Having never been south of the US, I've never seen the Milky Way. Too far north I figure from that photo.
Some part of the Milky Way is visible from any part of the planet. This includes the North Pole which is the worst place for observing it.
Unless you're in Alaska you can see the galactic center too. I'm in Finland which is (barely) too far north for that. However, parts of the Milky Way are still there in places with an actually dark sky. Now if I could only get away from this city more often...
So get *far* away from cities sometime and look up. Just don't expect anything but bright stars to be in colour, that's beyond the capabilities of human vision. Also, download Stellarium from Stellarium.org: it's great and it's free software and it's even easy to use.
And even with the noble gases inert is a relative term, so your statement applies there too.
Xenon fluoride has been made. Hell, it has industrial applications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_difluoride#Applications. Also, I heard about helium oxide from somewhere. That oxide was VERY unstable, but apparently it can exist for long enough to be measured.
Neon is the only one that's completely inert at this point as far as I'm aware.
Plutonium is still irrelevant when discussing the most poisonous substance known. Chemical toxicity is smaller than the worst poisons, and when it comes to radiotoxicity it has a huge half-life compared to really unstable nuclei which have a half-life on the order of 10^-22 seconds. And even those should be nowhere close to anti-matter in toxicity.
If you think this is an absurd comparison since no one will ever encounter these substances then I think that's fair enough. In that case we can continue to Polonium which is much worse news than Plutonium and is inhaled daily by smokers and anyone within their smoke range meaning it is both more dangerous and more likely to ever contaminate the average person. Plutonium is bad but there is no rational reason to suggest it is the worst substance.
You are not conducting "analysis of the options". You are making a strawman argument: "If not nuclear than coal and nothing else".
Coal has severe drawbacks. Nuclear has severe drawbacks. We are better off without either. Moreover, the nature of nuclear (hazards, costs to develop, waste management) make it a poor choice for transitioning away from coal to technologies that are superior to both. Nuclear may have its place, but replacing coal is not an appropriate application.
We might be better off without either, but that's not the way it works. Unless nature has given your country wonderful hydroelectric or geothermal opportunities (Norway/Iceland), you'll have to generate large amounts of electricity some way. And it turns out that way always contains coal/oil/nuclear.
Grandparent's argument would be a fallacy except it describes how things actually work out in the real world. And why would it be any different? Coal and nuclear are the only energy options that don't care much which (industrialized) country wants to use them: wind/solar can't provide baseline power and have NEVER powered a country, gas isn't available even nearly everywhere, oil is ridiculously expensive, hydroelectric depends on location and is often already fully utilized etc.
Face it, until someone comes up with a comprehensive (meaning working) solution to provide the electricity for societies coal and nuclear will always be there, and when either falters the other one will pick up the slack. And yes, I'd love 100% solar power too, but it's just not happening yet.
Do you suppose that current designs include the ability to be upgraded when future safety advances are developed? I sure hope so.
For big changes like this, no reactor will probably ever be upgradeable to the safety specifications of a reactor of the following generation.
This is not a problem though. The amounts of people killed by modern reactor designs is about zero. It's certainly less than the amount of people killed by coal plants as part of their normal operation.
The next generation will have even more safety features added, meaning the amount of deaths will likely be fewer than about zero. Judging by the actual track record of modern reactors, you're hoping for fewer than fewer than about zero deaths. I think there are more pressing sources of danger in our society, and this should remain true even if we assume I'm off in my estimate by several hundred deaths.
Yea, now people will finally stop arguing for it and give solar, wind, etc. more attention. Awesome.
Actually, much more likely is that people will put in little effort, meaning we'll get more of the same. If we build less nuclear this will mean more coal.
I'm sorry, but I'll never be a proponent for something that has a good chance of causing horrible diseases and mutations and birth defects, regardless of how good the technology protecting it is
As long as you understand that in practice your stance will often mean being a coal proponent. Consider this: I'm what many would term an eco-nut. I believe that if we continue with our current carbon dioxide emissions coastal regions will be flooded and there will be massive turmoil. I support massive government intervention to prevent this. And because of my ecological opinions, not despite them, I support nuclear power.
