Interesting point. A fixed point-to-point connection would certainly be the one kind where I think they could put a relatively intense beam of neutrinos onto a detector and deal with the signal to noise problem in inefficient detectors.
Next up -- the bandwidth problem. Which, I think, is the end of that idea. Modulating an e.g. proton beam is unlikely to produce a coherent oscillation and allow resonant transmission of simultaneous messages on many channels; it isn't even going to produce AM encoding. I think it is likely to simply send raw bits, bandwidth limited by things like the pion lifetime. Which is order of a nanosecond. Which limits bandwidth to perhaps 100 Mbps (assuming one wants decent pulse separation and minimal bit errors). Which is equivalent to connecting the end stations with household wireless links, and then trying to pour the ocean of transatlantic traffic through the teensy little pipe.
So now we have a REALLY expensive solution -- it requires an entire accelerator to produce the original beam, and detectors for particles that almost don't interact with ordinary matter at all aren't exactly cheap -- and would only need thousands to millions of links -- in both directions -- to handle the current traffic to say nothing of future growth. And they require a lot of power (per channel) to operate.
OTOH those "expensive" cables can carry lots of e.g. fibers or wires, and each fiber or wire can carry many simultaneous channels, and the technology is established and reliable.
So -- a bronze star for a maybe, but I still think it is pretty dubious. But who knows where research will lead? Maybe they'll invent NASERs along the way, or discover a way of making neutrinos in copious quantities with a 9 volt power supply and replace wireless altogether. Maybe this will attract the attention of distant alien SETI projects, in civilizations that long ago gave up electromagnetic communications altogether as being short range and unreliable...;-)
Gravity does not increase once you are inside the Earth's surface unless perhaps you are moving down towards a large, cow-shaped lode of pure Uranium. Newtonian gravitation satisfies a Gauss Law (like electrostatic fields) and aside from minor perturbation due to the Earth being rotationally deformed and the tides, the field starts at zero at the origin/center and smoothly increases as one moves toward the surface in any direction, then smoothly decreases (like $latex 1/r^2$) once one is outside of it. Rotation (e.g. coriolis forces) alter the perceived local acceleration by a hair as a function of latitude. The slight equatorial bulge and compressibility of the core material keep the field from increasing ideally/linearly (as it would for a perfect sphere of uniform density). Finally, the Sun and the Moon create further local acceleration perturbations that are not strictly speaking variations in the Earth's field, but that result from the non-uniformity of the Sun and Moon's fields and the fact that the center of mass of the Earth has a different acceleration than points on its surface as it interacts with them both (the tides).
None of these things are even slightly mysterious. None of them are really particularly difficult to calculate, or at least estimate. "Interesting" discoveries from the systematic study of near-Earth and inner-Earth gravity are entirely possible, but one would ordinarily consider the discover of a fifth force, or a short range modulation of the gravitational force, to be "interesting" in this context. In order to make such a discovery, however, one has to know the mass distribution and compute the net relative acceleration one should be observing to very high precision, as one is basically looking for an anomaly, and small deviations from a not-too-well-known or even well-defined base quantity are the most difficult to detect, see the entire (somewhat humorous) debate about global warming for an example).
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P.S. -- Off-topic general query: Wordpress lets one embed latex in comments, and it isn't even particularly focussed on technical subject matters. Is there an equally simple way to embed latex in/. comments? I'd put the ideal form of gravitation inside a sphere inline into this reply, except that nobody wants to read things like \vec{g} = -\frac{GMr}{R^3} \hat{r} or the derivation of same in latex unless they know latex well enough to read it as rendered...
But TFA proposal is stupid. It's a non-feasible, enormously expensive solution to either problems that already have a cheap and functional solution or that don't exist outside of overheated SciFi imaginations. Modulating neutrino beams to send messages (where the very fact that neutrinos don't interact with matter much also means that they are damned difficult and inefficient to detect, especially above the omnipresent "noise" of solar neutrino flux) merely indicates that some scientists don't have enough to do. We can also send EMP messages by setting off nuclear bombs in patterns corresponding to e.g. Morse code. Does that mean that we should?
To quote Doug Adams: "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Even near-Earth space. People worry about being hit by things falling from orbit, or hitting things up in orbit, but 10-50 meteorite falls occur every day (source: American Meteor Society) -- meteorites that are macroscopic, that is, since meteor dust is constantly drifting down everywhere from the millions of impacts on the upper atmosphere every day (I've collected these micrometeorites -- it is very easy -- and they fall at a rate that thickens the Earth's surface by a millimeter every few decades). How often do they hit something? Do I live in fear of being brained by a falling rock? Even with the "densely" populated Earth's surface, odds are that nobody within a hundred miles of you will even see a single meteor actually fall to the ground within their visual field in their lifetime. And we don't worry much about the "launch" of valuable resources (such as jet airplanes) that drive through this veritable hail of death every day. Rocket launches, OTOH, happen a few times a year. Having 100 or so more microsatellites up there won't even double their already existing risk, since rockets actually have to launch into the shitstorm of small meteors that are impacting the upper atmosphere all of the time. These are harmless to us -- nearly all of them come apart before they reach the ground -- but even a centimeter sized chunk of rock moving at a relative velocity of ~10 km/sec might as well be an anti-tank projectile to a rocket or satellite.
Your documented risk of death by bee-sting, shark bite, mad cow disease, being killed by a bullet fired into the air at random, choking on a bite of your food, being struck by lightning, or contracting a fatal disease from e.g. a tick or flea or animal bite are all way, way larger than the incremental risk to rockets by a few dozen satellites thrown up into a spaced orbit that keeps a patch of ground visible by one or more all of the time.
Actually, meteorites are worth a rather lot of money. Meteorites with "provenance" -- ones that did things like crash through the roof of a cottage at a known place and time -- are often the most valuable. Insurance will likely fix the cottage, and the owner might make anywhere from $1 to $1000 per gram from the meteorite itself, sold at auction -- the higher end if it is an attractive or rare type. A rare/beautiful meteorite with unusual provenance and no weathering is more valuable than gold. Even an ugly, common meteorite with provenance like "hitting a house" is probably $50-100/gram -- or more. Who knows what a collector will pay at auction?
If I understand this, the real possibility it enables is a true holographic display, not split images. The point is that one can deliver light with both amplitude and phase information to a fine-grained pixel grid. In principle, then, one can create outgoing waveforms of arbitrary shape, leading one to Casimir's prophetic statement (that I'm trying to recall, not look up): "If you see a lion in a cage, you cannot be certain that there really is a lion in the cage, as there could instead be a peculiar charge-current density that gives rise to the appearance of a lion". This is actually more formally stated as the Casimir Paradox -- because the solution to the EM field equations can be written as an integral equation with a surface (inhomogeneous) term, one can always reproduce the solution exterior to a closed subvolume produced by sources within that subvolume with a surface charge-current distribution that produces the same exterior solution.
The lasers themselves would then be the charge-current distributions. The interesting question would be how to modulate them with the requisite holographic encoding including phase information, at sufficient resolution to produce a clean 3D image.
Hmmm, fact of the day -- a new word. Now to use it in a sentence with a random stranger. "Hey, is that a baculum in your pants or are you just glad to see me?"
Regarding boot times and dates -- my 64 K motherboard 1982 IBM PC (with 3.5" floppies) was one of the first IBM PCs out there. There were Z-80 (Dec VT100) competitors, but there really weren't a lot of them in 1980 and 1981 -- the Apple 2, for example. The PC would "boot" without a floppy IIRC into Basic but it couldn't do anything unless you had a floppy or (and I'm not making this up) a cassette tape storage unit. I skipped the tape and went with the (then) brand new double density double sided 5.25" floppies, a whopping 360K of storage each. With aftermarket parts I added (eventually) serial and parallel ports, topped out the 640K memory capacity, and attached a 5 MB removable and 10 MB fixed hard drive. The separate chassis for the hard drives was larger than the PC itself and cost more -- a lot more -- for my 15 MB of space. All told, it cost somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 1982 dollars (charge conveniently to a research grant and not out of pocket:-) over a year or two.
