We know from accidents involving large vacuum chambers that people don't lose consciousness for about 15 seconds. Your skin has enough strength to keep your insides on the inside, and that's enough to keep your blood from boiling. It's like putting a water baloon into a vacuum chamber. Any water on the outside will boil away instantly, but the water on the inside won't do anything. Likewise, people accidentally exposed to hard vacuum have described feeling their saliva boiling in their mouth, but they obviously lived to talk about it.
I'm not going to claim that "vacuum is safe", but it isn't instantly fatal. It seems similar to drowning; if you're pulled out quickly enough, you'll cough a lot but survive, if you're pulled out shortly after losing consciousness, you can be revived with few ill effects, but if you aren't pulled out for ten minutes, you're dead.
Getting back to "2001", Kubrick wanted to make as factual a film as possible. There had been both animal experiments and human accidents with hard vacuums at the Air Force years before the movie was made, and Kubrick and Clarke were familar with the details. As you state, there is a mistake in the scene: Bowman does hold his breath. The rest of the scene is flawless. On the 2007 DVD, Arthur C. Clarke states that had he been on set day they filmed this, he would have caught the error. I believe him.
Re:2nd Person Plural
on
Second Person
·
· Score: 1, Informative
Now for the rest of the story...
English used to have distinct 2nd-person pronouns for singular and plural. Plural was "you", and singular was "thee" (as used by Shakespeare, and still used by the Amish). Across just about all human cultures, kings/emperors/tsars are referred to via the plural pronoun (probably because they are identified with their nation/state). Over time, lower members of royalty also start receiving the 2nd-person treatment, then just about everyone with any power over you, and finally children start using it to refer to their individual parents. By this point, the original singular pronoun is dead. But then people start to feel a need to distinguish the singular and plural cases, so a new plural pronoun gets invented and the cycle starts anew.
Also, the science in movies like 2001 and Bladerunner is laughable from some peoples' perspectives. You can't hold your breath and go into a vacuum without rupturing your lungs, but this is done in 2001. That may seem minor to a layman, but if you are someone in the field of space travel, it might look like space opera to you. From http://physics.suite101.com/blog.cfm/how_to_survive_a_vacuum: If you have the misfortune of being exposed to a vacuum, for instance, if you are a character in a science fiction story, your body will not explode, but your blood and other fluids may boil, given a long enough exposure. Frost will form in your mouth as your saliva rapidly evaporates. Your ears will pop. Eventually you will die of asphyxiation, if you haven't already had a heart attack from panic.
You have about a minute and a half to get to safety. Before exposure, or immediately after initial exposure, you should exhale and remove all the air from your lungs. Otherwise, the air pressure will rupture the delicate alveoli, the air sacs, in your lungs. That is not an injury that's easy to recover from. There is not much else you can do.
The only accurate depiction of vacuum exposure in fiction can be found in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie the main character is exposed very briefly, and handles the situation well.
My in-laws' cattle get one scoop of corn a day in the winter, every other day in the summer. The scoop's an old Folger's coffee can, so call it two pounds. The rest of the time, they're eating grass or hay. I've never followed them around, but I'm told that a 1,200 lb cow eats 28 lbs of hay/day.
The water that the cattle drink all comes from stream-fed ponds. Climate change might be a problem, but historically this area was forest, so the only well is for the house, not the livestock. (Down in the flatlands, however, the rice farmers are complaining about the water table dropping, and they're sitting next to major rivers.)
A number of these factors are actually common between Earth and Mars, so I certainly wouldn't assume disaster is in our future if real evidence of life (even relatively advanced life) is found on Mars. "Our Milky Way Galaxy is unusual in that it is one of the most massive galaxies in the nearby universe. Our Solar System also seems to have qualities that make it rather unique. According to Guillermo Gonzalez, Assistant Professor of Astronomy at the University of Washington, these qualities make the Sun one of the few stars in the Galaxy capable of supporting complex life." http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=139
Intergalactic colonization is easy. Just accelerate the Sun towards Andromeda and wait patiently. As long as it takes less than, oh, a billion years to get there, you've colonized another galaxy. (How to accelerate the Sun towards Andromeda is left as an exercise for the student.)
If enough people can afford to eat meat at that point. At that point, I don't care if anyone else can afford to eat meat. My plan is to repurpose an acre of the pasture as a garden, then cull the herd and eat meat until the vegetables ripen.
But in most cases(*) kids eventually grow up and move out.