After all, France has very low carbon dioxide emissions from its power generation, since a clear majority of its generation is nuclear. This is today, not in some hypothetical future! Meanwhile countries that oppose nuclear power and discuss renewables keep emitting day in and day out. No one knows when it will end. Saying nice things about how we'll use more renewables soon is doing close to nothing to stop global warming.
That confidence in our current strategy is being eroded rapidly. This isn't some second-rate system like Chernobyl, it is close-to-state-of-the-art.
I see your point about investigating alternative reactor technologies. However, the Fukushima reactors are certainly not state of the art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_boiling_water_reactor reactors for instance are already in operation. Generation III reactors are currently the state of the art of reactors in operation, and the Fukushima reactors are firmly in the generation II category.
The Fukushima reactors have no doubt had safety upgrades during their lifetime, but there's only so much you can do when the fundamental reactor design is antiquated.
This subject is clearly driven by astronomers with a desire to view the night sky. The issue of wasted energy seems only to be mentioned to gather support. This is clear in the first article which suggests using a 'shade' to make street lamps more efficient. A reflector is necessary if you want to get more useful energy out, as an opaque shade will just make your lamp housing hotter. I believe that modern designs do include reflectors now.
It doesn't really matter why astronomers say what they say. What matters is if it's true. And there is no doubt that illuminating the sky directly is a waste of electricity and therefore money. If they advocate less than stellar solutions then the answer is to get better solutions, not to ignore the whole light pollution issue.
The biggest issue being overlooked here seems to be what happens to the light that shines down as intended. This light reflects off things sending light upwards regardless of the lamp design. If you look at the aerial motor race photograph linked below you will notice that most of the light seems to be coming from the track itself, not the lights. http://www.craigfergusonimages.com/2009/11/aerial-f1-singapore-at-night-by-wong-kin-leong/
I don't think anyone is overlooking that. If you look, I doubt you can find many who say "We should eliminate ALL light pollution from urban areas". That's not happening, and everyone knows it. Astronomers accept the lesser bad of reflected light, and strive towards that rather than some improbable utopia.
There's another thing too: light pollution is rarely created above light fixtures (which is where the picture is taken from), but to the side. Streetlights mostly light pollute in the near horizontal, meaning they tend to light pollute some distance away from themselves. If the camera actually was in the line of sight of the light sources (like people on the ground, or the sky when floodlights point at it) then the picture would be so full of camera flare that it wouldn't look even half as pretty.
To sum up: reflected light is a problem, but it's nothing at all like what we have now, so people who care would be happy to deal with it instead.
It takes something on the face of it boring (the chemical elements as a simple diagram) and makes it really interesting. If it's not good enough to show to students directly then it should contain plenty of ideas for how to make elements interesting.
A couple of examples: get some tungsten and some magnesium of about equal volume and anyone will notice that one is much, much denser despite both being normal-looking metals. Get some indium and let the students bend thick metal rods with their bare hands.
I believe they tried that at Chernobyl already. The problem is that the radiation is ionizing and has energy in it in general.
So the air will be full of ions which will mess with radio, and the radiation will also cause any onboard electronics to misbehave or outright malfunction.
If someone built robots using the radiation-hardened electronics space probes use then that might work. But knowing how seldom we have significant problems with nuclear power I doubt there is anything like it.
The best bet would probably be to repurpose something from someone's nuclear weapons programme. But that's probably not happening for many different reasons.
Re:Where's the news for nerds in this?
on
Pocket Wars and Cores
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· Score: 3, Informative
I think it's rather the constant shouting of "slashvertisement" that's getting old.
Take a second look at this story: -It links to some Linux site or other which is certainly not ARM. -The article actually explains something quite insightful about the way ARM is advancing. Sure, some might have known this, but those who want to complain about that should realize that the discussion would be pretty shitty here if everyone was completely ignorant in advance. Do you ask the world what's wrong every time you hear something you already know? -There's the interesting point that you can't get a Windows desktop on ARM, and in the future when you can most probably won't want it either. -It's a story about a successful Intel competitor being even more successful (because face it, Intel wants to make every processor on Earth).
