This one actually gives some information on how they detected the belts (short version: it's based on infrared emissions that could only come from rocky debris).
And here is the actual paper on arXiv, if you want the full technical details of their methods.
So, you don't believe in life insurance, then? How about property insurance? Do you even lock your door when you go out? I don't worry too much about getting killed or having my stuff stolen, but that doesn't mean I don't take reasonable precautions for it. Having those precautions in place saves me from worrying about it.
Personally, I don't worry too much about where my next meal is coming from, because I have a job. If I lose it, then perhaps I'll worry, until I find another one.
Er... by "geosynchronous", do you mean lunasynchronous, i.e. remaining over one spot on the moon? There isn't one -- the moon's rotational period is so slow that at the distance required, the earth's gravity has more effect than the moon's. You'd need a set of lower orbiting satellites.
Well, it's not anything, yet. When it opens further, it will become an arm of the Indian Ocean. If the expansion continues, and depending on what happens to East Africa and the Indian Ocean, it could become an ocean in its own right, or perhaps half of the Indian Ocean, with a substantial divider between it and the other half.
The stock market is still gambling. It's partly a game of skill, in analyzing the information about the market and the companies you are buying, but it's gambling nonetheless.
And in poker, you're not playing against the house, just against other players. Just like the stock market. In poker the house takes a small cut of every pot; in the stock market, your broker does.
Yeah, that's not going to help when I'm debugging it two years later and have no clue what I was thinking when I wrote it. I have seriously gone in to look for a bug, said to myself, "What idiot wrote this incomprehensible garbage?", and looked at the cvs log only to discover that the idiot was me.
10% efficient at converting the photons that they absorb. The ultraviolet spectrum is considerably wider than the visual spectrum, so it could potentially be absorbing a much wider spectrum of light than currently available solar cells, and thus absorb many more photons. I don't have any actual numbers (in particular I'm not sure how much of the ultraviolet spectrum gets through the atmosphere, or what the photon flux is compared to visible light), but it's at least plausible.
How did this get modded insightful? Yes, 18-20 year olds will go to Canada to drink; speaking as someone who grew up within biking distance of the border, that's certainly not the only reason to go, though. In any case, if I had kids I'd rather they go to Canada to drink legally than do it illegally in the States. And do you honestly think the financial incentives aren't good enough for the state to do it without bribes? I'm sure the RFID chips cost less than $30 (they give away RFID cards for other purposes in a lot of places), and they'll save time and money processing people at the border.
What is Canada going to defend her territory with, exactly? I mean, with all due respect to the Maritime Command, it's about 1/6 the size of the U.S. Navy. If the U.S. really wants to send ships through the Northwest Passage without Canada's say-so, it won't have to ask nicely. The same goes for China.
Major climate changes in the past have tended to involve significant extinctions, as species caught in the wrong places couldn't adapt to the new conditions. Imagine that same effect on our food crops. Yes, other species adapt and move in to take their places, but the local effects can be severe in the meantime, and the faster it happens, the worse it will be. There may be bumper crops at higher latitudes, but first there will be increased desertification in the tropics.
There's also no guarantee that the warming would stop at any previously attained level; take a look at Venus for why this would be bad.
Even if it's part of their generic license, how it applies to Chrome is still important. What does "submitting, posting, or displaying" even mean in the context of a browser? It seems at least slightly plausible that could be interpreted to include personally generated content that the user views with the browser. I hope that it doesn't really work that way, but I am not a lawyer.
Cheating is bad, but there's no reason why satisfying a polygamy gene has to involve cheating. As long as both parties know what the other is doing and are okay with it, then everyone can be happy (even in cases where one of them wants to be monogamous and the other does not, though that certainly does create issues).
That said, TFA doesn't actually say anything about the influence of the gene on the men being monogamous; in fact, the study didn't investigate whether they were faithful at all. Rather, the gene seems to influence the men's level of commitment to a relationship and the quality of the pair bonding.
Presumably because the link to the second page in TFA is in a non-obvious location -- it's only in the sidebar, not at the end (or beginning) of the actual article.
Space travel does have a very high accident rate. It's not the early launches, either: the actual numbers are 18 deaths out of 430 people who have been to space (though many of those people have gone multiple times); 14 of those are accounted for by the two Space Shuttle disasters. The Shuttle in particular has a failure rate of 1.6%, 2 out of 123 launches.
But that's still not a reason to prevent commercial spaceflights. People do dangerous things all the time, and as long as they understand the risks, there's no reason to stop them.
Nitrates can still cause problems -- they're a serious source of water pollution, leading to algae blooms (which in turn lead to other problems) and possibly drinking water contamination. Fertilizer runoff is a big issue in agricultural areas.
They may still be less harmful overall than NOx, but they're certainly not harmless, and since they affect different domains any comparison is difficult to evaluate.
You know, I remember my first programming teacher explaining the same concept, back in high school... but he told us to use values like -1 that were actually invalid for the field in question. I wonder how many programmers learned it the way your instructor taught it (and didn't think about it the way you did)? It could explain a lot.
