For people who like this subject matter and want to read more about the history of the development of atomic bombs (including the history of early 20th century atomic physics), I can recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Solid history _and_ good writing.
I bought it after it was recommended in some other Slashdot post, and loved it.
I disagree. Here in the UK there has been rather a lot of coverage.
As far as I know, there are a lot of Indian immigrants living in the UK, and of course India used to be a British colony. It is closer to home.
And I meant it more generally anyway. A train crash close to London gets more coverage than a train crash in Chile. And that's the same all over the world.
It's events like this that can get one easily pissed off (yet again) over the bias in the American Media.
This isn't bias in American Media, this is bias in human brains. The further away something is from us personally, the less we care. It's not at all unique to the US.
We use coal, oil, and natural gas because they're CHEAPER than other energy sources. When they actually DO start to run short the price will rise and we'll (incrementally) switch to using something else.
This is a total non-argument until the costs of cleaning up the pollution is factored into the price of the fuel.
Of course the statistics change - more measurements are being done, so the error margin on the estimate goes down. There is a band of possibilities, a bunch of possible trajectories, and more measurements make that band smaller.
Currently Earth is still within that band, and Earth's diameter is about 1/45th of the width of the band, so that's the probability of a hit.
Since more measurements are being done, we'll see this for a few more days - either the band is smaller and Earth is still within it, which raises the probability, or the band is smaller and Earth isn't in it anymore, and the probability drops to 0.
Saying this is "fiddling of statistics" is an insult to the mathematicians involved.
(Story above is simplified, by making it 2D instead of 3D, and by ignoring the fact that it's probably not some fixed area but the probabilities of the thing going outside the area are smaller and it's some weighted average, and I don't really know anything about the maths, I just think it's obvious that the probability would change quickly).
In the EU, they are obliged to accept returns. To a rather ridiculous degree (I remember a protest by a pet store that was afraid it'd have to refund a deceased gold fish that was purchased a year ago...)
Certainly anything not damaged by the customer, and returned within eight days after purchase. For any reason.
And of course, that's ignoring the other benefits potentially offered. I just find it a bit unexpected that/.ers, the cutting edge of geekery, people weaned on Asimov and Star Trek, have such a cynical response..
Considering the anti-science slant of many posts these days, I don't think/. is the cutting edge of geekery, and probably hasn't been for ages.
Asimov, indeed. Reading the global warming threads make me think of "The Gods Themselves".
(for those who haven't read it: scientists find out civilization is destroying their sun by a new method of cheap energy, politicians and people cannot be convinced to stop using it... the full quote the book's title refers to is "Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain").
That immigrant usually has a rather good education, paid for by the Indian government, that didn't cost the US a dime. But you reap most of the benefits.
Moreoever it's quite widely recognized that companies are allowed to use/refer/compare other competitors under the terms of fair use, how else are companies going to mention competitors' products without infringing a TM?
I wonder if there's going to be a repeat of this sort of law suit in some other country. After all, Google is an international business, and for instance in the Netherlands it is not allowed to mention competitor's products in advertising.
I've never been so angry at these crooks in government before now. Dutch parliament rejects software patents, European parliament rejects software patents, they'll hurt the Dutch software industry very badly (I believe the total number of software patents held by Dutch IT companies is 3) and now the fuckers want to avoid all of that by adding it on to some fisheries decision.
Help me, fellow Dutchmen, how can we make this as public as possible as quickly as possible? I've never done anything active in politics before, but this must go into the spotlight! Give me some hints...
It's not a problem with the law of thermodynamics (otherwise, go convince the Sun it can't shine:-)).
The thing is that hydrogen is turned into helium, another element. That produces a huge amount of energy - in fact, the same amount it would cost to split that helium back into hydrogen.
You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and burn that so it turns back into water, but the energy involved in that is much smaller than the energy in the fusion thing. So it's cost effective to use some energy to split water to make hydrogen, to gain a huge amount of energy turning it into helium.
If we can get it to work. It's unclear to me whether vanilla hydrogen will work or some heavier isotope is needed, and the magnets required use up some extreme amount of energy to keep all the stuff in the right place.
Good point... I could also have added that an atom doesn't immediately split when hit by a neutron, but rather absorbs the neutron, then splits (IIRC). And so on. But it was already getting longish, and considering that I was a bit irritated with the other post being at +5 insightful, I don't think I did a bad job:-)
I'm sorry, we're looking at a theological magazine for technical articles?
I'm a total atheist, but the Christian Science Monitor is an extremely good publication, very independent.
It was apparently originally founded by a wealthy and religious woman about a century back. It is owned by a church, but you couldn't tell from the content. What you can tell is that it's not just another news organization for which profit is the all important thing.
What I object to, though, is the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements. These things are radioactive precisely because of their tendency to decay and in fact split themselves. They don't even split into other elements.
Nonsense. Yes, radioactive elements decay by themselves. That gives off some heat, and you can power devices with that (it's used in some space craft). In radioactive decay, atoms do not split - they emit a neutron or some other particle.
