect the ambiguous nature of the borders where one kind of physics butts up against some other kind, we have more than enough to play with to satisfy any theoretician. Within one problem space, we've got Newtonian physics which works peachy-keen. In another problem space we've got quantum mechanics. For the most part we only have to switch between one and the other without having to try to fit them together.
That sometimes means having to learn to dance really fast between different realities when trying to work close to that ambiguous border between two different physics. But with some training, the human mind is capable of some really fast footwork. For the most part, we can razzle-dazzle the problems well enough for the engineers to work with the results, being as how engineers go about doing their thing in relatively crude ways. ("At this scale, Pi is approximately 3", "Whether the glass is half full or half empty is beside the point: what is important is that the glass is twice as big as it needs to be.") And it is the engineering that we live with. That is what flushes the toilets and puts things in orbit. So long as the branches of physics we play with in our minds support the engineers who make modern life liveable, it is all good.
As parent post points out, the insurance industry is HUGE, one of the largest industries in the USA.
And yet, insurance produces nothing: it is not manufacture. It does not provide services that facilitate manufacture, transport of goods, or merchant affairs. The insurance industry does nothing except provide a means for you to bet against yourself; it is an abased form of gambling that contributes not one penny toward creating wealth.
Since the government cannot outlaw it, the government should have total control over it. Being as how the insurance industry is the greatest threat to capitalism that the USA has ever faced, and one of the basic tenets of the USA government is that it should guard capitalism against threats.
The barycenter of any planet and the Sun is far outside the planet's surface. Excepting Jupiter, whose barycenter with the Sun is approximately coincident with the Sun's surface, the barycenters are all deep within the Sun.
This means that the solar induced tides, no matter what their strength might be, do not perturb the planet's orbit. Nor do they distort the planet's shape to the degree that lunar tides distort the Earth's shape (and significantly perturb its solar orbit).
The study of geologic processes on Earth will continue to be significantly incomplete until it is recognized that the Earth and Moon function as a binary planet. Not as bodies that can be understood in isolation.
One would think that the International Astronomy Union and other professional organizations of astronomers would recognize this, but-- alas-- their heads appear to be too full of empty space to concern themselves with what is going on beneath their feet.
No, you have not missed anything. You are parroting the "logic" of the Committee for Small Body Nomenclature of the International Astronomical Union. This is a true committee of fifteen members whose job it has been to decide on definitions of words. There was and is no science here. Nor was there any logic based on science; the logic was that of taxonomy: making pigeonholes to classify stuff. Nor was logic used in making the final determinations; what the pigeonholes were to be called was decided by vote. It was a "let's make new words" party, having nothing to do with astronomy, geology, or selenology. (See? It is both easy and fun to add words to the pseudoscientific jargon. Even scientists can do it!)
The Moon is considered a moon as the barycentre is within the Earth.
The barycenter of the Earth-Moon binary system (and that is a legitimate phrase) is always 1,000 miles below the lithosphere of the Earth, and 3,000 miles above the Earth's core. Quito, Equador, is a city on the equator. When there is a lunar eclipse on either the Spring or Autumn equinox at Quito, an interplanetary voyager arriving from Mars would find that Quito was 1,500 miles closer to the Sun than usual, but 12 hours earlier or later it was almost 1,500 miles further from the Sun than the navigator's first order approximation*. The communications officer of that interplanerary ship had better take into account the way the Earth spins about the barycenter of the binary system if he is to stay in laser beam contact with the Quito space port.
More significantly over the Earth's history is that its rotation around the barycenter raises tides. Not just the noticeable ones in the hydrophere, but large ones in the various layers of the atmosphere, and smaller, but significant, ones in the lithosphere. Geology has yet to develop an effective model on how the tidal strains on the lithosphere affect plate tectonics. But there can be little question that significant tidal forces are at work, alternately stretching and compressing faults.
In retrospect, what this august body of astronomers should probably have done is given their naming problem over to the experts who have recognized degrees in the appropriate field of study: these kinds of taxonomic decisions are better left to the linguists and other language experts. There are probably very few astronomers who have done any study of language arts at all. No wonder they bungled the thing so badly. They probably did not even know they were not doing astronomy any more. *
I would not mind having someone check my geometry here. I think the difference is actually 3,000 miles (displacement of the Earth's center from the barycenter) but I'm going with the more conservative number.
Is it surprising that there is a difference in the behavioral history of a single planet and a similar planet that happens to be part of a binary planet system?
Hint: Venus does not have tides; has never had tides. Earth tides were a lot larger when Earth was young and the Moon was closer. They are still large enough to put a significant do-si-do waggle in the Earth's orbit about the Sun. Despite what dumb-ass astronomer conventions might say, when a satellite is so large that it deflects its primary from its orbit by 4,000 miles, you have a binary planet.
Why do so many Earth "scientists" fail to see that you cannot talk sensibly about Earth's mechanics without acknowledging the Moon's influence? Of course there is going to be a difference between the pot that sits on the stove undisturbed, and the one that is constantly stirred.
</rant>
I guess a lot depends on what you define a "real camera" to be.
For me, any camera body + lens combo that costs more than $750 is unrealistic. That's more than I can afford to replace if I lose it while kayaking. I'm happy with bridge cameras, and there are advantages in being able to go from wide angle to telephoto without swapping lenses. It does mean that you have to rely on the firmware for narrow DOF, etc-- but it is a reasonable trade-off.