Right. The only way around this is to have some complicated system with at least three admins, each of whom only has the power to revoke access for one of the others (or some number less than all the rest of them, for n > 3). Only a very paranoid and very bureaucratic organization is even going to think of going to the trouble of setting something like that up, though.
Yeah, that's definitely the ticket. I think what you actually want to have is sufficient fuel to make it to lunar orbit and back again, so if anything goes wrong with the refueling, you're not stranded. Other possibilities include refueling in LEO, at the space station, say; since getting to orbit at all is by far the biggest fuel cost, this could work pretty well.
Of course, at that point you're talking about establishing infrastructure in lunar orbit, so the next step is to establish infrastructure on the moon itself, and refuel on the ground as well. This is especially effective if enough water can be found to be a fuel source (via electrolysis), though it's not clear how likely that is.
Right, the problem with fusion is that it needs to be self-sustaining to be useful. The only way that's going to happen is if the reaction continuously generates enough heat to keep going, which almost certainly requires some significant minimum scale, and makes any sort of tabletop method pretty much impossible.
I think we'll have real fusion power plants once we figure out how to scale up the current methods enough to be self-sustaining. That's not easy, though, as it amounts to containing a small sun, and the containment technology also needs to be powered by the fusion.
Not really. In our own solar system, all the planets combined are less than a thousandth the mass of the sun. It's pretty much impossible for planets to make up a significant fraction of the mass of a stellar system -- if they did, they would have wound up as a star.
MACHOs may still make up some fraction of dark matter, but the idea that they could make up most of it has been largely disproved, and they're not really planets, either. It's fairly certain at this point that most dark matter is non-baryonic.
I think they're mainly suggesting that it would be more efficient than storing the same energy in ordinary chemical batteries, which is the current method for storing energy from natural sources for times of higher demand (or lower production, in the case of solar). Presumably their calculations are based on minimizing the inefficiencies for both batteries and compressed air.
Depends on how precise you are with your coordinates. Also, there are a lot of places where there are dust clouds and such in the way, so while there may technically be stars behind them, they're undetectable from Earth.
This is a bit more legit, I think. After all, it's not like they're claiming that you'll be officially associated with the star or anything (much like adopting a whale, say). You're just funding science related to that star, and they're acknowledging it. Obviously, no one else will really care, but if you feel like it, you get the pride of having funded a (very specific) scientific endeavor.
Slashdot Mirror
This one actually gives some information on how they detected the belts (short version: it's based on infrared emissions that could only come from rocky debris).
And here is the actual paper on arXiv, if you want the full technical details of their methods.
So, you don't believe in life insurance, then? How about property insurance? Do you even lock your door when you go out? I don't worry too much about getting killed or having my stuff stolen, but that doesn't mean I don't take reasonable precautions for it. Having those precautions in place saves me from worrying about it.
Personally, I don't worry too much about where my next meal is coming from, because I have a job. If I lose it, then perhaps I'll worry, until I find another one.
Er... by "geosynchronous", do you mean lunasynchronous, i.e. remaining over one spot on the moon? There isn't one -- the moon's rotational period is so slow that at the distance required, the earth's gravity has more effect than the moon's. You'd need a set of lower orbiting satellites.
Well, it's not anything, yet. When it opens further, it will become an arm of the Indian Ocean. If the expansion continues, and depending on what happens to East Africa and the Indian Ocean, it could become an ocean in its own right, or perhaps half of the Indian Ocean, with a substantial divider between it and the other half.
The stock market is still gambling. It's partly a game of skill, in analyzing the information about the market and the companies you are buying, but it's gambling nonetheless.
And in poker, you're not playing against the house, just against other players. Just like the stock market. In poker the house takes a small cut of every pot; in the stock market, your broker does.
Yeah, that's not going to help when I'm debugging it two years later and have no clue what I was thinking when I wrote it. I have seriously gone in to look for a bug, said to myself, "What idiot wrote this incomprehensible garbage?", and looked at the cvs log only to discover that the idiot was me.
10% efficient at converting the photons that they absorb. The ultraviolet spectrum is considerably wider than the visual spectrum, so it could potentially be absorbing a much wider spectrum of light than currently available solar cells, and thus absorb many more photons. I don't have any actual numbers (in particular I'm not sure how much of the ultraviolet spectrum gets through the atmosphere, or what the photon flux is compared to visible light), but it's at least plausible.
How did this get modded insightful? Yes, 18-20 year olds will go to Canada to drink; speaking as someone who grew up within biking distance of the border, that's certainly not the only reason to go, though. In any case, if I had kids I'd rather they go to Canada to drink legally than do it illegally in the States. And do you honestly think the financial incentives aren't good enough for the state to do it without bribes? I'm sure the RFID chips cost less than $30 (they give away RFID cards for other purposes in a lot of places), and they'll save time and money processing people at the border.
What is Canada going to defend her territory with, exactly? I mean, with all due respect to the Maritime Command, it's about 1/6 the size of the U.S. Navy. If the U.S. really wants to send ships through the Northwest Passage without Canada's say-so, it won't have to ask nicely. The same goes for China.