It didn't take "long" to boot into DOS from floppy, on the order of ten or twenty seconds although that was a long time ago to remember, and the boot time was highly variable depending then as now on what else you loaded, how much memory you had, whether you were booting from PROM, from floppy, or from the much faster but still enormously slow hard disk, and whether or not you had to load graphics drivers for a color card and monitor (generally yes, after I moved past the original green-screen).
The system clock was 5 MHz.
The system I just purchased, in contrast, has 6 cores in its i9 processor with a total aggregate of well over 10 GHz -- 2000 times the PC. It has 8 GB of memory -- 64K times the original 64K IBM PC. It has a terabyte of hard disk, over a million times the storage capacity of the PC. It's screen has roughly 12 times as many pixels as the PC, each pixel is a full 32 bits deep, and its graphics processor has speed and capability that is comparable to the main CPU (exceeds it, really, in context). The system has a built in camera and microphone, can play movies or watch television without wires -- and for all that is just a high end laptop and cost around 1/3rd of what that original IBM PC cost before I started fixing it up, 1/10th its eventual total tricked out cost.
And y'know, the damn thing still takes 10-20 seconds to boot. I suppose that if I invested in a solid state drive I could knock that down some, but I suspect boot time is conditioned more on how long people are willing to wait than it is on any sort of efficiency principle. Either that or there is a scaling principle that says that OS developers always use a fixed percentage of system resources, so the system scales right up with those resources.
Ah, nostalgia. I still have an empty IBM PC chassis/shell up in my attic -- one day to house one of my old laptops on my desk to make my office desktop really l337. If only I had and old amdek green screen that I could front with a hi-res screen.
As I said, now is better. All that is lacking is a neural interface so I can jack in without having to type...
300 baud or 1200 baud. 2400 baud was a big deal when e.g. Hayes smartmodems came out capable of such awesome rates.
Actual data terminal lines -- hot connections from a tty terminal like a VT-100 to your mainframe or mini computer -- might be as high as 9600 baud. IIRC RS-232 serial ports were limited (back in the early 80s) to 19200 in hardware, although later they sped up by another factor of 2 or 3 before serial became passe.
At 300 baud (bps), tty porn -- playboy centerfolds rendered in ascii characters printed out on a line printer -- were painfully slow. At 1200 baud -- a whopping 150 characters per second -- one could redraw a text-only screen full of character data in a matter of -- ten or twelve seconds. At 4800 baud a screen refresh finally got to be peppy at a few seconds total, and 9600 up wasn't terrible for text data.
Been there, lived through it all. 10+ Mbps out of my house anywhere in the world is basically full ethernet speed for 10-baseT or base 2 ethernet, the world's standard for a very long time. Of course my wireless speeds INSIDE my house are roughly 10x faster, and wirespeed is anywhere from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps in most places that still have wired ports.
See Niven and Pournelle's book "Footfall". It pretty much says it all for space combat and planetary siege with non-magical weapons that are based on sound physics. Project Orion. Gamma ray layers triggered with small nukes. Nuclear missiles. High speed high mass projectiles, smart and otherwise. Project Thor. Dropping Asteroids. Ramming. Regular (e.g. visible light) lasers.
Die snouts die.
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... would be a wonderful thing to turn off in most communities. For the most part, they serve no useful purpose but to waste electricity/energy. Cars have headlights. They have some crime deterrent effect in some spots that can be weighed against the savings in money and energy, but there are whole stretches of road that are illuminated like the daytime where there is no conceivable benefit from doing so. It's not all that clear that they deter crime in most locations and times where they are used -- at 3 a.m. there isn't anybody to see a crime, no matter how lit an area is. All you do is provide the criminals with the light they need to operate without the risk or inconvenience of using flashlights that do stand out on a dark night.
A 100W street light (which is rather small -- many are 250-400 W Sodium lamps) at $0.10 kw/hour costs roughly $1/day to operate, or $365/year -- plus maintenance. Even small cities typically have hundreds or thousands of lights -- hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in aggregate. I suspect almost any community could turn off half of their street lights without compromising safety very much or at all, and thereby save over $30,000 for every hundred lights they turn off.
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The point is to eventually catalyze everything to long chain hydrocarbons, e.g. Octane. Liquid at room temperature and pressure, high energy density. Way higher than any battery. Gasoline is gasoline because it is a damn efficient way to store energy and release it later under controlled circumstances and turn it into work.
... It's just monkeying around. If they wanted to do something serious, they'd try to e.g. intercalate human DNA associated with e.g. language or speech centers into chimpanzee or dog DNA. My dog's English sucks, and he's a mostly border-collie and speaks better English than most dogs. Why can't they try something useful for a change?
Because that human right was given to them by human nature
Did Hobbes, then, live in vain? "Life in the state of nature is ugly, nasty, brutish and short..."
Who is this "human nature" and how and when did she "give" anyone at all anything at all, let alone something as ephemeral and indeed openly imaginary as "rights"? Human rights are a convenient social collaborative hallucination. They don't exist in reality, they exist only in our minds, and they are not inborn in our minds -- small children clearly believe in "anything I can take and get away wish is mine" as often as they beleive in "here, take my toy and play with it", and it is only by shaping them by discouraging the former and encouraging the latter than the little amoral darlings develop a shaky and often overwhelmed "morality". They are memes, social axioms that lead to a fairly successful society, one that is often able to outcompete more repressive societies that do not offer "rights" but rather duties and obligations without balance (e.g. slave cultures, feudal cultures, dictatorships and other hegemonies). People fight best, it turns out, when they at least can fool themselves into thinking they are fighting for themselves.
Don't get me wrong -- human rights are glorious memes, ones I fully endorse and hope to see spread (and do my best to help spread). But I do not make the mistake of asserting that they are "given". They are not -- Jefferson got this one dead wrong. They are taken. We have no rights save those that we invent and then establish as a moral basis for our society. No God gives them to us, not even the "god" of human nature. If anything gives them to us, it is human reason, reason that can see and understand how we are collectively and individually better off living in a society with protections and freedoms than in a society where the strong can do anything they like to the weak, even if we happen to be one of the strong (for now). Ultimately even the slaveholders have to realize that only by abolishing slavery can they ensure that they and their descendants will not be at risk of being enslaved. Ultimately, even the powerful have to realize that when others come to power, only accepted limitations on power itself prevents them from going up against the wall come the revolution. Glorious memes indeed. Beats the hell out of the alternatives. My reason tells me so.
Because education is the universal anodyne to religious beliefs of all sorts.
This does leave them in a quandry, not unlike the Nazi quandry in WWII. In order to function in a competitive way in modern global society, you have to master technology. Technology cannot be mastered by the stupid and uneducated and ignorant and culturally isolated -- it requires education and open communications. Education is the universal anodyne to religious beliefs of all sorts.
This is a pretty serious Catch-22. A religious educated class is an oxymoron. Look at the figures for religious belief among e.g. the US National Academy (or just university professors in general). 7% of the NA are religious, 93% atheist or "agnostic" (whatever that means that is somehow different from atheist, since not knowing and not believing are the same thing). 60% of university professors are atheist or agnostic, compared to 25% of the general population. And as I said, these numbers underestimate the trend -- many of the "believers" are old people who were successfully indoctrinated when they were young, but the current generation of young people are growing up in a permissive, protected, open multicultural world that makes it very, very easy to reject indoctrination. To the extent that they remain in a church, it is often less about God than the social connections and belief that the church does good things in the community independent of whether its teachings are "true". In general, intuitive thinkers are more likely to believe in God (or accept their religious indoctrination uncritically) while critical thinkers are more likely to free their mind and reject their birth religion.