What nuclear fission is though, is to let the radiation of that decay hit more radioactive material, so that the other atom splits. That only works with a few, very heavy elements - like uranium (especially U235) and plutonium. That splitting is fission, and it certainly does create different elements - usually krypton, strontium, barium, etc. They are usually very radioactive themselves (because they have a few more neutrons than their normal isotopes), and lead to the problem of radioactive waste. That process gives off rather more energy than normal radioactivity.
In natural uranium, most of the decaying atoms don't lead to other atoms splitting; our role in all this is that we bring together enough of the stuff so that on average each decaying/splitting atom leads to another splitting atom. We put together a critical mass that leads to a self-sustaining chain reaction. That gives off a huge amount of energy, and it powers our reactors.
I thought LFS was great fun to do once, but if you think it's a dependency hell while installing, wait until you've been running it for a year or so and new program X insists on newer libraries. Keeping your installation up to date quickly becomes too complex.
So, it was fun, but I'm very happy to have moved to Gentoo later on - I still see the compiler scrolling, but now it downloads stuff and keeps track of dependencies by itself:-)
If you're breaking into something, running a DDOS attack or whatever, you're a cracker, as far as I'm concerned. Even if you insist on calling such people hackers, that's a meaning of the word that has nothing to do with the old meaning, of being skilful programmers. And there's no such thing as a white hat cracker.
Really what I ma asking is is there a market that MS is missing out on in Africa by not having Swahili? If so this is a major blow to them, if not, then I'm not sure this makes much difference at all.
The goal of open source software is quite a bit more than just "try to beat Microsoft", I would hope.
can microscopes make money? no.
can a new football stadium? yes.
Of course, but so does selling burgers. Do you think schools should start competing with McDonalds?
It makes money, but it doesn't have anything to do with education, which is what schools are for, remember. As far as I know, in most of the world schools and sports aren't intimately related.
Good post. I want to help, but it'll have to wait until the weekend. There's a problem with keeping the answers sufficiently informative (links to sources), and still short and readable enough for these people to actually read them.
A bit sad that the first hit for 'global warmings myths' on Google at the moment points to http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba230.html, a page of (I think) a lobby group explaining giving some of those "objections" you list...
Slashdot Mirror
For people who like this subject matter and want to read more about the history of the development of atomic bombs (including the history of early 20th century atomic physics), I can recommend The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes. Solid history _and_ good writing.
I bought it after it was recommended in some other Slashdot post, and loved it.
Doesn't that comma imply that you are something other than human and are talking to humans?
And if so, what kind of powers do you have? Do you use them for good, or for awesome?
We can evolve to do that iff:
I'd say it's doubtful that all three are true.
I disagree. Here in the UK there has been rather a lot of coverage.
As far as I know, there are a lot of Indian immigrants living in the UK, and of course India used to be a British colony. It is closer to home.
And I meant it more generally anyway. A train crash close to London gets more coverage than a train crash in Chile. And that's the same all over the world.
It's events like this that can get one easily pissed off (yet again) over the bias in the American Media.
This isn't bias in American Media, this is bias in human brains. The further away something is from us personally, the less we care. It's not at all unique to the US.
We use coal, oil, and natural gas because they're CHEAPER than other energy sources. When they actually DO start to run short the price will rise and we'll (incrementally) switch to using something else.
This is a total non-argument until the costs of cleaning up the pollution is factored into the price of the fuel.
Of course the statistics change - more measurements are being done, so the error margin on the estimate goes down. There is a band of possibilities, a bunch of possible trajectories, and more measurements make that band smaller.
Currently Earth is still within that band, and Earth's diameter is about 1/45th of the width of the band, so that's the probability of a hit.
Since more measurements are being done, we'll see this for a few more days - either the band is smaller and Earth is still within it, which raises the probability, or the band is smaller and Earth isn't in it anymore, and the probability drops to 0.
Saying this is "fiddling of statistics" is an insult to the mathematicians involved.
(Story above is simplified, by making it 2D instead of 3D, and by ignoring the fact that it's probably not some fixed area but the probabilities of the thing going outside the area are smaller and it's some weighted average, and I don't really know anything about the maths, I just think it's obvious that the probability would change quickly).
wow, thats pretty hot.. or are you still using fahrenheits?
Actually, it's rather cold. Assuming that a SI unit pedant would use Kelvin...
In the EU, they are obliged to accept returns. To a rather ridiculous degree (I remember a protest by a pet store that was afraid it'd have to refund a deceased gold fish that was purchased a year ago...)
Certainly anything not damaged by the customer, and returned within eight days after purchase. For any reason.
And of course, that's ignoring the other benefits potentially offered. I just find it a bit unexpected that /.ers, the cutting edge of geekery, people weaned on Asimov and Star Trek, have such a cynical response..
Considering the anti-science slant of many posts these days, I don't think /. is the cutting edge of geekery, and probably hasn't been for ages.
Asimov, indeed. Reading the global warming threads make me think of "The Gods Themselves".
(for those who haven't read it: scientists find out civilization is destroying their sun by a new method of cheap energy, politicians and people cannot be convinced to stop using it... the full quote the book's title refers to is "Against stupidity the Gods themselves contend in vain").
Bullshit.