Hell, there's no end to interesting things in connection with this. It's a story about something that's changing which could change a lot of things, possibly for the better. I'd ask what's wrong with you rather than what's wrong with Slashdot.
I think we're arguing past each other here. The grandparent said:
Jet loads of pallets of big duty drums? Sure that's perfectly safe.
To this I replied that it's perfectly safe, or at least safer than background radiation in a plane. You'll probably agree that that phrasing implies that they were dealing with something profoundly dangerous. You also quoted me saying that it might be dangerous if someone ingested it.
Note that he didn't talk about leaking barrels: that's an extra assumption. Unless we have data on barrels leaking (and leaking significant amounts for that matter) there's no reason to assume that that's the case.
Well unless the pilots actually all contracted cancer in an improbable way. But note that that information is completely unsourced, so I'll stick to pointing out that Uranium won't kill you always in every way: it's not Polonium and several bad things have to happen for it to kill you. If the barrels were competently sealed (there's no evidence to contradict this I believe) then the risk of the yellowcake killing all three pilots was probably significantly lower than the risk of flying without radioactives.
Until I see any evidence to the contrary I'll stick to this being a basic radioactivity scare story.
The material you're talking about is an alpha emitter. This means the radiation is stopped by things like barrels, walls, your clothes, your skin and air.
There would only be residual gamma radiation. This would become harmless on the way from the barrels to the cockpit. If you're not trolling you would do well to read up on how different types of radiation work.
The above poster was right about it being no risk unless someone ingested it. The pilots were exposed to dangerous radiation though: airplanes are routinely hit by powerful cosmic radiation which is much worse than anything coming from yellowcake barrels.
So what about the suspected link here? An illness that kills less people than the regular flu gets global attention (and HUGE vaccine demand),
Normal seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.
As such, "less people than the regular flu" doesn't say a lot. Your link also says that they still think it's a net positive, meaning more people would have died without than contracted narcolepsy with.
A lot more than "better than normal flu" is required to make something harmless.
A case can be made for either. Not everybody agrees with you. Get over it.
If we define "case" as "saying things that are not true", then yes.
Defining "case" as "a lot of people say it so it's right" then it's also true.
But for anything like grammatical correctness there's no case at all - it's simply a common misunderstanding caused by people dabbling with latin without any actual knowledge of it.
I'm quite satisfied with the JPEGs from my camera. They have great colour for being digital, so I feel no need to post process despite always saving the RAWs too.
I have no need for "realistic" colour. I see that every second I'm awake. I prefer photos that look good over photos that look realistic. It's of course fine if someone else wants to copy their in-brain processing, but I don't.
I don't use Lightroom because I don't have the money and it doesn't exist on my operating system anyway. As for the "easily" part...
I get this "it's easy to make the colours right in [software]" all the time. I disagree, it requires skill. Skill I don't have. I can tell when colour is good, but I can't always get good colour - just like I know what music I like despite not knowing how to play a single instrument.
The JPEG engine of my SLR has been optimized by people who are better at colour than I am. As I said, me messing with the pictures in software will just make things worse. Telling any stranger that he can get colours right with his own taste seems like a pretty big gamble to me - it could be someone who thinks pink and dark green are a winning combination!
With a properly color-calibrated photo workflow, it's trivial with a Kodachrome color profile to get the same colors.
Assuming this is true, the key word becomes properly. That means "you have to be an expert", since not even most photographers know how to do colour profiles.
I'm a digital photographer who started out with a bad digicam in 2005, so I don't have film nostalgia. However, each time I hear that you can just select any colour you want in software to make things great I think it's pretty much a fantasy. You probably can, but digital pictures still look like shit on average compared to film pictures. Why is that?
There are probably several reasons, but I think it comes down to this: if you're doing the colours yourself in photo software, then you have to have a good eye to get it right. If on the other hand you're relying on the film to get colours (like most back in the day) then the team of experts at the film manufacturer have optimized the colours. It becomes a matter of any random person vs. a team of probably highly paid experts. Knowing what's in any particular photo helps the random boob, but in my experience it doesn't help enough.