This is fairly visible among the Arab countries. The ones that are the best educated are the least fundamentalist. Given the shrinking of the world by the Internet and universal access to streaming media (movies, music, books, etc) cultural homogenization can only move its young people towards freedom and away from fundamentalist Islam, even if it doesn't move them all at once out of Islam altogether. Islam itself is going to liberalize. It has no real choice, as a non-liberal Islam cannot compete in the world of ideas or the harder world of economics and political and military power.
Well, except that Buddha had the same idea 500 years earlier, and advocated the "separation" of church and state by means of the elimination of church altogether, given that Buddha was an atheist. All religions "flourish" under governments that are hostile -- see, for example Judaism, that has managed the trick a lot longer than Christianity, Sikhism, Hinduism (under the Muslim Mughals), Buddhism (under predominantly Hindu governments, then later Taoist and Confusianist governments. In fact, opposition to a religion by a government and a surrounding population that believes something else simply strengthens one's cognitive dissonance muscles and provides the needed cultural isolation that permits a group to maintain the purity of its beliefs. It is the dominant religion that has the harder time remaining "pure" -- it tends to follow the will of the people and thought of the times a lot better, unless it has some strong minority competitors (e.g. Jews) to use to polarize its populace and keep them in line. Christianity got co-opted by the state because it reconfigured itself into the perfect religion for a slaveholding world empire -- it openly endorsed slavery and obedience to secular authority (the correct interpretation of that line) and provided divine support for that secular authority. It was the Holy Roman Empire, right? The Emperor was no longer a God as he was in Caesar's day, but he was now appointed by God and mandated with a divine task. In the process, the Church took about 1/3 to 2/3 of the power away from the state over the centuries -- some centuries the state was ascendant, some the church, but the church's influence was dominant right up two Henry and the Church of England. Its "viral nature" is simply due to the fact that it promises you infinite pleasures in a future world as long as you suffer the slings and arrows of this one patiently, like a good little slave, and obey your slave masters and the divinely endorsed secular power of your God, your Pope, your Emperor, your King, and your Lord (or owner) in the chain of divine command.
Really, though, the concept of separation of church and state as an explicit meme wasn't due to either Buddha or Jesus -- it was due to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, notably Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Paine and Franklin. All of these men were closet atheists or deists, as revealed by their writings post mortem (however much they sometimes had to posture in public as Christians). They wished to formally establish the principle of freedom from religion, not freedom of religion, in a world where atheism and apostasy were still capital crimes and/or cause for immediate social and political ostracism. The amazing thing is, by playing all of the fragmented Christian groups against one another (many of whom had bitter memories of European persecution) they managed to actually make this happen! And in the process, created the meme that is slowly but surely realizing their dream of destroying the widespread belief in ancient mythologies and thereby eliminating the enormous non-democratic political power wielded by those who claim to speak for God in those mythologies. World atheism is up to 16% and rising faster than any other "belief", and in all probability this figure significantly underreports the truth, as there are plenty of "Christians" in the US who really don't believe in Jesus but who just find comfort in belonging to a church for social reasons. Young people, especially, are fleeing the church(es) in droves; the religious population is aging out in many sub-branches of Christianity as education trumps indoctrination and young people opt out.
This is what the Islamists truly fear, and rightly so. Islam is far more violent and irrational even than violent and irrational Christianity or Judaism -- violence, extortion and threat are explicit parts of all of the Suras in the Quran but two, or is it three -- and its absurd assertions are laid out straight in a much
Is a duck running? Which duck? Howard? Donald? Daffy? I mean, who wouldn't vote for Howard, but electing Donald would be like giving Uncle Scrooge the keys to the government, and Daffy is, well, not playing with a full deck. And of course all of these ducks are clearly under the control of the MPAA, aren't they. Bet you didn't think of that.
I must confess that I agree with your basic point, though. The Republican party -- founded, note well, by the famous atheist Abraham Lincoln -- has deteriorated to where one virtually has to sign a loyalty pledge to Jesus to be a viable candidate, and not just any Jesus, the Jesus of the straight up New Testament, not the Jesus of some crazy Book of Mormon supposedly discovered on gold plates buried in a hillside up upstate New York and miraculously translated into one of the worst-written and most obviously anachronistic examples of early American science fiction and fantasy. Sometimes some of its candidates seem sane, or are moderately sensible in some ways, but underneath it all is their pledge to end gay marriage, abolish abortion, bring back Christian prayer in the public schools, and generally make life hell for anyone whose religious beliefs differ from the set laid out on the pledge form, a.k.a. the "Republican Platform". The Democrats are mostly better on this, although they still have to pay lip service to being religious they can get away with being dignified Episcopalians or Methodists, but they are just as dumb on social issues at the other extreme of things, and of course all God's chilluns gotta eat, so they suck up to the money and power interests just as much as the Republicans do, lest the Money Dry Up in a world where campaigns cost tens of millions of dollars (and rising!).
Howard the Duck does indeed seem like a breath of fresh air in comparison...
What they are trying to do is get the US to react. To attack Iran, so that they can rally "the Muslim world" into a WW3-type "Islam vs The World" war that they believe to be inevitable and that they believe they will win.
Do you really think so? Do you really think that there is a single Muslim country out there that is so deluded that they really think that they would win? Yes, sure, everybody wants to be the Madhi and bring about the Muslim Apocalypse, but they cannot win and they know it. Even if they get a nuclear bomb they cannot win. The only possible scenario wherein they might be able to win would be if they developed a weaponized superbug and triggered a pandemic that "miraculously" avoided only -- or mostly -- Muslims, while having a 95% fatality rate against everybody else, and even then what would they do about those equalizing nukes, nukes in sufficient abundance to bomb most of Islam back to a desert of molten glass where its cities once were. That's about as likely as the odds of the US developing a superbug that wipes out only Muslims.
A "religious WW3" isn't going to happen. If one started, we'd just win, and they know that. Think: Nearly all of their weapons and munitions came from where? Other countries. They don't have the manufacturing base or wealth to support a war engine on their own. In a big religious war, who would be their weapons-building allies? Not China -- China is trying to wipe out Islam within its borders already and (correctly) view them as a serious threat to the "freedom" of all the non-Muslims in China, a much larger threat than e.g. the mostly pacifist Buddhists. Not Russia, ditto. Not the Czech's. Not us. Not France. Not the UK. So who is going to build and replenish their armaments, when the best planes they have in their air force are F14s that we built and sold/gave to Iraq? Sure, they have a stock of Chinese and Russian planes and missiles, but they're all ancient and decrepit and irreplaceable and finite. Iran could wage full-scale war for maybe a whole week against just the forces we already have deployed in that region. Do you really think that F14s with outdated everything can take F15s, F16s, and F22s with the latest and greatest tech? Why do you think Iran has those F14s? Iraq flew them there rather than let the US shoot them down in gulf war 1, and that was 20 years ago -- the F14s haven't gotten any younger and I imagine Iran has a hard time getting parts and performing book maintenance. I'd bet no more than half of them are really combat worthy, for the brief time between when they take off and are shot down.
Look at the history. Afghanistan was "unwinnable" -- the Russians were bogged down there forever. The British were unable to hold it. We went in and defeated the Taliban in detail in almost no time at all. Sure, it took us years to get out and government building and all of that crap is probably a seed cast on rocky soil, but a "WW3 opponent"? Don't make me laugh. Iraq took us a matter of a few weeks -- twice (because Bush the First was an asshole who refused to finish what he started and left Saddam in power to placate the Saudis and Turkey, at the expense of countless Iraqi lives, much suffering, misery and genocide, and of course our credibility in the region). In both cases a supposedly powerful army was decimated and eliminated almost overnight -- remember, while Iraq didn't defeat Iran in their war, they fought to a standstill! Chances are good that Iran's army is pretty much exactly as strong as Iraq's was then, give or take a hair.