Quality bridge cameras ($300+ models) also have the ability to mimic a narrow depth of field. That can be very useful in wedding party photography, etc, where capturing candid portrait shots is critical to the photographer's success, and he will not have time to swap between lenses on his DSLR.
On my Fuji HS25EXR, the camera identifies the subject with its face recognition technology and takes 2 or 3 shots, The foreground is handled normally but the extra images are used to double or triple expose the background for the shallow DOF effect. Results are often quite good and can reduce the amount of post work by quite a bit.
Those who claim aspergers have no right to call anyone insensitive.
That is just SO wrong.
Why would I want to ruin large parts of a good image with this effect?
Portrait photography.
Or any time when the presence of crap in the background degrades the photo. That candid picture of your Mom sharing a moment with your aunt would look great if it were not for the Ronald McDonald billboard in the background.
I also think the muzzle flash is from the sabot.
One advantage mentioned in TFA is that there are no combustibles in the ship's magazine. When you can treat your ammo the same way you treat the canned peaches, your ship has an incredible advantage over traditional warships.
Other advantages are longer range, simplified sight picture of a moving target (at 5,000 mph a truck 100 miles away is not going to move very far down the road), and pyrophoric behavior when depleted uranium is used in the projectile (in addition to the kinetic energy, you have the explosive behavior of releasing a burning hot cloud of uranium dust at the point of impact).
This is a truly nasty weapon.
I'm guessing the muzzle flash is from part of the sabot. Maybe styrofoam peanuts, maybe a big coil of copper wire.
I'm not sure how much of this presentation has been photoshopped. The flight sequence doesn't look right-- if this was going at Mach 7, how come the background looks like something from an airplane at 100 mph?
I'm guessing the projectile is depleted uranium, judging by its behavior on impact. Is there anything new in the unclassified pages about the depleted uranium dust we deployed in Iraq during the Gulf War? Last I heard, the stuff was probably nasty, with effects lasting a decade or more.
Were they all played with the same catgut strings and horsehair bows? It isn't just the violin, you know.
I was once told that the best violin bows were made from seven year old palomino ponies who were in heat when the hairs were harvested. And the best violin strings were made from the guts of Upper East Side alley cats.
It might be escargot to some, but for me its just a mess of cooked snails.
On the contrary, there was lots of reason to suspect old code of being inefficient on new machines.
Much of that old code used clever techniques, highly rewarded when they were developed, to fit the software to the limitations of those ancient machines. When you have 48 K of core, and that is all you've got, you choose algorithms that can be written in tiny loops that will fit, and you use re-entrant techniques so that the code that is already in place for the date calculation can be re-used to calculate part of the return on investment, depending on the state of a one bit flag tucked into some other process. That could save seconds, or even minutes, by avoiding loading new code from tape. You optimize the size of the Hollerith card decks, to decrease the number of boxes that have to be hauled around on hand trucks, and the hours needed to read and compile the cards to tape.
It was much more important that the program could be compiled to tape in the 11 pm to 5:30 am time slot than how efficiently it would perform during the workday. Workday performance enhancements could be added in later revisions.
Above post proves that some persons are willing to pay a lot more for the same tools as those who use the best practices of resource management.
And that some people cannot make the distinction between effective workflows and good tools.
It is easy to be inefficient on a Linux box. Move that user to a Mac or Windows box, and a strange thing happens. He will be just as inefficient when measured by time. However he will be much more inefficient when measured by total cost of his output.
In conclusion, the easy way to increase the inefficiency in a workflow is to buy expensive computers for the most inefficient personnel. This stimulates the economy. The cost of this stimulation is borne by the companies that use this tactic and shows up as a decrease in competitive advantages. But it is all done for the greater glory of Apple and Microsoft so it is all good.
And yet, still doing the job and saving the company from the cost of purchasing a new(er) truck. Much as Win98 or even DOS boxes can save a ton of money in similar, specialized, situations. Which is why it is a good car analogy. For those who need car analogies.
There are better car analogies.
There are lots of farms that use trucks that were new in the 1950s to haul stuff to and from the fields. I once had a summer job at a seed cleaning plant that used a 2 ton 1938 Ford flatbed truck to move pallets of grass seed from the cleaning operation to the warehouse, a quarter mile away. That truck had not been on a paved road in decades, first and third gear were shot, it was always parked on a hill at overnight because the starting motor was too weak to turn crank the cold engine; it had to be jump started in the morning. We routinely overloaded it with up to 8 tons, but it would chug between the two buildings at all of 5 mph.
Continuing to use WinXP or even Win98 in situations that require nothing more is a no brainer. When the hardware wears out, either placing an order with the local computer refurbisher for a rebuilt box of the same vintage, or jumping to Linux on a new box with the ancient OS and its apps running in a VM, would work just fine.
The magic words in parent post are "via VMware"). Running the original OS in a VM under a solid Linux distro is an inexpensive solution for many upgrade issues. The VM can be set up to keep the WinXP, Win98, or WinNT isolated from sources of infection while distros like RH/Fedora, Debian, or Ubuntu have excellent patch and upgrade management systems.
In both cases, a possible low cost upgrade that would probably provide a fix good for a decade or two is to get contemporary hardware, install an industrial grade Linux distro, and install Win98 or WinNT in virtual machines under the Linux shell. As far as the critical Windows apps are concerned, they would see the same environment they are in now. Except that the new hardware would be a lot faster.
If there is something basically wrong with this approach, I'm sure it will be mentioned in following comments. Along, almost certainly, with a lot of Windows fanboi crap about how this can't possibly work since you aren't spending any money (except for the better hardware).