Colour is notoriously difficult and I could be completely wrong. But in the meantime I'm pleased to notice that some of the nicest digital colours come from Fuji digital cameras set to default settings. Presumably some of the same technologies or even people are involved as with their films. My Olympus SLR has a reputation for good JPEG colours for that matter, and given correct white balance and exposure I cannot improve on the colours in processing something like 90% of the time.
The problem is that handy did not ask for backgruond information on where it comes from, he did not ask how to acquire those materials in prison, he did not ask about smuggling or manufacturing equipment - he merely asked how to light a cigarette with batteries. The video addresses that.
That's the thing though, you only get answers that way.
If you're ignorant (note, no value judgement implied here!) then you usually lack both answers and questions. A large part of the value of asking a person is that you often get answers to related questions you didn't ask.
Take the article this discussion is filed under as an example. Posit that you Google "Kindle fault electricity" and you get the linked multimeter show. If you've never used a multimeter you will be very unlikely to ask "what's the correct way of using the probes on a multimeter". And yet if some of the above posters are to be believed that question changes the article and its conclusions from insight to junk! Google is good at what it does but it has insight only if it has happened to trawl insight into the results that day.
In addition, nothing stops anyone from both asking people and Googling. Why not ask both? If you're personally annoyed by questions asked then don't reply, but I don't see why you would have to butt in and force your information gathering techniques on others.
There's also something of a contradiction in arguing against asking questions in a discussion thread - if Google really had all the answers for us humans there wouldn't be a thread here.
Slashdot Mirror
Now ask yourself why we can't have both.
There is not really any connection between you having glasses (a good thing) and light pollution (a bad thing).
We don't have to live in caves to get darker skies, either.
Having never been south of the US, I've never seen the Milky Way. Too far north I figure from that photo.
Some part of the Milky Way is visible from any part of the planet. This includes the North Pole which is the worst place for observing it.
Unless you're in Alaska you can see the galactic center too. I'm in Finland which is (barely) too far north for that. However, parts of the Milky Way are still there in places with an actually dark sky. Now if I could only get away from this city more often...
So get *far* away from cities sometime and look up. Just don't expect anything but bright stars to be in colour, that's beyond the capabilities of human vision. Also, download Stellarium from Stellarium.org: it's great and it's free software and it's even easy to use.
Welcome to the afterlife, Jean-Luc.
You live in a scientific reality where today's knowledge can reliably predict future knowledge and capabilities?
And even with the noble gases inert is a relative term, so your statement applies there too.
Xenon fluoride has been made. Hell, it has industrial applications: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenon_difluoride#Applications. Also, I heard about helium oxide from somewhere. That oxide was VERY unstable, but apparently it can exist for long enough to be measured.
Neon is the only one that's completely inert at this point as far as I'm aware.
Plutonium is still irrelevant when discussing the most poisonous substance known. Chemical toxicity is smaller than the worst poisons, and when it comes to radiotoxicity it has a huge half-life compared to really unstable nuclei which have a half-life on the order of 10^-22 seconds. And even those should be nowhere close to anti-matter in toxicity.
If you think this is an absurd comparison since no one will ever encounter these substances then I think that's fair enough. In that case we can continue to Polonium which is much worse news than Plutonium and is inhaled daily by smokers and anyone within their smoke range meaning it is both more dangerous and more likely to ever contaminate the average person. Plutonium is bad but there is no rational reason to suggest it is the worst substance.
You are not conducting "analysis of the options". You are making a strawman argument: "If not nuclear than coal and nothing else".
Coal has severe drawbacks. Nuclear has severe drawbacks. We are better off without either. Moreover, the nature of nuclear (hazards, costs to develop, waste management) make it a poor choice for transitioning away from coal to technologies that are superior to both. Nuclear may have its place, but replacing coal is not an appropriate application.
We might be better off without either, but that's not the way it works. Unless nature has given your country wonderful hydroelectric or geothermal opportunities (Norway/Iceland), you'll have to generate large amounts of electricity some way. And it turns out that way always contains coal/oil/nuclear.