Major climate changes in the past have tended to involve significant extinctions, as species caught in the wrong places couldn't adapt to the new conditions. Imagine that same effect on our food crops. Yes, other species adapt and move in to take their places, but the local effects can be severe in the meantime, and the faster it happens, the worse it will be. There may be bumper crops at higher latitudes, but first there will be increased desertification in the tropics.
There's also no guarantee that the warming would stop at any previously attained level; take a look at Venus for why this would be bad.
Even if it's part of their generic license, how it applies to Chrome is still important. What does "submitting, posting, or displaying" even mean in the context of a browser? It seems at least slightly plausible that could be interpreted to include personally generated content that the user views with the browser. I hope that it doesn't really work that way, but I am not a lawyer.
Cheating is bad, but there's no reason why satisfying a polygamy gene has to involve cheating. As long as both parties know what the other is doing and are okay with it, then everyone can be happy (even in cases where one of them wants to be monogamous and the other does not, though that certainly does create issues). That said, TFA doesn't actually say anything about the influence of the gene on the men being monogamous; in fact, the study didn't investigate whether they were faithful at all. Rather, the gene seems to influence the men's level of commitment to a relationship and the quality of the pair bonding.
Presumably because the link to the second page in TFA is in a non-obvious location -- it's only in the sidebar, not at the end (or beginning) of the actual article.
Space travel does have a very high accident rate. It's not the early launches, either: the actual numbers are 18 deaths out of 430 people who have been to space (though many of those people have gone multiple times); 14 of those are accounted for by the two Space Shuttle disasters. The Shuttle in particular has a failure rate of 1.6%, 2 out of 123 launches.
But that's still not a reason to prevent commercial spaceflights. People do dangerous things all the time, and as long as they understand the risks, there's no reason to stop them.
Nitrates can still cause problems -- they're a serious source of water pollution, leading to algae blooms (which in turn lead to other problems) and possibly drinking water contamination. Fertilizer runoff is a big issue in agricultural areas. They may still be less harmful overall than NOx, but they're certainly not harmless, and since they affect different domains any comparison is difficult to evaluate.
You know, I remember my first programming teacher explaining the same concept, back in high school... but he told us to use values like -1 that were actually invalid for the field in question. I wonder how many programmers learned it the way your instructor taught it (and didn't think about it the way you did)? It could explain a lot.
1080p compatible?
Yes, and the details are just amazing. Especially the corners on the ball -- they're just incredibly sharp.
Right. The only way around this is to have some complicated system with at least three admins, each of whom only has the power to revoke access for one of the others (or some number less than all the rest of them, for n > 3). Only a very paranoid and very bureaucratic organization is even going to think of going to the trouble of setting something like that up, though.
Yeah, that's definitely the ticket. I think what you actually want to have is sufficient fuel to make it to lunar orbit and back again, so if anything goes wrong with the refueling, you're not stranded. Other possibilities include refueling in LEO, at the space station, say; since getting to orbit at all is by far the biggest fuel cost, this could work pretty well.
Of course, at that point you're talking about establishing infrastructure in lunar orbit, so the next step is to establish infrastructure on the moon itself, and refuel on the ground as well. This is especially effective if enough water can be found to be a fuel source (via electrolysis), though it's not clear how likely that is.
Right, the problem with fusion is that it needs to be self-sustaining to be useful. The only way that's going to happen is if the reaction continuously generates enough heat to keep going, which almost certainly requires some significant minimum scale, and makes any sort of tabletop method pretty much impossible.
I think we'll have real fusion power plants once we figure out how to scale up the current methods enough to be self-sustaining. That's not easy, though, as it amounts to containing a small sun, and the containment technology also needs to be powered by the fusion.
That's pretty funny, but it should perhaps be pointed out that INTERCAL actually exists (i.e. there are real compilers available).
Not really. In our own solar system, all the planets combined are less than a thousandth the mass of the sun. It's pretty much impossible for planets to make up a significant fraction of the mass of a stellar system -- if they did, they would have wound up as a star.
MACHOs may still make up some fraction of dark matter, but the idea that they could make up most of it has been largely disproved, and they're not really planets, either. It's fairly certain at this point that most dark matter is non-baryonic.
I think they're mainly suggesting that it would be more efficient than storing the same energy in ordinary chemical batteries, which is the current method for storing energy from natural sources for times of higher demand (or lower production, in the case of solar). Presumably their calculations are based on minimizing the inefficiencies for both batteries and compressed air.
Depends on how precise you are with your coordinates. Also, there are a lot of places where there are dust clouds and such in the way, so while there may technically be stars behind them, they're undetectable from Earth.
This is a bit more legit, I think. After all, it's not like they're claiming that you'll be officially associated with the star or anything (much like adopting a whale, say). You're just funding science related to that star, and they're acknowledging it. Obviously, no one else will really care, but if you feel like it, you get the pride of having funded a (very specific) scientific endeavor.