However, the biggest thing that argues against an attack on Iran = Muslim WW3 is this. Islam isn't one religion. It is two (well, more than two, but two big branches, sort of like Eastern Orthodox and Catholicism for Christianity). Iran is Shia, most of the rest of the region is Sunni. The Shia are indeed the apocalyptic branch and most inclined to believe in the Madhi and a Muslim World following a major war,
Ah, I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but look at the y-axis scale in the first chart. See? That's what we in the business call a "log scale". The logarithm is the inverse function to the exponential, so when one makes the y-coordinate the log of y, you get a straight line.
If you want to see the algebra, if log y = a t (log is a linear function for some constant a), the e^(log y) = y = e^(a t), the exponential, where the particular log function I'm using (there is one for each possible base) is the natural log. If e makes you uncomfortable, substitute log_10 y = b t 10^(log_10 y) = y = 10^(b t). It's all the same.
You should really work a bit harder on understanding the textbooks and claims like this before ranting. Lots of very smart people have looked at them (and indeed, Moore was a Very Smart Guy) and you have to realistically compute the odds. Which is more likely, a failure of your understanding or that all of these very smart people are wrong? That's not that they can't be wrong -- only a suggestion not to shoot from the hip; do a bit more work -- well, a lot more work -- before claiming that something like this that has been reviewed many times is wrong.
That's the beauty of it! Iran itself is batshit crazy! So it really doesn't matter what we want. I'm merely pointing out that many of the forces that might not want it here are all, curiously enough, vested in such a way that they won't actively oppose it, and might secretly welcome it. A very few of those powers might actively provoke it, if they can/could without getting caught. When Iran does something insane enough to start the war, China will not do anything like what you describe. At this point our economies are completely linked -- neither country can afford to go head to head against the other. And honestly, I don't think that they want to. So no, China would not suddenly become hostile with us over oil. In fact, look for China to lean on North Korea like they've never been leaned on before because there is no time like the present to try to bring it into at least the late 20th century and because they won't, if push came to shove, support NK against the US and SK if NK attacks SK. If NK falls and a unified Korea becomes a neighbor, it is nothing to them -- NK is nothing to them now but a burden, and SK won't become any stronger by becoming "Korea" once again. On the other hand, trade with the US and the West in general is worth a fortune -- their whole economy would collapse without it (as, as you note, would ours). They don't want a nuclear armed powderkeg run by dinosaurs on one of their borders any more than anybody else. Hell, if NK attacked, they might even help wipe them out in order to have a hand in crafting the new Korea.
Similarly, there is little reason for them to overreact to a US-Iran war, as long as it looks like it will be short. Which it will, if it happens. Don't get me wrong, I hope that it doesn't. I teach at Duke, many of my students are of Iranian descent (including some of my best ones, who are also my friends). I'm on the PAAIA mailing list. I grew up in India and understand the need of Iran to posture and create pride. I respect Iran -- one of the cradles of modern civilization, a sleeping giant, and all that.
But their current government is batshit crazy, run by evil little turds and wild-eyed religious fanatics who suppress freedom at every opportunity, abuse women and homosexuals, think that the holocaust never happened, and are clueless about the 21st century. And they're going to provoke a war, barring a miracle, because otherwise they are going to get thrown out of power by their own people within the year. Think of it as a side effect of the Arab Spring uprisings, which are hardly over. Iran has a mightily suppressed intellectual class that would very much like to join real civilization, and perhaps more than any other country in the middle east, even including Egypt and Turkey, they have the cultural horsepower to do it if they would get over Islamism.
Sadly, they won't. Not without a whole lot more people dying. I wish I were wrong about this, truly I do, but I don't think I am. The stars are against it, as I pointed out above. Too may people make money -- too much money, at that -- and a nuclear armed Iran is a friggin' nightmare, with the government they now have.
If only I had one. If only I had time to write one. If only somebody would actually pay me to write one.
But hey, I predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany well over a year before they happened (before they even started to happen). I still get occasional spooky looks from one of my German friends who couldn't even imagine it happening until it did...
The carriers are last war's weapons. They are only useful if they can keep out of missile range and launch aircraft. The chinese and iran have medium range surface to surface missiles with longer reach than aircraft. The carrier is an obsolete strategy; the missile is the cannon of the 21st century and carrier groups are the castles.
Ah, if only it were so. However, it's not. A war with Iran would last roughly one month. The progress would be simple -- we would eliminate its air power in detail within roughly one week, standing the navy well off. We would at the same time eliminate most of Iraq's navy from the air. We would at the same time systematically eliminate its visible ground assets (including both air and surface missiles). There would be much sound, much fury, and Iran's political leadership might well be killed in a decapitation strike early on, and of course its nuclear plant would be completely destroyed. By the second week our navy would be moving back in, at some risk but largely protected by on-ship magic against missiles, and how will Iran be able to target those missiles? We'll have complete control of space, complete control of the air, and will be able to see and target any radar emissions almost instantly. Turn an asset on and lose it. Leave it off and lose it anyway as it is picked out by satellites and surveillance air. We will have all of the battlefield intelligence, all of the command and control, huge technological advantages, and overwhelming military force. Week's three and four will be the ground war, which may not conclude by week four but which will have defeated Iran's army in detail by week four. Mopping up may take another two to four weeks. As long as we don't try to occupy a defeated Iran and fight the war into the hills, we could eliminate their military and get out in no time, and leave their internal political structure in shambles if not destroyed.
Iran knows that, which is why they may not knock the block off of our shoulder in Hormuz. On the other hand -- everybody else wants this war. I mean everybody. Count the number of people who gain advantage -- and I mean $100B and up advantage -- from this war. Pretty big list, right? In the NYT today, there it is, congress seeking to cut a half trillion to a trillion from the pentagon budget over ten years. How long would another war stretch that out? Indefinitely? How much money is that a year? Oooo, a lot. Then there is Israel (really wants the war and may use espionage and subterfuge to provoke it). The apocalyptic Christians (no armageddon without rivers of blood, Jesus can't come back until we start up something big involving Israel). Obama (can he really leave Iran and Korea as unfinished business going into this election? And nobody wants to tackle Korea, as they have real missiles and NUKES). Oil companies. Democrats (want to raise taxes). Republicans (want to protect their military-industrial buddies). CNN. The generals (out of Iraq and Afghanistan, about to be made irrelevant again). Our Sunni allies hate and fear the Shia, especially Shia armed with nukes.
I do appreciate the Kabuki reference, but perhaps this is a different kind of theater. The only three countries in Asia that the US couldn't immediately take are India, China and North Korea, and honestly, we could probably kick NK's butt and take names tactically but the strategic war would cost 25 million lives as NK nuked SK, Japan, and as much of the US as they could reach (maybe Alaska, dunno). India I would hate to take on, not least because India is my second country and they are our friends (and they've got a damn tough, nuclear armed military). China is also both our friend, our biggest trading partner, and a nut too tough to ever want to crack. Iran (and Pakistan, at rough equivalence in terms of actual military power but weakly armed with nukes) we could certainly take down, and take down quickly. India could take down Pakistan in a matter of weeks (which
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Interesting point. A fixed point-to-point connection would certainly be the one kind where I think they could put a relatively intense beam of neutrinos onto a detector and deal with the signal to noise problem in inefficient detectors.
