Isaac Asimov used that idea in The Martian Way (short story, Martian colonists solve their water shortage problem by going to Saturn and bringing icy ring chunks back). He had a 'micropile' heat some of the ice to steam, then have it shoot out at extreme pressure. As acceleration = force / mass, and the force was great, the acceleration was equally as great, and the constant acceleration got the colonists back to Mars in a matter of weeks.
To use that to escape Earth gravity, though...think of the power of a chemical rocket, and now try to duplicate that with steam!
I was going to use kgs, but then I got to thinking that the mass of the Earth would still make gravity at 9.8 m per second squared. But you're right... that would be the force of the Earth if weighed on, erm, the Earth. Knock off a zero, and pretend I said kilos.
Mod parent for funny, even though I'm answering seriously...
Wouldn't the power output needed to move 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Newtons of mass (maybe I should have used tons...just knock four zeroes off, that's close enough) just pump so much climate-changing stuff in the air it'd defeat the purpose?
By the way, a Saturn V rocket weighs around 3,000 tons (30 thousand Netwons, approximately). That's just for comparison.
If we used enough rockets to make a sizeable difference to Earth's orbit (which we don't have the fuel for, or the raw materials to build the rockets), the heat would be incredible. That's assuming that one of the rockets doesn't have a fault and blow up, leading to a firestorm that cooks the planet enough to evaporate the oceans.
But science fiction isn't meant to be primarily a prediction method for the future. It's a way of showing the contemporary issues in society, but getting away with being close-to-the-bone by wrapping it in sci-fi. Just look at how Star Trek did it through its history. Kirk kissing Uhura, Dax kissing another woman because her symbiant used to be in a male, countless discussions about greed and drug use and equality given in a setting that doesn't get the easily irritated someting to complain about.
Allow me to slow time so much that I reverse it. I'll travel back in time and repeat what you said, so that people will think you repeated what I said.
I just want to expand on the matter of climate versus weather, for all those Americans that seem to be confused (not the Americans that aren't... we know where Al Gore's from).
'Climate' is the big picture. Hundreds of weather-recording locations around the world, taking data for years and years.
'Weather' is the three-day forecast thing you check to see if you'll need your brolly. Sorry: umbrella.
Let's use an analogy for those Americans that are dragging the others down into the 3rd World: a NASCAR race. Knowing what the climate is doing is like knowing who's likely to win a NASCAR race when there's one lap to go (on a caution flag) because you've watched the whole race, you understand the rules of the race, and you have been paying attention. The weather for one day? That's like trying to figure out who won the race because you have a single picture. Taken at a totally random time during the race. Of a section of the track that may or may not have cars on it. And you don't know what lap the photo was taken on.
So the more I see some people doing the equivalent of waving that photo at me, saying "it was Dale that done won the race", the more I let you wave. Because you're putting your stupidity online, where it can be searched for years to come, and people that aren't paid by oil companies / aren't gullible / aren't in a state of fear will see just how manipulative / stupid / scared you were.
The breakthrough may someday allow scientists to create stem cells without destroying embryos
[Overheard at fertility clinic] - it's a good job these embryos weren't going to be used for medical purposes.
(sound of pedal bin opening)
(sound of petri dishes hitting the inside of the bin)
(sound of lid closing)
I did a quick look on Google: in 2003, there were 400,000 frozen embryos in fertility clinics in the US. And that was revealed when the previous estimates ranged from the tens of thousands to 200,000 frozen embryos, with many estimates hovering around 100,000.
Somehow, and call me an old cynic if you like, I don't see 400,000 right-to-life women foregoing their own genetic heritage in order to give these fertilized eggs a home. They're not going to be viable, frozen as they are, indefinitely.
I'm a pragmatist. Recycle what we can re-use if we can. You may disagree with me, you may agree with me, but history shows that science and progress only gets held back for so long in one place before it thrives and benefits another place. And please don't try to appeal to my humane side: just look at the world around you. Look at the news. Life is cheap even if you're bigger than a kidney bean. It's time we started getting Vulcan on these embryos and started considering the needs of the many.
Because if America is basing foreign policy on hypothetical situations that are contradicted by real intelligence reports / common sense, just imagine what Iran could do IF they had enough unicorn poo gold to destabilize the dollar blah blah Amero blah SuperInterstateHighway the width of Manhattan blah blah tin foil hats blah Ron Paul?
They have guns. And yet they don't shoot across the Iraqi border with reckless abandon. And North Korea has the bomb, and yet South Korea still steadfastly refuses to be a glass ashtray.