If you have, say, three kids 2 years apart starting when you're 18, the last one is out of college when you're 42. You'll have all the youthful energy you need to keep up with the little bundles of joy, and you'll still have twenty years or so to save up for retirement.
Or you can delay having kids until you're 38, giving you twenty years to save up for their college and your retirement, but a worn out body means that you won't be spending as much time on campouts and float trips.
The thing to avoid is to have kids at 22, get divorced and remarried, and have a second set of kids at 42. Trust me on this, I speak from experience.
(*) The exception is a kid who, for whatever reason, never moves out. Raising either a basement-dwelling slacker or a child with a disability will ruin your retirement plans no matter what. Lucky me, I'm again speaking from experience.
you should look around you at what is happening to the economy, and what direction it's headed. Thirty years in the IT industry, and my fallback career is cattle rancher. My in-laws own a small ranch where I work from time to time. If peak oil predictions prove to be optimistic, I'll still be able to put food on the table.
Good luck guys! Don't forget the crucial "Ballmer Peak" when getting started. http://xkcd.com/323/ I've never noticed it while programming, but the peak definitely exists when I'm bowling or playing golf. Initially I stink, but after a couple of beers I can do no wrong. With more alcohol, however, I rapidly make my starting performace look like the work of a genius. The people I'm playing with joke that could turn pro if I could figure out how to get an IV past the rules committee.
That is of course supposed to be 11 atmospheres. Typos always happen at the worst place... If only Slashdot offered some way to view a message before actually posting it.
When you're looking at a 10k year life span for some container it doesn't make much sense to use ceramics for anything structural. Like the actual container. Yeah, because concrete doesn't have much endurance. http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=06/12/01/170200
3.9.1 The space system shall provide the crew and passengers with the capability for emergency egress to a safe haven during prelaunch activities ((Requirement 34469).).
3.9.2 The space system shall provide emergency egress, safe haven, and rescue post touchdown ((Requirement 34470).).
3.9.3 The space system shall provide crew and passenger survival modes throughout the ascent and on-orbit profile (from hatch closure until atmosphere entry interface) in the following order of precedence ((Requirement 34471).):
Abort. Escape by retaining the crew and passengers encapsulated in a portion of the vehicle that can reenter without crew or passenger fatality or permanent disability. Escape by removing the crew and passengers from the vehicle.
3.9.4 The program shall ensure that ascent survival modes can be successfully accomplished during any ascent failure mode including, but not limited to, complete loss of thrust, complete loss of control, and catastrophic booster failure at any point during ascent ((Requirement 34473).).
3.9.5 The space system shall provide crew and passenger survival modes throughout the descent profile (from entry interface through landing) in the following order of precedence ((Requirement 34474).):
Design features that increase tolerance to loss of critical functions such that landing can still be accomplished. Escape.
3.9.6 The program shall ensure that the descent survival modes can be successfully accomplished for loss of critical functions including, but not limited to, loss of active attitude control and loss of primary power ((Requirement 34476).). And a bit later:
3.12 Flight Termination
3.12.1 Flight termination shall include features that allow sufficient time for abort or escape prior to activation of the destruct system ((Requirement 34505).). These things can really add to the cost of a vehicle.
What I'd like is a machine that functions as a server (web, email, whatever), and also runs X-Windows on a nice big screen and talks to a keyboard and mouse. The desktop/server dichotomy seems to say that I can have one or the other, but not both. This makes no sense at all. Why would having the usual KVM video system interfere with running backrouhg servers? It seems obvious to me that if one of the servers is having problems, it'd be really handy to be able to log in via a full-screen GUI to diagnose and fix things. I'm not sure what you can fix with a full-screen GUI that can't be done with an xterm. Server subsystems are designed to run on headless systems, so if a GUI is actually useful, it's provided via a web interface.
And if I want both in one machine, what's an easy way to do it? What I've been doing is installing the "desktop" distro, then downloading each of the servers I want and installing them as separate operations. That's what I've generally done as well. You don't want to install more than you need, plus the PC heritage is one service/one server. So if you want one box to be a server for web, email and whatever, you need to load them up separately anyway.
My servers are compiled on their machine, for example, which is probably good for performance. Unless you're running Gentoo, I don't know if that helps. IIRC, most makefiles are configured for a lowest-common-denominator architecture. But if you're using the gcc switches for your exact processor, then yeah, it helps.