Next up -- the bandwidth problem. Which, I think, is the end of that idea. Modulating an e.g. proton beam is unlikely to produce a coherent oscillation and allow resonant transmission of simultaneous messages on many channels; it isn't even going to produce AM encoding. I think it is likely to simply send raw bits, bandwidth limited by things like the pion lifetime. Which is order of a nanosecond. Which limits bandwidth to perhaps 100 Mbps (assuming one wants decent pulse separation and minimal bit errors). Which is equivalent to connecting the end stations with household wireless links, and then trying to pour the ocean of transatlantic traffic through the teensy little pipe.
So now we have a REALLY expensive solution -- it requires an entire accelerator to produce the original beam, and detectors for particles that almost don't interact with ordinary matter at all aren't exactly cheap -- and would only need thousands to millions of links -- in both directions -- to handle the current traffic to say nothing of future growth. And they require a lot of power (per channel) to operate.
OTOH those "expensive" cables can carry lots of e.g. fibers or wires, and each fiber or wire can carry many simultaneous channels, and the technology is established and reliable.
So -- a bronze star for a maybe, but I still think it is pretty dubious. But who knows where research will lead? Maybe they'll invent NASERs along the way, or discover a way of making neutrinos in copious quantities with a 9 volt power supply and replace wireless altogether. Maybe this will attract the attention of distant alien SETI projects, in civilizations that long ago gave up electromagnetic communications altogether as being short range and unreliable...;-)
Maybe they'll come visit. And then eat us.
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Gravity does not increase once you are inside the Earth's surface unless perhaps you are moving down towards a large, cow-shaped lode of pure Uranium. Newtonian gravitation satisfies a Gauss Law (like electrostatic fields) and aside from minor perturbation due to the Earth being rotationally deformed and the tides, the field starts at zero at the origin/center and smoothly increases as one moves toward the surface in any direction, then smoothly decreases (like $latex 1/r^2$) once one is outside of it. Rotation (e.g. coriolis forces) alter the perceived local acceleration by a hair as a function of latitude. The slight equatorial bulge and compressibility of the core material keep the field from increasing ideally/linearly (as it would for a perfect sphere of uniform density). Finally, the Sun and the Moon create further local acceleration perturbations that are not strictly speaking variations in the Earth's field, but that result from the non-uniformity of the Sun and Moon's fields and the fact that the center of mass of the Earth has a different acceleration than points on its surface as it interacts with them both (the tides).
/. comments? I'd put the ideal form of gravitation inside a sphere inline into this reply, except that nobody wants to read things like \vec{g} = -\frac{GMr}{R^3} \hat{r} or the derivation of same in latex unless they know latex well enough to read it as rendered...
None of these things are even slightly mysterious. None of them are really particularly difficult to calculate, or at least estimate. "Interesting" discoveries from the systematic study of near-Earth and inner-Earth gravity are entirely possible, but one would ordinarily consider the discover of a fifth force, or a short range modulation of the gravitational force, to be "interesting" in this context. In order to make such a discovery, however, one has to know the mass distribution and compute the net relative acceleration one should be observing to very high precision, as one is basically looking for an anomaly, and small deviations from a not-too-well-known or even well-defined base quantity are the most difficult to detect, see the entire (somewhat humorous) debate about global warming for an example).
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P.S. -- Off-topic general query: Wordpress lets one embed latex in comments, and it isn't even particularly focussed on technical subject matters. Is there an equally simple way to embed latex in
...the equally important discovery that after successfully mating, both flies lie on their backs and smoke cigarettes?
They'll behave almost like photons.
But TFA proposal is stupid. It's a non-feasible, enormously expensive solution to either problems that already have a cheap and functional solution or that don't exist outside of overheated SciFi imaginations. Modulating neutrino beams to send messages (where the very fact that neutrinos don't interact with matter much also means that they are damned difficult and inefficient to detect, especially above the omnipresent "noise" of solar neutrino flux) merely indicates that some scientists don't have enough to do. We can also send EMP messages by setting off nuclear bombs in patterns corresponding to e.g. Morse code. Does that mean that we should?
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To quote Doug Adams: "You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space."
Even near-Earth space. People worry about being hit by things falling from orbit, or hitting things up in orbit, but 10-50 meteorite falls occur every day (source: American Meteor Society) -- meteorites that are macroscopic, that is, since meteor dust is constantly drifting down everywhere from the millions of impacts on the upper atmosphere every day (I've collected these micrometeorites -- it is very easy -- and they fall at a rate that thickens the Earth's surface by a millimeter every few decades). How often do they hit something? Do I live in fear of being brained by a falling rock? Even with the "densely" populated Earth's surface, odds are that nobody within a hundred miles of you will even see a single meteor actually fall to the ground within their visual field in their lifetime. And we don't worry much about the "launch" of valuable resources (such as jet airplanes) that drive through this veritable hail of death every day. Rocket launches, OTOH, happen a few times a year. Having 100 or so more microsatellites up there won't even double their already existing risk, since rockets actually have to launch into the shitstorm of small meteors that are impacting the upper atmosphere all of the time. These are harmless to us -- nearly all of them come apart before they reach the ground -- but even a centimeter sized chunk of rock moving at a relative velocity of ~10 km/sec might as well be an anti-tank projectile to a rocket or satellite.
Your documented risk of death by bee-sting, shark bite, mad cow disease, being killed by a bullet fired into the air at random, choking on a bite of your food, being struck by lightning, or contracting a fatal disease from e.g. a tick or flea or animal bite are all way, way larger than the incremental risk to rockets by a few dozen satellites thrown up into a spaced orbit that keeps a patch of ground visible by one or more all of the time.
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It's called the "Casimir Paradox" in the literature. I first learned of it from my advisor, Larry Biedenharn.
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Actually, meteorites are worth a rather lot of money. Meteorites with "provenance" -- ones that did things like crash through the roof of a cottage at a known place and time -- are often the most valuable. Insurance will likely fix the cottage, and the owner might make anywhere from $1 to $1000 per gram from the meteorite itself, sold at auction -- the higher end if it is an attractive or rare type. A rare/beautiful meteorite with unusual provenance and no weathering is more valuable than gold. Even an ugly, common meteorite with provenance like "hitting a house" is probably $50-100/gram -- or more. Who knows what a collector will pay at auction?
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If I understand this, the real possibility it enables is a true holographic display, not split images. The point is that one can deliver light with both amplitude and phase information to a fine-grained pixel grid. In principle, then, one can create outgoing waveforms of arbitrary shape, leading one to Casimir's prophetic statement (that I'm trying to recall, not look up): "If you see a lion in a cage, you cannot be certain that there really is a lion in the cage, as there could instead be a peculiar charge-current density that gives rise to the appearance of a lion". This is actually more formally stated as the Casimir Paradox -- because the solution to the EM field equations can be written as an integral equation with a surface (inhomogeneous) term, one can always reproduce the solution exterior to a closed subvolume produced by sources within that subvolume with a surface charge-current distribution that produces the same exterior solution.
The lasers themselves would then be the charge-current distributions. The interesting question would be how to modulate them with the requisite holographic encoding including phase information, at sufficient resolution to produce a clean 3D image.
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Hmmm, fact of the day -- a new word. Now to use it in a sentence with a random stranger. "Hey, is that a baculum in your pants or are you just glad to see me?"
rgb
Regarding boot times and dates -- my 64 K motherboard 1982 IBM PC (with 3.5" floppies) was one of the first IBM PCs out there. There were Z-80 (Dec VT100) competitors, but there really weren't a lot of them in 1980 and 1981 -- the Apple 2, for example. The PC would "boot" without a floppy IIRC into Basic but it couldn't do anything unless you had a floppy or (and I'm not making this up) a cassette tape storage unit. I skipped the tape and went with the (then) brand new double density double sided 5.25" floppies, a whopping 360K of storage each. With aftermarket parts I added (eventually) serial and parallel ports, topped out the 640K memory capacity, and attached a 5 MB removable and 10 MB fixed hard drive. The separate chassis for the hard drives was larger than the PC itself and cost more -- a lot more -- for my 15 MB of space. All told, it cost somewhere between $10,000 and $15,000 1982 dollars (charge conveniently to a research grant and not out of pocket:-) over a year or two.