I think that the last 50 years, humans have been evolving backwards
There's no such thing. Your group either stays as it is because situations don't force a change, or your group undergoes some change and certain traits become more desirable than others. And either way, the group then either prospers or it doesn't, either because of the change or in spite of the change (but in the long run, usually because of the change).
Saying that evolution has a direction indicates you think that there's some end design that evolution is heading for. There isn't.
I just want to get an inkling for what people think of the whole notion of advertising. I'll say what I think, and you let me know if that's how you think / don't think.
Advertising is great for letting me know there is new stuff out there, or for allowing me the occasional 'Eureka' moment (when I see something in meatspace that confuses me because I don't know what it's good for, then I see it being used on an ad so now at least I know its purpose).
But there are plenty of superfluous commercials. Advertising the electric company, for example. It's not as though I was going to NOT use electricity in my computer to post this reply. They're not the only ones. It's not as though I see adverts for a petrol company and I think "I'll use that instead of orange juice in my car."
If I'm in the market for something, I'll shop around. Look for opinions online, check out websites and magazines from independent test sources. Weigh up my options. I certainly don't base my 'desires' on catchphrases and logos. And because of this, I'm an advertiser's worst nightmare. I don't think I can ever be corerced into buying anything I didn't already want or don't need. No matter how many credit card offers I receive, I still refuse to run up a debt because the card has a picture of a polar bear on it, or I can get Reward Points (tm) that are worth less than the amount I'd be paying in interest if I did fall for the sales pitch.
So adverts in my PDFs? About as much use on me as pop-up adverts on the web. And my browser blocks those. If it becomes an annoyance, I'll look for software that stops the ads. Or read the PDFs offline. The worst it will be for me is a waste of screen area.
There seems to be quite a lot of mutual ego-stimulation at the top of this thread. Nice platitudes, but until your post (Shining Celebi) there was only one other post that actually searched for what he has voted for. And that took information from the guy's own website. Yeah, that's impartial right there!
Talk, by the looks of things, is extremely cheap in America. And even after the mess made of Iraq by the right-of-centre party, it seems that people haven't learned a thing and still believe whatever people tell them. Looks to me like the man's as much a part of the established order-of-things as anyone else that says all those nice things that gets their foot in the door (I'll cut taxes, I'm against pork-barrel politics etc.) but then follows the whip when it comes to voting.
Let's not forget that we have people (in this thread, no less) crying out for an American President to help fix the damage done to their Constitution over the past few years...and they want a man from the same Party that used it as toilet paper to begin with? That's like accepting a building contract bid from the company that deliberately knocked down your house with no good reason. Over an eight year period. Personally: if someone did that to my house / bedrock document for the nation, I'd not want to give them the time of day for a while.
I'll be proven wrong if he runs as a Third Party 'Constitution' candidate after he loses to Mitt or Rudy in your primaries. But I won't hold my breath in preparation for my retraction. It just seems like a lot of Americans are suffering from a political version of Battered Wife Syndrome - they willingly return to the ones that abused them, because they've been so beaten down they've started to believe the lying and scaremongering is all true. The ability to take independent action's just not there. You've been broken, and only BB can save you all.
I've noticed a trend among the religiously vocal, especially when it comes to putting their opinion into anything graphic: they steal.
I know, there might be some 'splaining to do to the big G man in the sky when their time comes (something to do with a few sentences beginning "thou shalt not..."), but they do it all the same anyway.
Christian t-shirts and gifts are great witnessing tools for allowing others to read the Word while just walking down the street. As Christians we want to share Jesus with people that haven't found him yet, but sometimes we find it hard to initiate the conversation. That is why wearing a Christian shirt or hat is so incredible! You don't have to think of things to say to get the conversation started because people will ask you questions about the messages on the shirts. After you get started then we just have to let the Holy Spirit talk through us.
Ever wondered What Would Jesus Steal? Everyone else's ideas. Because when I want to do something socially abhorrent like force my ideas down someone's throat, I like to be a hypocrite when I do it too. And stealing someone else's hard work is just the way to do it. Hey, it worked for Eostre / Easter...
All Apple did is take existing technology, package it up into a nice little device and slap a shiny UI onto it.
