I don't actually remember the old discussion. But the concept of low energy transfers between Lagrange points is hardly new, and a quick Google search provided the aforementioned link.
For what it's worth, Arthur Andersen's conviction was overturned by a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Practially, it probably won't matter for Andersen since the company's reputation likely is irreparable. But it has gone out of its way to clear its name.
You would lose out on decades of research into jet engines if you went nuclear. And with proper shielding and what not, it's not clear that it would be lighter and better performing. On the other hand, much of the time, you've got plenty of spare electrical capacity (courtesy of nuclear) on your carrier, which if you could convert into a reasonable substitute for jet fuel, would allow you to store that energy for use on the aircraft.
Many of the high school science Olympiads are rather generous with medals. I don't know about IOI, but the International Chemistry Olympiad gives out golds to about 10% of the competitors, silvers to the next 20%, and bronzes to the next 30%, leaving only 40% without a medal.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Never realized that POS systems are multi-thousand dollar machines (as I learned from my morbid curiosity about the following post). They appear so simple at first glance.
I notice on AMD's PDF (linked in summary) that they list some of their envisioned uses. Why would someone need a modern 64 bit system for a point of sale system? Wouldn't a Motorola (err... Freescale) 68000 be more than powerful enough for the task, and way cheaper? I don't understand why some seemingly rather simple applications would require a large amount of processing power.
As a synthetic organic chemist, trying new stuff is fun, but there's the necessary evil of maintaining a compound supply chain. And some tasks, like grant writing, are seriously hard work. (Not to mention pressure packed!) Sure, my prof is ultimately responsible (just a postdoc right now), but I treat it as if it were my own lab on the line since that's good practice for the future. Drafting 70 pages worth (spread across multiple projects) in a month on short notice, back when the NIH stimulus package grants were announced, was mayhem. It was in the middle of that grant writing session that I formalized in my mind hard limits for when I would deal with work. I love what I do, but I need my personal space away from work, too.
In academic science, there may be no clock, but if one's not careful, it's easy to always be tied to work. For me, it's now very simple. I work hard at work. It doesn't mean that I don't ever take breaks (like right now), but I am highly productive. If I have no dinner plans after work, I am willing to drag reading/writing that I can do by pen with me to a bar and work through dinner until I get bored of the work. But I treat that as optional, and if I run into a friend at the bar or for any other reason don't feel like doing the work, I set it aside. Once I stop working at the bar (or leave work, if I didn't drag anything to the bar), I'm done. No e-mail. No phone calls. (Okay, I make rare exceptions for phone calls for close colleagues. But those are short calls, once every year or so.) No work on a paper that might have to be written. If there's work that is pressing enough to be done, I get it done in the lab or my office. I don't even have ChemDraw installed on my home computer even though I can do so for free. (Heck... I've even neglected to install an office suite on my home computer since I don't need one when away from the office.) My time away from the lab, aside from the time that I optionally spend at a bar right after work, is my own. I generally avoid even thinking about the work that has to be done once away from the lab/office.
Expanding on one of those questions, how does analyzing the light tell us about the rate of star formation? That's a very interesting statement. From the article, "By analyzing their light, Cardamone determined how much star formation is taking place within the galaxies." How does that work?
Agreed that 5000 votes is completely unacceptable even on the largest scale elections. That's an order of magnitude higher than the margin between candidates in Florida in the US 2000 presidential election!
Even on earth, the study of lithotrophs ("rock eaters" that get energy by oxidizing inorganic materials) is a decades-old field. They are found in all sorts of settings, though not a significant part (by mass, not necessarily by importance) of the biosphere. Many lithotrophs even engage in carbon fixation from CO2 using the energy they derived from "rock eating", and thus can live completely independently of any need for photosynthesis (even by other organisms). As for lithotroph metabolisms, your imagination is the limit. Lithotrophs even have commercially viable applications. Anaerobic oxidation of ammonia by nitrite, a reaction performed by certain "anammox" bacteria, is useful for the treatment of fertilizer-contaminated waste water.