It didn't take "long" to boot into DOS from floppy, on the order of ten or twenty seconds although that was a long time ago to remember, and the boot time was highly variable depending then as now on what else you loaded, how much memory you had, whether you were booting from PROM, from floppy, or from the much faster but still enormously slow hard disk, and whether or not you had to load graphics drivers for a color card and monitor (generally yes, after I moved past the original green-screen).
The system clock was 5 MHz.
The system I just purchased, in contrast, has 6 cores in its i9 processor with a total aggregate of well over 10 GHz -- 2000 times the PC. It has 8 GB of memory -- 64K times the original 64K IBM PC. It has a terabyte of hard disk, over a million times the storage capacity of the PC. It's screen has roughly 12 times as many pixels as the PC, each pixel is a full 32 bits deep, and its graphics processor has speed and capability that is comparable to the main CPU (exceeds it, really, in context). The system has a built in camera and microphone, can play movies or watch television without wires -- and for all that is just a high end laptop and cost around 1/3rd of what that original IBM PC cost before I started fixing it up, 1/10th its eventual total tricked out cost.
And y'know, the damn thing still takes 10-20 seconds to boot. I suppose that if I invested in a solid state drive I could knock that down some, but I suspect boot time is conditioned more on how long people are willing to wait than it is on any sort of efficiency principle. Either that or there is a scaling principle that says that OS developers always use a fixed percentage of system resources, so the system scales right up with those resources.
Ah, nostalgia. I still have an empty IBM PC chassis/shell up in my attic -- one day to house one of my old laptops on my desk to make my office desktop really l337. If only I had and old amdek green screen that I could front with a hi-res screen.
As I said, now is better. All that is lacking is a neural interface so I can jack in without having to type...
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300 baud or 1200 baud. 2400 baud was a big deal when e.g. Hayes smartmodems came out capable of such awesome rates.
Actual data terminal lines -- hot connections from a tty terminal like a VT-100 to your mainframe or mini computer -- might be as high as 9600 baud. IIRC RS-232 serial ports were limited (back in the early 80s) to 19200 in hardware, although later they sped up by another factor of 2 or 3 before serial became passe.
At 300 baud (bps), tty porn -- playboy centerfolds rendered in ascii characters printed out on a line printer -- were painfully slow. At 1200 baud -- a whopping 150 characters per second -- one could redraw a text-only screen full of character data in a matter of -- ten or twelve seconds. At 4800 baud a screen refresh finally got to be peppy at a few seconds total, and 9600 up wasn't terrible for text data.
Been there, lived through it all. 10+ Mbps out of my house anywhere in the world is basically full ethernet speed for 10-baseT or base 2 ethernet, the world's standard for a very long time. Of course my wireless speeds INSIDE my house are roughly 10x faster, and wirespeed is anywhere from 100 Mbps to 1 Gbps in most places that still have wired ports.
Trust me, now is better.
rgb
See Niven and Pournelle's book "Footfall". It pretty much says it all for space combat and planetary siege with non-magical weapons that are based on sound physics. Project Orion. Gamma ray layers triggered with small nukes. Nuclear missiles. High speed high mass projectiles, smart and otherwise. Project Thor. Dropping Asteroids. Ramming. Regular (e.g. visible light) lasers. Die snouts die. rgb
... would be a wonderful thing to turn off in most communities. For the most part, they serve no useful purpose but to waste electricity/energy. Cars have headlights. They have some crime deterrent effect in some spots that can be weighed against the savings in money and energy, but there are whole stretches of road that are illuminated like the daytime where there is no conceivable benefit from doing so. It's not all that clear that they deter crime in most locations and times where they are used -- at 3 a.m. there isn't anybody to see a crime, no matter how lit an area is. All you do is provide the criminals with the light they need to operate without the risk or inconvenience of using flashlights that do stand out on a dark night. A 100W street light (which is rather small -- many are 250-400 W Sodium lamps) at $0.10 kw/hour costs roughly $1/day to operate, or $365/year -- plus maintenance. Even small cities typically have hundreds or thousands of lights -- hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in aggregate. I suspect almost any community could turn off half of their street lights without compromising safety very much or at all, and thereby save over $30,000 for every hundred lights they turn off. rgb
The point is to eventually catalyze everything to long chain hydrocarbons, e.g. Octane. Liquid at room temperature and pressure, high energy density. Way higher than any battery. Gasoline is gasoline because it is a damn efficient way to store energy and release it later under controlled circumstances and turn it into work.
... It's just monkeying around. If they wanted to do something serious, they'd try to e.g. intercalate human DNA associated with e.g. language or speech centers into chimpanzee or dog DNA. My dog's English sucks, and he's a mostly border-collie and speaks better English than most dogs. Why can't they try something useful for a change?
Yeah, and a bunch more of us at least used to use gopher with enthusiasm. Too bad about the http thing...
Because that human right was given to them by human nature
Did Hobbes, then, live in vain? "Life in the state of nature is ugly, nasty, brutish and short..."
Who is this "human nature" and how and when did she "give" anyone at all anything at all, let alone something as ephemeral and indeed openly imaginary as "rights"? Human rights are a convenient social collaborative hallucination. They don't exist in reality, they exist only in our minds, and they are not inborn in our minds -- small children clearly believe in "anything I can take and get away wish is mine" as often as they beleive in "here, take my toy and play with it", and it is only by shaping them by discouraging the former and encouraging the latter than the little amoral darlings develop a shaky and often overwhelmed "morality". They are memes, social axioms that lead to a fairly successful society, one that is often able to outcompete more repressive societies that do not offer "rights" but rather duties and obligations without balance (e.g. slave cultures, feudal cultures, dictatorships and other hegemonies). People fight best, it turns out, when they at least can fool themselves into thinking they are fighting for themselves.
Don't get me wrong -- human rights are glorious memes, ones I fully endorse and hope to see spread (and do my best to help spread). But I do not make the mistake of asserting that they are "given". They are not -- Jefferson got this one dead wrong. They are taken. We have no rights save those that we invent and then establish as a moral basis for our society. No God gives them to us, not even the "god" of human nature. If anything gives them to us, it is human reason, reason that can see and understand how we are collectively and individually better off living in a society with protections and freedoms than in a society where the strong can do anything they like to the weak, even if we happen to be one of the strong (for now). Ultimately even the slaveholders have to realize that only by abolishing slavery can they ensure that they and their descendants will not be at risk of being enslaved. Ultimately, even the powerful have to realize that when others come to power, only accepted limitations on power itself prevents them from going up against the wall come the revolution. Glorious memes indeed. Beats the hell out of the alternatives. My reason tells me so.
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Because education is the universal anodyne to religious beliefs of all sorts.
This does leave them in a quandry, not unlike the Nazi quandry in WWII. In order to function in a competitive way in modern global society, you have to master technology. Technology cannot be mastered by the stupid and uneducated and ignorant and culturally isolated -- it requires education and open communications. Education is the universal anodyne to religious beliefs of all sorts.
This is a pretty serious Catch-22. A religious educated class is an oxymoron. Look at the figures for religious belief among e.g. the US National Academy (or just university professors in general). 7% of the NA are religious, 93% atheist or "agnostic" (whatever that means that is somehow different from atheist, since not knowing and not believing are the same thing). 60% of university professors are atheist or agnostic, compared to 25% of the general population. And as I said, these numbers underestimate the trend -- many of the "believers" are old people who were successfully indoctrinated when they were young, but the current generation of young people are growing up in a permissive, protected, open multicultural world that makes it very, very easy to reject indoctrination. To the extent that they remain in a church, it is often less about God than the social connections and belief that the church does good things in the community independent of whether its teachings are "true". In general, intuitive thinkers are more likely to believe in God (or accept their religious indoctrination uncritically) while critical thinkers are more likely to free their mind and reject their birth religion.