If we're down to "all [group] did was utilise existing invention, rearrange the stuff with [this and that] and [stick something on one end] to attract the world's attention", you could replace Apple / nice little device / shiny UI with:
NASA / three stage rocket / moon lander
the non-Chinese / a barrel and self-contained bullets / wooden handle
James Starley / rubber wheels / handlebars and a saddle
That's all they did. And changed how we do things just a little. You have to give it to Apple -- nobody calls a generic personal music player "a Walkman" anymore, even though Sony has video and mp3 Walkman devices in the market.
The current global warming debate isn't that there have or haven't been variations in Earth's temperature in the past (there have - Antarctica used to have forests, or someone / something put flora and fauna fossils on the continent just to screw with our brains...and it was in roughly the same place 100 million years ago, with what is now Australia and India).
And it's not whether the sun's output is or isn't constant (it's not, but the increases measured since the 1970s don't equate to what's happening on Earth in much the same way that a burning house across town doesn't explain why your kettle's boiling).
That debate is the speed it's happening, and how rising sea levels is bad for anywhere with sea ports that handle a lot of essentials to people's lives. And the population displacement that would result in having (for example) Florida as a small archipeligo. The fossil record shows slow changes. What we're doing now is speeding up the process. There have been no increases like this in the past. And studies now show the big extinction events of this planet coincide with climate change rather than impact events. The dinosaurs were being ousted long before the KT hit the Yucatan... and there was even a 'dinosaur killer' asteriod that hit Earth some time before KT, which resulted in no global extinctions at all.
Of course, I understand there are influential Americans that think: "despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming". Good luck with that. The British already had their King Canute.
This is off-topic. As was the post I'm answering. Both should be marked as such.
Slashdot Mirror
Isaac Asimov used that idea in The Martian Way (short story, Martian colonists solve their water shortage problem by going to Saturn and bringing icy ring chunks back). He had a 'micropile' heat some of the ice to steam, then have it shoot out at extreme pressure. As acceleration = force / mass, and the force was great, the acceleration was equally as great, and the constant acceleration got the colonists back to Mars in a matter of weeks.
...think of the power of a chemical rocket, and now try to duplicate that with steam!
To use that to escape Earth gravity, though
I was going to use kgs, but then I got to thinking that the mass of the Earth would still make gravity at 9.8 m per second squared. But you're right... that would be the force of the Earth if weighed on, erm, the Earth. Knock off a zero, and pretend I said kilos.
if there was discovered oil on mars we would be there by now
There, fixed it for you. Because if oil is discovered there in the near future, it would be there now too.
Mod parent for funny, even though I'm answering seriously...
...just knock four zeroes off, that's close enough) just pump so much climate-changing stuff in the air it'd defeat the purpose?
Wouldn't the power output needed to move 60,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 Newtons of mass (maybe I should have used tons
By the way, a Saturn V rocket weighs around 3,000 tons (30 thousand Netwons, approximately). That's just for comparison.
If we used enough rockets to make a sizeable difference to Earth's orbit (which we don't have the fuel for, or the raw materials to build the rockets), the heat would be incredible. That's assuming that one of the rockets doesn't have a fault and blow up, leading to a firestorm that cooks the planet enough to evaporate the oceans.
I do like the idea of a rocket store, though.
Not just Evolution... there are loads of Mars gives us trouble movies.
But science fiction isn't meant to be primarily a prediction method for the future. It's a way of showing the contemporary issues in society, but getting away with being close-to-the-bone by wrapping it in sci-fi. Just look at how Star Trek did it through its history. Kirk kissing Uhura, Dax kissing another woman because her symbiant used to be in a male, countless discussions about greed and drug use and equality given in a setting that doesn't get the easily irritated someting to complain about.
Allow me to slow time so much that I reverse it. I'll travel back in time and repeat what you said, so that people will think you repeated what I said.
There. Did you miss me?
Looking at the top two hits on this Google search, it looks like people in Government don't even know the basic functions of Microsoft Word.
Those that do not learn the mistakes in File ---> Versions history are doomed to repeat them.
I just want to expand on the matter of climate versus weather, for all those Americans that seem to be confused (not the Americans that aren't... we know where Al Gore's from).
'Climate' is the big picture. Hundreds of weather-recording locations around the world, taking data for years and years.
'Weather' is the three-day forecast thing you check to see if you'll need your brolly. Sorry: umbrella.
Let's use an analogy for those Americans that are dragging the others down into the 3rd World: a NASCAR race. Knowing what the climate is doing is like knowing who's likely to win a NASCAR race when there's one lap to go (on a caution flag) because you've watched the whole race, you understand the rules of the race, and you have been paying attention. The weather for one day? That's like trying to figure out who won the race because you have a single picture. Taken at a totally random time during the race. Of a section of the track that may or may not have cars on it. And you don't know what lap the photo was taken on.