Volcanoes: 145-255 million tons of CO2 per year, total.
(http://volcanoes.usgs.gov/Hazards/What/VolGas/voHumans: 24 billion tons. About 150 times the amount of all volcanoes combined.
That immigrant usually has a rather good education, paid for by the Indian government, that didn't cost the US a dime. But you reap most of the benefits.
Moreoever it's quite widely recognized that companies are allowed to use/refer/compare other competitors under the terms of fair use, how else are companies going to mention competitors' products without infringing a TM?
I wonder if there's going to be a repeat of this sort of law suit in some other country. After all, Google is an international business, and for instance in the Netherlands it is not allowed to mention competitor's products in advertising.
Most people outside the US are also confused by temperatures in Kelvin...
For now I've mailed an explanation, some links and a request for advice to some journalist friends. Not much time...
I've never been so angry at these crooks in government before now. Dutch parliament rejects software patents, European parliament rejects software patents, they'll hurt the Dutch software industry very badly (I believe the total number of software patents held by Dutch IT companies is 3) and now the fuckers want to avoid all of that by adding it on to some fisheries decision.
Help me, fellow Dutchmen, how can we make this as public as possible as quickly as possible? I've never done anything active in politics before, but this must go into the spotlight! Give me some hints...
It's not a problem with the law of thermodynamics (otherwise, go convince the Sun it can't shine :-)).
The thing is that hydrogen is turned into helium, another element. That produces a huge amount of energy - in fact, the same amount it would cost to split that helium back into hydrogen.
You can split water into hydrogen and oxygen, and burn that so it turns back into water, but the energy involved in that is much smaller than the energy in the fusion thing. So it's cost effective to use some energy to split water to make hydrogen, to gain a huge amount of energy turning it into helium.
If we can get it to work. It's unclear to me whether vanilla hydrogen will work or some heavier isotope is needed, and the magnets required use up some extreme amount of energy to keep all the stuff in the right place.
Good point... I could also have added that an atom doesn't immediately split when hit by a neutron, but rather absorbs the neutron, then splits (IIRC). And so on. But it was already getting longish, and considering that I was a bit irritated with the other post being at +5 insightful, I don't think I did a bad job :-)
I'm sorry, we're looking at a theological magazine for technical articles?
I'm a total atheist, but the Christian Science Monitor is an extremely good publication, very independent.
It was apparently originally founded by a wealthy and religious woman about a century back. It is owned by a church, but you couldn't tell from the content. What you can tell is that it's not just another news organization for which profit is the all important thing.
What I object to, though, is the insinuation that we are the ones splitting the nuclei of the radioactive elements. These things are radioactive precisely because of their tendency to decay and in fact split themselves. They don't even split into other elements.
Nonsense. Yes, radioactive elements decay by themselves. That gives off some heat, and you can power devices with that (it's used in some space craft). In radioactive decay, atoms do not split - they emit a neutron or some other particle.
What nuclear fission is though, is to let the radiation of that decay hit more radioactive material, so that the other atom splits. That only works with a few, very heavy elements - like uranium (especially U235) and plutonium. That splitting is fission, and it certainly does create different elements - usually krypton, strontium, barium, etc. They are usually very radioactive themselves (because they have a few more neutrons than their normal isotopes), and lead to the problem of radioactive waste. That process gives off rather more energy than normal radioactivity.
In natural uranium, most of the decaying atoms don't lead to other atoms splitting; our role in all this is that we bring together enough of the stuff so that on average each decaying/splitting atom leads to another splitting atom. We put together a critical mass that leads to a self-sustaining chain reaction. That gives off a huge amount of energy, and it powers our reactors.
Sound familiar?
I thought LFS was great fun to do once, but if you think it's a dependency hell while installing, wait until you've been running it for a year or so and new program X insists on newer libraries. Keeping your installation up to date quickly becomes too complex.
So, it was fun, but I'm very happy to have moved to Gentoo later on - I still see the compiler scrolling, but now it downloads stuff and keeps track of dependencies by itself :-)
If you're breaking into something, running a DDOS attack or whatever, you're a cracker, as far as I'm concerned. Even if you insist on calling such people hackers, that's a meaning of the word that has nothing to do with the old meaning, of being skilful programmers. And there's no such thing as a white hat cracker.
Really what I ma asking is is there a market that MS is missing out on in Africa by not having Swahili? If so this is a major blow to them, if not, then I'm not sure this makes much difference at all.
The goal of open source software is quite a bit more than just "try to beat Microsoft", I would hope.
can microscopes make money? no. can a new football stadium? yes.
Of course, but so does selling burgers. Do you think schools should start competing with McDonalds?
It makes money, but it doesn't have anything to do with education, which is what schools are for, remember. As far as I know, in most of the world schools and sports aren't intimately related.
Good post. I want to help, but it'll have to wait until the weekend. There's a problem with keeping the answers sufficiently informative (links to sources), and still short and readable enough for these people to actually read them.
A bit sad that the first hit for 'global warmings myths' on Google at the moment points to http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba230.html, a page of (I think) a lobby group explaining giving some of those "objections" you list...
Perhaps setup a Wiki somewhere?