Generally speaking, desktops and servers need their performance tuned in different ways. Servers can afford long timeslices to avoid scheduler overhead, desktops want smaller slices so things seem responsive. And even then, X generally needs to be special-cased. Linus keeps tinkering with things, though, trying to find a magic algorithm. Someday he might even succeed.
If your server isn't too loaded, then the scheduler probably doesn't make much difference. If you're running a web server on your desktop and one day it gets./ed, that's another story.
Nearly half of all respondents said that they used the same password for all of their online accounts I use the same password for all of the forums that I belong to, which accounts for about 90% of my online accounts. My more private accounts (instant messaging, email, etc) use different passwords, but they're all the same fixed string with the provider's name embedded within it. Yes, someone figuring out that my Gmail password is 'gottaLoveGmail' might then guess that my Yahoo password is 'gottaLoveYahoo', but I'm willing to live with the risk. Finally, I use unique machine-generated passwords for all of my on-line financial accounts. All of those passwords are kept in a PGP-encrypted file; even correctly decrypted, the file looks a lot like line noise, which I figure makes breaking into it that much harder.
I think it was Project Gutenburg, but it may hav been Google. Anyway, someone proposed using unreadable OCR scans for CAPTCHAs. You present two of them in a random order, one's already been solved, one hasn't. If the answer for the solved one is correct, you increment a counter for the unsolved one in your database. When a hundred people agree on what it says, you mark it as solved. Eventually, you've solve a bunch of stuff that conventional OCR couldn't touch.
A related idea would be to use the Mechanical Turk as a CAPTCHA. For instance, you show a satelite photo and ask if Steve Fossett's plane is visible. Well, not that exactly, but you get the idea.
Well, not me personally but the guys I went to college with in the mid 90s. They had cable fed into TV tuners and streaming to drives, controlled automatically by TV listens off the Internet. This was an obvious convergence of 1) TV tuner cards, 2) fast-enough processing at affordable prices, and 3) cheap-enough storage. TiVo came along and boxed it all up, then patented what other people had already been doing. Except that you haven't described TiVo's patent. They cover using a circular buffer so you can watch while you're streaming, without saving to a file.
Even thought I own a DishNetwork receiver, I think that TiVo was right to get their patent and Dish Network shouldn't have fought as hard as they did. TiVo isn't a bunch of patent trolls; they built and marketed hardware which other people copied.
My aunt just had her first kid at 40ish. She rushed off back to work as soon as possible, a scant few months after the birth, dumping her responsibility on perfect strangers in some daycare center. [...] Of course, it's not actually a mystery why she had the kid. It was just yet another piece in the yuppie status symbol puzzle. I saw worse when I adopted two Russian three-year-olds. My wife and I went into court, we told them that she was a stay-at-home mom, and in thirty minutes we were done; and that's with translations needed of every word uttered. Meanwhile, there was another woman staying in the same hotel as us. She was an unmarried M.D. who wasn't planning to quit her job, and was complaining about spending over four hours in court being grilled about every aspect of her life.
Personally, I'm surprised that she was finally allowed to adopt, since in a few more years she and her child may wind up in the news (http://news.google.com/news?q=reactive+attachment+disorder). OTOH, Russia's international adoption system appears to be basically a method for turning a profit while reducing the load on their orphanage system. In this, they are helped by good-meaning Americans who seem to think that almost any life in the US will be better than the kids' probable life in Russia. (This is a feeling that I share, BTW, I just wish I known beforehand.)
Your aunt is also laying the groundwork for her kid having reactive attachment disorder, although a less severe case. OTOH, being less severe it is less likely to be diagnosed, and left untreated it may be more likely to lead to problems in later life.
I'm interested in their omni-directional treadmill, CyberCarpet. I've tried to design something like this, but I inevitably wind up with a ten-foot (three meter, for our foreign friends) sphere that the user walks upon/within.
Sure, it may seem academic now, but in just 3e9 years, our galaxy is going to merge with the Andromeda galaxy(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda-Milky_Way_collision). That would re-ignite re-ignite the merged black holes, and we'd have to move to a better neighborhood.
Obviously there are certain topologies that they can't create, but most things that a printer can make a CNC machine can make as well. All I care about is if a RepRap can be used to make a CNC machine. Then you'd have the best of both worlds.
You can still make wrapped coils, methinks. Just build them up in cross-sections. The printing resolution would likely limit how tight you could get it, though. Also, I'm not confident about the conductivity of the low-melting point metal alloys they are currently testing. Moters get warm when they are under load; that's why motors like to use copper wiring for their coils. I can just see an entire RepRap moter suddenly turning into a puddle in the middle of a big job.