So the more I see some people doing the equivalent of waving that photo at me, saying "it was Dale that done won the race", the more I let you wave. Because you're putting your stupidity online, where it can be searched for years to come, and people that aren't paid by oil companies / aren't gullible / aren't in a state of fear will see just how manipulative / stupid / scared you were.
[rimshot] ...and don't forget to tip your waitresses.
Another web search and a quick 'multiply by 30 for the daily amount' shows George's Folly is costing Americans 8.25 billion a month.
Can't give the American kids healthcare, though. Jesus wouldn't want that shit on his watch!
[Overheard at fertility clinic] - it's a good job these embryos weren't going to be used for medical purposes.
(sound of pedal bin opening)
(sound of petri dishes hitting the inside of the bin)
(sound of lid closing)
I did a quick look on Google: in 2003, there were 400,000 frozen embryos in fertility clinics in the US. And that was revealed when the previous estimates ranged from the tens of thousands to 200,000 frozen embryos, with many estimates hovering around 100,000.
Somehow, and call me an old cynic if you like, I don't see 400,000 right-to-life women foregoing their own genetic heritage in order to give these fertilized eggs a home. They're not going to be viable, frozen as they are, indefinitely.
I'm a pragmatist. Recycle what we can re-use if we can. You may disagree with me, you may agree with me, but history shows that science and progress only gets held back for so long in one place before it thrives and benefits another place. And please don't try to appeal to my humane side: just look at the world around you. Look at the news. Life is cheap even if you're bigger than a kidney bean. It's time we started getting Vulcan on these embryos and started considering the needs of the many.
What IF Iran finds unicorns that poo gold bars?
Because if America is basing foreign policy on hypothetical situations that are contradicted by real intelligence reports / common sense, just imagine what Iran could do IF they had enough unicorn poo gold to destabilize the dollar blah blah Amero blah SuperInterstateHighway the width of Manhattan blah blah tin foil hats blah Ron Paul?
They have guns. And yet they don't shoot across the Iraqi border with reckless abandon. And North Korea has the bomb, and yet South Korea still steadfastly refuses to be a glass ashtray.
Hmmmm.
Wouldn't that be CompIraq and CompAfghanistan?
...lunch-time doubly so.'
Ford Prefect. Which is very apt, because today is Mos Def's birthday.
There's no such thing. Your group either stays as it is because situations don't force a change, or your group undergoes some change and certain traits become more desirable than others. And either way, the group then either prospers or it doesn't, either because of the change or in spite of the change (but in the long run, usually because of the change).
Saying that evolution has a direction indicates you think that there's some end design that evolution is heading for. There isn't.
If someone can just incorporate the following into a post:
- pr0n
- the phrase "...in their upright position before landing..."
that would be great, thanks.
Ok, you lot. We'll call it a draw...
(rimshot) Don't forget to tip your waitresses...(!)
I'll get my coat...
1 - landscaping
2 - dishwashing
3 - picking our fruit
I just want to get an inkling for what people think of the whole notion of advertising. I'll say what I think, and you let me know if that's how you think / don't think.
Advertising is great for letting me know there is new stuff out there, or for allowing me the occasional 'Eureka' moment (when I see something in meatspace that confuses me because I don't know what it's good for, then I see it being used on an ad so now at least I know its purpose).
But there are plenty of superfluous commercials. Advertising the electric company, for example. It's not as though I was going to NOT use electricity in my computer to post this reply. They're not the only ones. It's not as though I see adverts for a petrol company and I think "I'll use that instead of orange juice in my car."
If I'm in the market for something, I'll shop around. Look for opinions online, check out websites and magazines from independent test sources. Weigh up my options. I certainly don't base my 'desires' on catchphrases and logos. And because of this, I'm an advertiser's worst nightmare. I don't think I can ever be corerced into buying anything I didn't already want or don't need. No matter how many credit card offers I receive, I still refuse to run up a debt because the card has a picture of a polar bear on it, or I can get Reward Points (tm) that are worth less than the amount I'd be paying in interest if I did fall for the sales pitch.
So adverts in my PDFs? About as much use on me as pop-up adverts on the web. And my browser blocks those. If it becomes an annoyance, I'll look for software that stops the ads. Or read the PDFs offline. The worst it will be for me is a waste of screen area.