Grandparent's argument would be a fallacy except it describes how things actually work out in the real world. And why would it be any different? Coal and nuclear are the only energy options that don't care much which (industrialized) country wants to use them: wind/solar can't provide baseline power and have NEVER powered a country, gas isn't available even nearly everywhere, oil is ridiculously expensive, hydroelectric depends on location and is often already fully utilized etc.
Face it, until someone comes up with a comprehensive (meaning working) solution to provide the electricity for societies coal and nuclear will always be there, and when either falters the other one will pick up the slack. And yes, I'd love 100% solar power too, but it's just not happening yet.
Do you suppose that current designs include the ability to be upgraded when future safety advances are developed? I sure hope so.
For big changes like this, no reactor will probably ever be upgradeable to the safety specifications of a reactor of the following generation.
This is not a problem though. The amounts of people killed by modern reactor designs is about zero. It's certainly less than the amount of people killed by coal plants as part of their normal operation.
The next generation will have even more safety features added, meaning the amount of deaths will likely be fewer than about zero. Judging by the actual track record of modern reactors, you're hoping for fewer than fewer than about zero deaths. I think there are more pressing sources of danger in our society, and this should remain true even if we assume I'm off in my estimate by several hundred deaths.
Yea, now people will finally stop arguing for it and give solar, wind, etc. more attention. Awesome.
Actually, much more likely is that people will put in little effort, meaning we'll get more of the same. If we build less nuclear this will mean more coal.
I'm sorry, but I'll never be a proponent for something that has a good chance of causing horrible diseases and mutations and birth defects, regardless of how good the technology protecting it is
As long as you understand that in practice your stance will often mean being a coal proponent. Consider this: I'm what many would term an eco-nut. I believe that if we continue with our current carbon dioxide emissions coastal regions will be flooded and there will be massive turmoil. I support massive government intervention to prevent this. And because of my ecological opinions, not despite them, I support nuclear power.
After all, France has very low carbon dioxide emissions from its power generation, since a clear majority of its generation is nuclear. This is today, not in some hypothetical future! Meanwhile countries that oppose nuclear power and discuss renewables keep emitting day in and day out. No one knows when it will end. Saying nice things about how we'll use more renewables soon is doing close to nothing to stop global warming.
That confidence in our current strategy is being eroded rapidly. This isn't some second-rate system like Chernobyl, it is close-to-state-of-the-art.
I see your point about investigating alternative reactor technologies. However, the Fukushima reactors are certainly not state of the art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_boiling_water_reactor reactors for instance are already in operation. Generation III reactors are currently the state of the art of reactors in operation, and the Fukushima reactors are firmly in the generation II category.
The Fukushima reactors have no doubt had safety upgrades during their lifetime, but there's only so much you can do when the fundamental reactor design is antiquated.
You've been modded down but I like your line of thought.
This subject is clearly driven by astronomers with a desire to view the night sky. The issue of wasted energy seems only to be mentioned to gather support. This is clear in the first article which suggests using a 'shade' to make street lamps more efficient. A reflector is necessary if you want to get more useful energy out, as an opaque shade will just make your lamp housing hotter. I believe that modern designs do include reflectors now.
It doesn't really matter why astronomers say what they say. What matters is if it's true. And there is no doubt that illuminating the sky directly is a waste of electricity and therefore money. If they advocate less than stellar solutions then the answer is to get better solutions, not to ignore the whole light pollution issue.
The biggest issue being overlooked here seems to be what happens to the light that shines down as intended. This light reflects off things sending light upwards regardless of the lamp design. If you look at the aerial motor race photograph linked below you will notice that most of the light seems to be coming from the track itself, not the lights.
http://www.craigfergusonimages.com/2009/11/aerial-f1-singapore-at-night-by-wong-kin-leong/
I don't think anyone is overlooking that. If you look, I doubt you can find many who say "We should eliminate ALL light pollution from urban areas". That's not happening, and everyone knows it. Astronomers accept the lesser bad of reflected light, and strive towards that rather than some improbable utopia.