I think most people would be happy if RepRap could produce specialized machines able to build sensors, stepper motors and microcontrollers from raw materials.
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We know from accidents involving large vacuum chambers that people don't lose consciousness for about 15 seconds. Your skin has enough strength to keep your insides on the inside, and that's enough to keep your blood from boiling. It's like putting a water baloon into a vacuum chamber. Any water on the outside will boil away instantly, but the water on the inside won't do anything. Likewise, people accidentally exposed to hard vacuum have described feeling their saliva boiling in their mouth, but they obviously lived to talk about it.
I'm not going to claim that "vacuum is safe", but it isn't instantly fatal. It seems similar to drowning; if you're pulled out quickly enough, you'll cough a lot but survive, if you're pulled out shortly after losing consciousness, you can be revived with few ill effects, but if you aren't pulled out for ten minutes, you're dead.
Getting back to "2001", Kubrick wanted to make as factual a film as possible. There had been both animal experiments and human accidents with hard vacuums at the Air Force years before the movie was made, and Kubrick and Clarke were familar with the details. As you state, there is a mistake in the scene: Bowman does hold his breath. The rest of the scene is flawless. On the 2007 DVD, Arthur C. Clarke states that had he been on set day they filmed this, he would have caught the error. I believe him.
Now for the rest of the story...
English used to have distinct 2nd-person pronouns for singular and plural. Plural was "you", and singular was "thee" (as used by Shakespeare, and still used by the Amish). Across just about all human cultures, kings/emperors/tsars are referred to via the plural pronoun (probably because they are identified with their nation/state). Over time, lower members of royalty also start receiving the 2nd-person treatment, then just about everyone with any power over you, and finally children start using it to refer to their individual parents. By this point, the original singular pronoun is dead. But then people start to feel a need to distinguish the singular and plural cases, so a new plural pronoun gets invented and the cycle starts anew.
If you have the misfortune of being exposed to a vacuum, for instance, if you are a character in a science fiction story, your body will not explode, but your blood and other fluids may boil, given a long enough exposure. Frost will form in your mouth as your saliva rapidly evaporates. Your ears will pop. Eventually you will die of asphyxiation, if you haven't already had a heart attack from panic.
You have about a minute and a half to get to safety. Before exposure, or immediately after initial exposure, you should exhale and remove all the air from your lungs. Otherwise, the air pressure will rupture the delicate alveoli, the air sacs, in your lungs. That is not an injury that's easy to recover from. There is not much else you can do.
The only accurate depiction of vacuum exposure in fiction can be found in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey. In the movie the main character is exposed very briefly, and handles the situation well.
A Borg, a Terminator, and Robocop walk into a bar. The bartender looks at them and asks, "Is this some kind of a joke?"
My in-laws' cattle get one scoop of corn a day in the winter, every other day in the summer. The scoop's an old Folger's coffee can, so call it two pounds. The rest of the time, they're eating grass or hay. I've never followed them around, but I'm told that a 1,200 lb cow eats 28 lbs of hay/day.
The water that the cattle drink all comes from stream-fed ponds. Climate change might be a problem, but historically this area was forest, so the only well is for the house, not the livestock. (Down in the flatlands, however, the rice farmers are complaining about the water table dropping, and they're sitting next to major rivers.)
http://www.astrobio.net/news/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=139
Intergalactic colonization is easy. Just accelerate the Sun towards Andromeda and wait patiently. As long as it takes less than, oh, a billion years to get there, you've colonized another galaxy. (How to accelerate the Sun towards Andromeda is left as an exercise for the student.)
But in most cases(*) kids eventually grow up and move out.
If you have, say, three kids 2 years apart starting when you're 18, the last one is out of college when you're 42. You'll have all the youthful energy you need to keep up with the little bundles of joy, and you'll still have twenty years or so to save up for retirement.
Or you can delay having kids until you're 38, giving you twenty years to save up for their college and your retirement, but a worn out body means that you won't be spending as much time on campouts and float trips.
The thing to avoid is to have kids at 22, get divorced and remarried, and have a second set of kids at 42. Trust me on this, I speak from experience.
(*) The exception is a kid who, for whatever reason, never moves out. Raising either a basement-dwelling slacker or a child with a disability will ruin your retirement plans no matter what. Lucky me, I'm again speaking from experience.
I keep trying to explain to people why DRM is bad. This makes my job easier.