There seems to be quite a lot of mutual ego-stimulation at the top of this thread. Nice platitudes, but until your post (Shining Celebi) there was only one other post that actually searched for what he has voted for. And that took information from the guy's own website. Yeah, that's impartial right there!
...and they want a man from the same Party that used it as toilet paper to begin with? That's like accepting a building contract bid from the company that deliberately knocked down your house with no good reason. Over an eight year period. Personally: if someone did that to my house / bedrock document for the nation, I'd not want to give them the time of day for a while.
Talk, by the looks of things, is extremely cheap in America. And even after the mess made of Iraq by the right-of-centre party, it seems that people haven't learned a thing and still believe whatever people tell them. Looks to me like the man's as much a part of the established order-of-things as anyone else that says all those nice things that gets their foot in the door (I'll cut taxes, I'm against pork-barrel politics etc.) but then follows the whip when it comes to voting.
Let's not forget that we have people (in this thread, no less) crying out for an American President to help fix the damage done to their Constitution over the past few years
I'll be proven wrong if he runs as a Third Party 'Constitution' candidate after he loses to Mitt or Rudy in your primaries. But I won't hold my breath in preparation for my retraction. It just seems like a lot of Americans are suffering from a political version of Battered Wife Syndrome - they willingly return to the ones that abused them, because they've been so beaten down they've started to believe the lying and scaremongering is all true. The ability to take independent action's just not there. You've been broken, and only BB can save you all.
Good luck with your elections y'all.
I know, there might be some 'splaining to do to the big G man in the sky when their time comes (something to do with a few sentences beginning "thou shalt not..."), but they do it all the same anyway.
'Got milk?' idea? Steal it, stick it on a t-shirt, then sell it for profit. Got Jesus? And while you're at it, why not do the same with SubWay, Ford, Superman, even Watty Piper's 'The Little Engine That Could'.
That was just one Google Images search and (consequently) one t-shirt seller. Going to a second site, there's theft from Spongebob Squarepants, Abercrombie & Fitch, Jim Bean, Deal Or No Deal, Pepsi Cola, Reese's Peanut Butter, Hot Topic offensive cute animal, Desperate Housewives, Hershey's Chocolate, Lost, Staples, Heroes, Pop / American Idol, and an Apple theft with iTunes.
Thou shalt not steal? Screw that, that last paragraph's output even had the audacity to put its OWN copyright notice on many of the t-shirts!
As their site says...
Ever wondered What Would Jesus Steal? Everyone else's ideas. Because when I want to do something socially abhorrent like force my ideas down someone's throat, I like to be a hypocrite when I do it too. And stealing someone else's hard work is just the way to do it. Hey, it worked for Eostre / Easter...
If we're down to "all [group] did was utilise existing invention, rearrange the stuff with [this and that] and [stick something on one end] to attract the world's attention", you could replace Apple / nice little device / shiny UI with:
NASA / three stage rocket / moon lander
the non-Chinese / a barrel and self-contained bullets / wooden handle
James Starley / rubber wheels / handlebars and a saddle
That's all they did. And changed how we do things just a little. You have to give it to Apple -- nobody calls a generic personal music player "a Walkman" anymore, even though Sony has video and mp3 Walkman devices in the market.
But in this case, 4/5 = 0.83267. (Imperial floating point error, my sire...)
...2, 1, go.
...and it was in roughly the same place 100 million years ago, with what is now Australia and India).
The current global warming debate isn't that there have or haven't been variations in Earth's temperature in the past (there have - Antarctica used to have forests, or someone / something put flora and fauna fossils on the continent just to screw with our brains
And it's not whether the sun's output is or isn't constant (it's not, but the increases measured since the 1970s don't equate to what's happening on Earth in much the same way that a burning house across town doesn't explain why your kettle's boiling).
That debate is the speed it's happening, and how rising sea levels is bad for anywhere with sea ports that handle a lot of essentials to people's lives. And the population displacement that would result in having (for example) Florida as a small archipeligo. The fossil record shows slow changes. What we're doing now is speeding up the process. There have been no increases like this in the past. And studies now show the big extinction events of this planet coincide with climate change rather than impact events. The dinosaurs were being ousted long before the KT hit the Yucatan... and there was even a 'dinosaur killer' asteriod that hit Earth some time before KT, which resulted in no global extinctions at all.
Of course, I understand there are influential Americans that think: "despite the hysterics of a few pseudo-scientists, there is no reason to believe in global warming". Good luck with that. The British already had their King Canute.
This is off-topic. As was the post I'm answering. Both should be marked as such.