I just wondered something. Generally, the presence of condensed phase liquid water is considered a marker that tells us "Look for life here." Unfortunately, given our current technology, most planets we find are gas giants that orbit too close to the star to be in the "habitable zone". But gas giants, by virtue of being huge, have hugely high atmospheric pressures in the lower atmosphere. Couldn't supercritical water (i.e. water at a sufficiently high temperature/pressure that there is no distinction between gas and liquid) support life? Or, for that matter, supercritical methane, or any other supercritical medium? After all, we can run useful chemistry in supercritical fluids such as supercritical CO2. And if it can support life, wouldn't the possibility of life in supercritical water significantly extend the habitable zone?
Good question. There's lots of ways, but my personal preference in this context is a system that expends energy in order to combat entropy. Once you stop combatting entropy, you head towards thermodynamic equilibrium, and are dead. This definition may be overly broad (by that definition, my computer's memory chips are alive), but I suspect that if we find something that meets these criteria, it will be associated with life.
Test it on earth first! Lots of chiral molecules on earth rotate light in one direction. Lots rotate it the other way. So the total rotation is going to be rather small. Furthermore, most molecules (including all of the atmospheric gases) are not chiral. The scientists should start by trying to detect life that's one meter away by measuring optical rotation. I doubt they'll manage. But if they do, then they can move on to longer distances.
For what it's worth, though, the scientists appear to be well aware of these challenges. In the press release, they note that they'll be starting with pond surfaces, then hopefully moving on to landscape-sized regions of earth. They're a long way from proving that this would be feasible on Europa, much less on exoplanets.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't actually remember the old discussion. But the concept of low energy transfers between Lagrange points is hardly new, and a quick Google search provided the aforementioned link.
For example, this old article discusses the same concept.
Well, for starters, if one direction is energetically favorable, then the opposite is not.
Canceling accidental mismoderation. (Evidently, posting anonymously doesn't get the job done.)
For anyone who wants the original paper, published in Science today, it may be found here. The abstract is free.
For what it's worth, Arthur Andersen's conviction was overturned by a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Practially, it probably won't matter for Andersen since the company's reputation likely is irreparable. But it has gone out of its way to clear its name.
You would lose out on decades of research into jet engines if you went nuclear. And with proper shielding and what not, it's not clear that it would be lighter and better performing. On the other hand, much of the time, you've got plenty of spare electrical capacity (courtesy of nuclear) on your carrier, which if you could convert into a reasonable substitute for jet fuel, would allow you to store that energy for use on the aircraft.
Many of the high school science Olympiads are rather generous with medals. I don't know about IOI, but the International Chemistry Olympiad gives out golds to about 10% of the competitors, silvers to the next 20%, and bronzes to the next 30%, leaving only 40% without a medal.
The fair tax requires the repealing of the 16th Amendment, meaning no income tax.
Not really. The 16th amendment simply allows a federal income tax. It doesn't require that one actually be collected.
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. Never realized that POS systems are multi-thousand dollar machines (as I learned from my morbid curiosity about the following post). They appear so simple at first glance.
Okay, curiosity got the better of me. A look at the customization options on the high end Dell system was, umm, interesting.
I notice on AMD's PDF (linked in summary) that they list some of their envisioned uses. Why would someone need a modern 64 bit system for a point of sale system? Wouldn't a Motorola (err... Freescale) 68000 be more than powerful enough for the task, and way cheaper? I don't understand why some seemingly rather simple applications would require a large amount of processing power.
As a synthetic organic chemist, trying new stuff is fun, but there's the necessary evil of maintaining a compound supply chain. And some tasks, like grant writing, are seriously hard work. (Not to mention pressure packed!) Sure, my prof is ultimately responsible (just a postdoc right now), but I treat it as if it were my own lab on the line since that's good practice for the future. Drafting 70 pages worth (spread across multiple projects) in a month on short notice, back when the NIH stimulus package grants were announced, was mayhem. It was in the middle of that grant writing session that I formalized in my mind hard limits for when I would deal with work. I love what I do, but I need my personal space away from work, too.