This is fairly visible among the Arab countries. The ones that are the best educated are the least fundamentalist. Given the shrinking of the world by the Internet and universal access to streaming media (movies, music, books, etc) cultural homogenization can only move its young people towards freedom and away from fundamentalist Islam, even if it doesn't move them all at once out of Islam altogether. Islam itself is going to liberalize. It has no real choice, as a non-liberal Islam cannot compete in the world of ideas or the harder world of economics and political and military power.
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Well, except that Buddha had the same idea 500 years earlier, and advocated the "separation" of church and state by means of the elimination of church altogether, given that Buddha was an atheist. All religions "flourish" under governments that are hostile -- see, for example Judaism, that has managed the trick a lot longer than Christianity, Sikhism, Hinduism (under the Muslim Mughals), Buddhism (under predominantly Hindu governments, then later Taoist and Confusianist governments. In fact, opposition to a religion by a government and a surrounding population that believes something else simply strengthens one's cognitive dissonance muscles and provides the needed cultural isolation that permits a group to maintain the purity of its beliefs. It is the dominant religion that has the harder time remaining "pure" -- it tends to follow the will of the people and thought of the times a lot better, unless it has some strong minority competitors (e.g. Jews) to use to polarize its populace and keep them in line. Christianity got co-opted by the state because it reconfigured itself into the perfect religion for a slaveholding world empire -- it openly endorsed slavery and obedience to secular authority (the correct interpretation of that line) and provided divine support for that secular authority. It was the Holy Roman Empire, right? The Emperor was no longer a God as he was in Caesar's day, but he was now appointed by God and mandated with a divine task. In the process, the Church took about 1/3 to 2/3 of the power away from the state over the centuries -- some centuries the state was ascendant, some the church, but the church's influence was dominant right up two Henry and the Church of England. Its "viral nature" is simply due to the fact that it promises you infinite pleasures in a future world as long as you suffer the slings and arrows of this one patiently, like a good little slave, and obey your slave masters and the divinely endorsed secular power of your God, your Pope, your Emperor, your King, and your Lord (or owner) in the chain of divine command.
Really, though, the concept of separation of church and state as an explicit meme wasn't due to either Buddha or Jesus -- it was due to the philosophers of the Enlightenment, notably Jefferson, Adams, Washington, Paine and Franklin. All of these men were closet atheists or deists, as revealed by their writings post mortem (however much they sometimes had to posture in public as Christians). They wished to formally establish the principle of freedom from religion, not freedom of religion, in a world where atheism and apostasy were still capital crimes and/or cause for immediate social and political ostracism. The amazing thing is, by playing all of the fragmented Christian groups against one another (many of whom had bitter memories of European persecution) they managed to actually make this happen! And in the process, created the meme that is slowly but surely realizing their dream of destroying the widespread belief in ancient mythologies and thereby eliminating the enormous non-democratic political power wielded by those who claim to speak for God in those mythologies. World atheism is up to 16% and rising faster than any other "belief", and in all probability this figure significantly underreports the truth, as there are plenty of "Christians" in the US who really don't believe in Jesus but who just find comfort in belonging to a church for social reasons. Young people, especially, are fleeing the church(es) in droves; the religious population is aging out in many sub-branches of Christianity as education trumps indoctrination and young people opt out.
This is what the Islamists truly fear, and rightly so. Islam is far more violent and irrational even than violent and irrational Christianity or Judaism -- violence, extortion and threat are explicit parts of all of the Suras in the Quran but two, or is it three -- and its absurd assertions are laid out straight in a much
Is a duck running? Which duck? Howard? Donald? Daffy? I mean, who wouldn't vote for Howard, but electing Donald would be like giving Uncle Scrooge the keys to the government, and Daffy is, well, not playing with a full deck. And of course all of these ducks are clearly under the control of the MPAA, aren't they. Bet you didn't think of that.
I must confess that I agree with your basic point, though. The Republican party -- founded, note well, by the famous atheist Abraham Lincoln -- has deteriorated to where one virtually has to sign a loyalty pledge to Jesus to be a viable candidate, and not just any Jesus, the Jesus of the straight up New Testament, not the Jesus of some crazy Book of Mormon supposedly discovered on gold plates buried in a hillside up upstate New York and miraculously translated into one of the worst-written and most obviously anachronistic examples of early American science fiction and fantasy. Sometimes some of its candidates seem sane, or are moderately sensible in some ways, but underneath it all is their pledge to end gay marriage, abolish abortion, bring back Christian prayer in the public schools, and generally make life hell for anyone whose religious beliefs differ from the set laid out on the pledge form, a.k.a. the "Republican Platform". The Democrats are mostly better on this, although they still have to pay lip service to being religious they can get away with being dignified Episcopalians or Methodists, but they are just as dumb on social issues at the other extreme of things, and of course all God's chilluns gotta eat, so they suck up to the money and power interests just as much as the Republicans do, lest the Money Dry Up in a world where campaigns cost tens of millions of dollars (and rising!).
Howard the Duck does indeed seem like a breath of fresh air in comparison...
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What they are trying to do is get the US to react. To attack Iran, so that they can rally "the Muslim world" into a WW3-type "Islam vs The World" war that they believe to be inevitable and that they believe they will win.
Do you really think so? Do you really think that there is a single Muslim country out there that is so deluded that they really think that they would win? Yes, sure, everybody wants to be the Madhi and bring about the Muslim Apocalypse, but they cannot win and they know it. Even if they get a nuclear bomb they cannot win. The only possible scenario wherein they might be able to win would be if they developed a weaponized superbug and triggered a pandemic that "miraculously" avoided only -- or mostly -- Muslims, while having a 95% fatality rate against everybody else, and even then what would they do about those equalizing nukes, nukes in sufficient abundance to bomb most of Islam back to a desert of molten glass where its cities once were. That's about as likely as the odds of the US developing a superbug that wipes out only Muslims.
A "religious WW3" isn't going to happen. If one started, we'd just win, and they know that. Think: Nearly all of their weapons and munitions came from where? Other countries. They don't have the manufacturing base or wealth to support a war engine on their own. In a big religious war, who would be their weapons-building allies? Not China -- China is trying to wipe out Islam within its borders already and (correctly) view them as a serious threat to the "freedom" of all the non-Muslims in China, a much larger threat than e.g. the mostly pacifist Buddhists. Not Russia, ditto. Not the Czech's. Not us. Not France. Not the UK. So who is going to build and replenish their armaments, when the best planes they have in their air force are F14s that we built and sold/gave to Iraq? Sure, they have a stock of Chinese and Russian planes and missiles, but they're all ancient and decrepit and irreplaceable and finite. Iran could wage full-scale war for maybe a whole week against just the forces we already have deployed in that region. Do you really think that F14s with outdated everything can take F15s, F16s, and F22s with the latest and greatest tech? Why do you think Iran has those F14s? Iraq flew them there rather than let the US shoot them down in gulf war 1, and that was 20 years ago -- the F14s haven't gotten any younger and I imagine Iran has a hard time getting parts and performing book maintenance. I'd bet no more than half of them are really combat worthy, for the brief time between when they take off and are shot down.