There's another thing too: light pollution is rarely created above light fixtures (which is where the picture is taken from), but to the side. Streetlights mostly light pollute in the near horizontal, meaning they tend to light pollute some distance away from themselves. If the camera actually was in the line of sight of the light sources (like people on the ground, or the sky when floodlights point at it) then the picture would be so full of camera flare that it wouldn't look even half as pretty.
To sum up: reflected light is a problem, but it's nothing at all like what we have now, so people who care would be happy to deal with it instead.
I'm not sure how directly applicable it is, but The Periodic Table Table at http://theodoregray.com/periodictable is a great science site.
It takes something on the face of it boring (the chemical elements as a simple diagram) and makes it really interesting. If it's not good enough to show to students directly then it should contain plenty of ideas for how to make elements interesting.
A couple of examples: get some tungsten and some magnesium of about equal volume and anyone will notice that one is much, much denser despite both being normal-looking metals. Get some indium and let the students bend thick metal rods with their bare hands.
I believe they tried that at Chernobyl already. The problem is that the radiation is ionizing and has energy in it in general.
So the air will be full of ions which will mess with radio, and the radiation will also cause any onboard electronics to misbehave or outright malfunction.
If someone built robots using the radiation-hardened electronics space probes use then that might work. But knowing how seldom we have significant problems with nuclear power I doubt there is anything like it.
The best bet would probably be to repurpose something from someone's nuclear weapons programme. But that's probably not happening for many different reasons.
I think it's rather the constant shouting of "slashvertisement" that's getting old.
Take a second look at this story:
-It links to some Linux site or other which is certainly not ARM.
-The article actually explains something quite insightful about the way ARM is advancing. Sure, some might have known this, but those who want to complain about that should realize that the discussion would be pretty shitty here if everyone was completely ignorant in advance. Do you ask the world what's wrong every time you hear something you already know?
-There's the interesting point that you can't get a Windows desktop on ARM, and in the future when you can most probably won't want it either.
-It's a story about a successful Intel competitor being even more successful (because face it, Intel wants to make every processor on Earth).
Hell, there's no end to interesting things in connection with this. It's a story about something that's changing which could change a lot of things, possibly for the better. I'd ask what's wrong with you rather than what's wrong with Slashdot.
I think we're arguing past each other here. The grandparent said:
Jet loads of pallets of big duty drums? Sure that's perfectly safe.
To this I replied that it's perfectly safe, or at least safer than background radiation in a plane. You'll probably agree that that phrasing implies that they were dealing with something profoundly dangerous. You also quoted me saying that it might be dangerous if someone ingested it.
Note that he didn't talk about leaking barrels: that's an extra assumption. Unless we have data on barrels leaking (and leaking significant amounts for that matter) there's no reason to assume that that's the case.
Well unless the pilots actually all contracted cancer in an improbable way. But note that that information is completely unsourced, so I'll stick to pointing out that Uranium won't kill you always in every way: it's not Polonium and several bad things have to happen for it to kill you. If the barrels were competently sealed (there's no evidence to contradict this I believe) then the risk of the yellowcake killing all three pilots was probably significantly lower than the risk of flying without radioactives.
Until I see any evidence to the contrary I'll stick to this being a basic radioactivity scare story.
The material you're talking about is an alpha emitter. This means the radiation is stopped by things like barrels, walls, your clothes, your skin and air.
There would only be residual gamma radiation. This would become harmless on the way from the barrels to the cockpit. If you're not trolling you would do well to read up on how different types of radiation work.
The above poster was right about it being no risk unless someone ingested it. The pilots were exposed to dangerous radiation though: airplanes are routinely hit by powerful cosmic radiation which is much worse than anything coming from yellowcake barrels.
So what about the suspected link here? An illness that kills less people than the regular flu gets global attention (and HUGE vaccine demand),
Normal seasonal flu kills hundreds of thousands of people each year.
As such, "less people than the regular flu" doesn't say a lot. Your link also says that they still think it's a net positive, meaning more people would have died without than contracted narcolepsy with.