In academic science, there may be no clock, but if one's not careful, it's easy to always be tied to work. For me, it's now very simple. I work hard at work. It doesn't mean that I don't ever take breaks (like right now), but I am highly productive. If I have no dinner plans after work, I am willing to drag reading/writing that I can do by pen with me to a bar and work through dinner until I get bored of the work. But I treat that as optional, and if I run into a friend at the bar or for any other reason don't feel like doing the work, I set it aside. Once I stop working at the bar (or leave work, if I didn't drag anything to the bar), I'm done. No e-mail. No phone calls. (Okay, I make rare exceptions for phone calls for close colleagues. But those are short calls, once every year or so.) No work on a paper that might have to be written. If there's work that is pressing enough to be done, I get it done in the lab or my office. I don't even have ChemDraw installed on my home computer even though I can do so for free. (Heck... I've even neglected to install an office suite on my home computer since I don't need one when away from the office.) My time away from the lab, aside from the time that I optionally spend at a bar right after work, is my own. I generally avoid even thinking about the work that has to be done once away from the lab/office.
The spacecraft Galileo, on its way to Jupiter, performed a related experiment back in 1990. Details were published in Nature
Expanding on one of those questions, how does analyzing the light tell us about the rate of star formation? That's a very interesting statement. From the article, "By analyzing their light, Cardamone determined how much star formation is taking place within the galaxies." How does that work?
Definitely an interesting result. The original article is published in Science. A free abstract can be found here.
Agreed that 5000 votes is completely unacceptable even on the largest scale elections. That's an order of magnitude higher than the margin between candidates in Florida in the US 2000 presidential election!
Even on earth, the study of lithotrophs ("rock eaters" that get energy by oxidizing inorganic materials) is a decades-old field. They are found in all sorts of settings, though not a significant part (by mass, not necessarily by importance) of the biosphere. Many lithotrophs even engage in carbon fixation from CO2 using the energy they derived from "rock eating", and thus can live completely independently of any need for photosynthesis (even by other organisms). As for lithotroph metabolisms, your imagination is the limit. Lithotrophs even have commercially viable applications. Anaerobic oxidation of ammonia by nitrite, a reaction performed by certain "anammox" bacteria, is useful for the treatment of fertilizer-contaminated waste water.
I just wondered something. Generally, the presence of condensed phase liquid water is considered a marker that tells us "Look for life here." Unfortunately, given our current technology, most planets we find are gas giants that orbit too close to the star to be in the "habitable zone". But gas giants, by virtue of being huge, have hugely high atmospheric pressures in the lower atmosphere. Couldn't supercritical water (i.e. water at a sufficiently high temperature/pressure that there is no distinction between gas and liquid) support life? Or, for that matter, supercritical methane, or any other supercritical medium? After all, we can run useful chemistry in supercritical fluids such as supercritical CO2. And if it can support life, wouldn't the possibility of life in supercritical water significantly extend the habitable zone?
and how do you define life anyway?
Good question. There's lots of ways, but my personal preference in this context is a system that expends energy in order to combat entropy. Once you stop combatting entropy, you head towards thermodynamic equilibrium, and are dead. This definition may be overly broad (by that definition, my computer's memory chips are alive), but I suspect that if we find something that meets these criteria, it will be associated with life.
Test it on earth first! Lots of chiral molecules on earth rotate light in one direction. Lots rotate it the other way. So the total rotation is going to be rather small. Furthermore, most molecules (including all of the atmospheric gases) are not chiral. The scientists should start by trying to detect life that's one meter away by measuring optical rotation. I doubt they'll manage. But if they do, then they can move on to longer distances.
For what it's worth, though, the scientists appear to be well aware of these challenges. In the press release, they note that they'll be starting with pond surfaces, then hopefully moving on to landscape-sized regions of earth. They're a long way from proving that this would be feasible on Europa, much less on exoplanets.
So when will it be small enough to fit on a shark's head?
Even with science, you can't prove that God does or does not exist.
Assume God exists. This statement is either true or false. If true, then he exists. If not, then he does not exist.
Therefore, God does or does not exist. Hmm... that wasn't too hard.
Talking tea leaves! You see... evolution is real after all. Take that, Texas legislators!