Look at the history. Afghanistan was "unwinnable" -- the Russians were bogged down there forever. The British were unable to hold it. We went in and defeated the Taliban in detail in almost no time at all. Sure, it took us years to get out and government building and all of that crap is probably a seed cast on rocky soil, but a "WW3 opponent"? Don't make me laugh. Iraq took us a matter of a few weeks -- twice (because Bush the First was an asshole who refused to finish what he started and left Saddam in power to placate the Saudis and Turkey, at the expense of countless Iraqi lives, much suffering, misery and genocide, and of course our credibility in the region). In both cases a supposedly powerful army was decimated and eliminated almost overnight -- remember, while Iraq didn't defeat Iran in their war, they fought to a standstill! Chances are good that Iran's army is pretty much exactly as strong as Iraq's was then, give or take a hair.
However, the biggest thing that argues against an attack on Iran = Muslim WW3 is this. Islam isn't one religion. It is two (well, more than two, but two big branches, sort of like Eastern Orthodox and Catholicism for Christianity). Iran is Shia, most of the rest of the region is Sunni. The Shia are indeed the apocalyptic branch and most inclined to believe in the Madhi and a Muslim World following a major war,
Ah, I hate to be the one to point this out to you, but look at the y-axis scale in the first chart. See? That's what we in the business call a "log scale". The logarithm is the inverse function to the exponential, so when one makes the y-coordinate the log of y, you get a straight line.
If you want to see the algebra, if log y = a t (log is a linear function for some constant a), the e^(log y) = y = e^(a t), the exponential, where the particular log function I'm using (there is one for each possible base) is the natural log. If e makes you uncomfortable, substitute log_10 y = b t 10^(log_10 y) = y = 10^(b t). It's all the same.
You should really work a bit harder on understanding the textbooks and claims like this before ranting. Lots of very smart people have looked at them (and indeed, Moore was a Very Smart Guy) and you have to realistically compute the odds. Which is more likely, a failure of your understanding or that all of these very smart people are wrong? That's not that they can't be wrong -- only a suggestion not to shoot from the hip; do a bit more work -- well, a lot more work -- before claiming that something like this that has been reviewed many times is wrong.
rgb
That's the beauty of it! Iran itself is batshit crazy! So it really doesn't matter what we want. I'm merely pointing out that many of the forces that might not want it here are all, curiously enough, vested in such a way that they won't actively oppose it, and might secretly welcome it. A very few of those powers might actively provoke it, if they can/could without getting caught. When Iran does something insane enough to start the war, China will not do anything like what you describe. At this point our economies are completely linked -- neither country can afford to go head to head against the other. And honestly, I don't think that they want to. So no, China would not suddenly become hostile with us over oil. In fact, look for China to lean on North Korea like they've never been leaned on before because there is no time like the present to try to bring it into at least the late 20th century and because they won't, if push came to shove, support NK against the US and SK if NK attacks SK. If NK falls and a unified Korea becomes a neighbor, it is nothing to them -- NK is nothing to them now but a burden, and SK won't become any stronger by becoming "Korea" once again. On the other hand, trade with the US and the West in general is worth a fortune -- their whole economy would collapse without it (as, as you note, would ours). They don't want a nuclear armed powderkeg run by dinosaurs on one of their borders any more than anybody else. Hell, if NK attacked, they might even help wipe them out in order to have a hand in crafting the new Korea.
Similarly, there is little reason for them to overreact to a US-Iran war, as long as it looks like it will be short. Which it will, if it happens. Don't get me wrong, I hope that it doesn't. I teach at Duke, many of my students are of Iranian descent (including some of my best ones, who are also my friends). I'm on the PAAIA mailing list. I grew up in India and understand the need of Iran to posture and create pride. I respect Iran -- one of the cradles of modern civilization, a sleeping giant, and all that.
But their current government is batshit crazy, run by evil little turds and wild-eyed religious fanatics who suppress freedom at every opportunity, abuse women and homosexuals, think that the holocaust never happened, and are clueless about the 21st century. And they're going to provoke a war, barring a miracle, because otherwise they are going to get thrown out of power by their own people within the year. Think of it as a side effect of the Arab Spring uprisings, which are hardly over. Iran has a mightily suppressed intellectual class that would very much like to join real civilization, and perhaps more than any other country in the middle east, even including Egypt and Turkey, they have the cultural horsepower to do it if they would get over Islamism.
Sadly, they won't. Not without a whole lot more people dying. I wish I were wrong about this, truly I do, but I don't think I am. The stars are against it, as I pointed out above. Too may people make money -- too much money, at that -- and a nuclear armed Iran is a friggin' nightmare, with the government they now have.
rgb
If only I had one. If only I had time to write one. If only somebody would actually pay me to write one.
But hey, I predicted the fall of the Soviet Union and the reunification of Germany well over a year before they happened (before they even started to happen). I still get occasional spooky looks from one of my German friends who couldn't even imagine it happening until it did...
The carriers are last war's weapons. They are only useful if they can keep out of missile range and launch aircraft. The chinese and iran have medium range surface to surface missiles with longer reach than aircraft. The carrier is an obsolete strategy; the missile is the cannon of the 21st century and carrier groups are the castles.
Ah, if only it were so. However, it's not. A war with Iran would last roughly one month. The progress would be simple -- we would eliminate its air power in detail within roughly one week, standing the navy well off. We would at the same time eliminate most of Iraq's navy from the air. We would at the same time systematically eliminate its visible ground assets (including both air and surface missiles). There would be much sound, much fury, and Iran's political leadership might well be killed in a decapitation strike early on, and of course its nuclear plant would be completely destroyed. By the second week our navy would be moving back in, at some risk but largely protected by on-ship magic against missiles, and how will Iran be able to target those missiles? We'll have complete control of space, complete control of the air, and will be able to see and target any radar emissions almost instantly. Turn an asset on and lose it. Leave it off and lose it anyway as it is picked out by satellites and surveillance air. We will have all of the battlefield intelligence, all of the command and control, huge technological advantages, and overwhelming military force. Week's three and four will be the ground war, which may not conclude by week four but which will have defeated Iran's army in detail by week four. Mopping up may take another two to four weeks. As long as we don't try to occupy a defeated Iran and fight the war into the hills, we could eliminate their military and get out in no time, and leave their internal political structure in shambles if not destroyed.
Iran knows that, which is why they may not knock the block off of our shoulder in Hormuz. On the other hand -- everybody else wants this war. I mean everybody. Count the number of people who gain advantage -- and I mean $100B and up advantage -- from this war. Pretty big list, right? In the NYT today, there it is, congress seeking to cut a half trillion to a trillion from the pentagon budget over ten years. How long would another war stretch that out? Indefinitely? How much money is that a year? Oooo, a lot. Then there is Israel (really wants the war and may use espionage and subterfuge to provoke it). The apocalyptic Christians (no armageddon without rivers of blood, Jesus can't come back until we start up something big involving Israel). Obama (can he really leave Iran and Korea as unfinished business going into this election? And nobody wants to tackle Korea, as they have real missiles and NUKES). Oil companies. Democrats (want to raise taxes). Republicans (want to protect their military-industrial buddies). CNN. The generals (out of Iraq and Afghanistan, about to be made irrelevant again). Our Sunni allies hate and fear the Shia, especially Shia armed with nukes.
I do appreciate the Kabuki reference, but perhaps this is a different kind of theater. The only three countries in Asia that the US couldn't immediately take are India, China and North Korea, and honestly, we could probably kick NK's butt and take names tactically but the strategic war would cost 25 million lives as NK nuked SK, Japan, and as much of the US as they could reach (maybe Alaska, dunno). India I would hate to take on, not least because India is my second country and they are our friends (and they've got a damn tough, nuclear armed military). China is also both our friend, our biggest trading partner, and a nut too tough to ever want to crack. Iran (and Pakistan, at rough equivalence in terms of actual military power but weakly armed with nukes) we could certainly take down, and take down quickly. India could take down Pakistan in a matter of weeks (which