A lot more than "better than normal flu" is required to make something harmless.
I'm thinking the same thing - this is my attempt at frist post using only my retinas, and frankly it's not exactly looking like a success.
A case can be made for either. Not everybody agrees with you. Get over it.
If we define "case" as "saying things that are not true", then yes.
Defining "case" as "a lot of people say it so it's right" then it's also true.
But for anything like grammatical correctness there's no case at all - it's simply a common misunderstanding caused by people dabbling with latin without any actual knowledge of it.
For how an actual case is made, see: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2139/what-is-the-plural-of-penis
Ah, both hot grits and Natalie Portman. This made my day significantly better.
I'm quite satisfied with the JPEGs from my camera. They have great colour for being digital, so I feel no need to post process despite always saving the RAWs too.
I have no need for "realistic" colour. I see that every second I'm awake. I prefer photos that look good over photos that look realistic. It's of course fine if someone else wants to copy their in-brain processing, but I don't.
I don't use Lightroom because I don't have the money and it doesn't exist on my operating system anyway. As for the "easily" part...
I get this "it's easy to make the colours right in [software]" all the time. I disagree, it requires skill. Skill I don't have. I can tell when colour is good, but I can't always get good colour - just like I know what music I like despite not knowing how to play a single instrument.
The JPEG engine of my SLR has been optimized by people who are better at colour than I am. As I said, me messing with the pictures in software will just make things worse. Telling any stranger that he can get colours right with his own taste seems like a pretty big gamble to me - it could be someone who thinks pink and dark green are a winning combination!
With a properly color-calibrated photo workflow, it's trivial with a Kodachrome color profile to get the same colors.
Assuming this is true, the key word becomes properly. That means "you have to be an expert", since not even most photographers know how to do colour profiles.
I'm a digital photographer who started out with a bad digicam in 2005, so I don't have film nostalgia. However, each time I hear that you can just select any colour you want in software to make things great I think it's pretty much a fantasy. You probably can, but digital pictures still look like shit on average compared to film pictures. Why is that?
There are probably several reasons, but I think it comes down to this: if you're doing the colours yourself in photo software, then you have to have a good eye to get it right. If on the other hand you're relying on the film to get colours (like most back in the day) then the team of experts at the film manufacturer have optimized the colours. It becomes a matter of any random person vs. a team of probably highly paid experts. Knowing what's in any particular photo helps the random boob, but in my experience it doesn't help enough.
Colour is notoriously difficult and I could be completely wrong. But in the meantime I'm pleased to notice that some of the nicest digital colours come from Fuji digital cameras set to default settings. Presumably some of the same technologies or even people are involved as with their films. My Olympus SLR has a reputation for good JPEG colours for that matter, and given correct white balance and exposure I cannot improve on the colours in processing something like 90% of the time.
You reminded me of Rudy Rucker's crazy Ware tetralogy...don't know if that was an actual reference to it.
Oww, my brain hurts.
The problem is that handy did not ask for backgruond information on where it comes from, he did not ask how to acquire those materials in prison, he did not ask about smuggling or manufacturing equipment - he merely asked how to light a cigarette with batteries. The video addresses that.
That's the thing though, you only get answers that way.
If you're ignorant (note, no value judgement implied here!) then you usually lack both answers and questions. A large part of the value of asking a person is that you often get answers to related questions you didn't ask.
Take the article this discussion is filed under as an example. Posit that you Google "Kindle fault electricity" and you get the linked multimeter show. If you've never used a multimeter you will be very unlikely to ask "what's the correct way of using the probes on a multimeter". And yet if some of the above posters are to be believed that question changes the article and its conclusions from insight to junk! Google is good at what it does but it has insight only if it has happened to trawl insight into the results that day.
In addition, nothing stops anyone from both asking people and Googling. Why not ask both? If you're personally annoyed by questions asked then don't reply, but I don't see why you would have to butt in and force your information gathering techniques on others.
There's also something of a contradiction in arguing against asking questions in a discussion thread - if Google really had all the answers for us humans there wouldn't be a thread here.