Since cement is a type of ceramic ("the term covers inorganic non metallic materials which are formed by the action of heat. Up until the 1950s or so, the most important of these were the traditional clays, made into pottery, bricks, tiles and the like, along with cements and glass."), and concrete is cement with an added aggregate, I'd say that the terms can overlap quite a bit. The use of ceramics for nuclear waste storage implies the use of the waste as an aggregate, making the final product a type of concrete.
http://nodis3.gsfc.nasa.gov/displayDir.cfm?Internal_ID=N_PR_8705_002A_&page_name=Chapter3 3.9 Crew and Passenger Survival
3.9.1 The space system shall provide the crew and passengers with the capability for emergency egress to a safe haven during prelaunch activities ((Requirement 34469).).
3.9.2 The space system shall provide emergency egress, safe haven, and rescue post touchdown ((Requirement 34470).).
3.9.3 The space system shall provide crew and passenger survival modes throughout the ascent and on-orbit profile (from hatch closure until atmosphere entry interface) in the following order of precedence ((Requirement 34471).):
Abort.
Escape by retaining the crew and passengers encapsulated in a portion of the vehicle that can reenter without crew or passenger fatality or permanent disability.
Escape by removing the crew and passengers from the vehicle.
3.9.4 The program shall ensure that ascent survival modes can be successfully accomplished during any ascent failure mode including, but not limited to, complete loss of thrust, complete loss of control, and catastrophic booster failure at any point during ascent ((Requirement 34473).).
3.9.5 The space system shall provide crew and passenger survival modes throughout the descent profile (from entry interface through landing) in the following order of precedence ((Requirement 34474).):
Design features that increase tolerance to loss of critical functions such that landing can still be accomplished.
Escape.
3.9.6 The program shall ensure that the descent survival modes can be successfully accomplished for loss of critical functions including, but not limited to, loss of active attitude control and loss of primary power ((Requirement 34476).). And a bit later: 3.12 Flight Termination
3.12.1 Flight termination shall include features that allow sufficient time for abort or escape prior to activation of the destruct system ((Requirement 34505).). These things can really add to the cost of a vehicle.
Generally speaking, desktops and servers need their performance tuned in different ways. Servers can afford long timeslices to avoid scheduler overhead, desktops want smaller slices so things seem responsive. And even then, X generally needs to be special-cased. Linus keeps tinkering with things, though, trying to find a magic algorithm. Someday he might even succeed.
If your server isn't too loaded, then the scheduler probably doesn't make much difference. If you're running a web server on your desktop and one day it gets
I think it was Project Gutenburg, but it may hav been Google. Anyway, someone proposed using unreadable OCR scans for CAPTCHAs. You present two of them in a random order, one's already been solved, one hasn't. If the answer for the solved one is correct, you increment a counter for the unsolved one in your database. When a hundred people agree on what it says, you mark it as solved. Eventually, you've solve a bunch of stuff that conventional OCR couldn't touch.
A related idea would be to use the Mechanical Turk as a CAPTCHA. For instance, you show a satelite photo and ask if Steve Fossett's plane is visible. Well, not that exactly, but you get the idea.
Even thought I own a DishNetwork receiver, I think that TiVo was right to get their patent and Dish Network shouldn't have fought as hard as they did. TiVo isn't a bunch of patent trolls; they built and marketed hardware which other people copied.
Personally, I'm surprised that she was finally allowed to adopt, since in a few more years she and her child may wind up in the news (http://news.google.com/news?q=reactive+attachment+disorder). OTOH, Russia's international adoption system appears to be basically a method for turning a profit while reducing the load on their orphanage system. In this, they are helped by good-meaning Americans who seem to think that almost any life in the US will be better than the kids' probable life in Russia. (This is a feeling that I share, BTW, I just wish I known beforehand.)
Your aunt is also laying the groundwork for her kid having reactive attachment disorder, although a less severe case. OTOH, being less severe it is less likely to be diagnosed, and left untreated it may be more likely to lead to problems in later life.
I'm interested in their omni-directional treadmill, CyberCarpet. I've tried to design something like this, but I inevitably wind up with a ten-foot (three meter, for our foreign friends) sphere that the user walks upon/within.
Sure, it may seem academic now, but in just 3e9 years, our galaxy is going to merge with the Andromeda galaxy(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andromeda-Milky_Way_collision). That would re-ignite re-ignite the merged black holes, and we'd have to move to a better neighborhood.
I think most people would be happy if RepRap could produce specialized machines able to build sensors, stepper motors and microcontrollers from raw materials.