Tell me, how many of the hacked emails have you actually read?
How many of the hacked emails do you think almost anyone bringing them up has actually read?
I, unlike (almost assuredly) you, and the vast majority of people citing them, have actually read several. Now, keep in mind that these were carefully selected by Wikileaks, out of the vast number of emails that a campaign chair goes through, to be the most harmful things that they can find. In most of them, Clinton isn't even part of the conversation - not even quoted several replies back. However, in some of them, things she's written there. And my reaction to reading the actual words of Hillary Clinton?
Honestly, I was impressed.
Lest you think I'm a Clinton supporter, I was an Obama delegate in 2008 in the primaries when I lived in the US, aka fought hard against Clinton and her dirty campaign then. And I was a Bernie backer this time around and was harshly attacked by Clinton fans on progressive sites. Her politics don't align well with mine. She's a hawk. She's very pro-Israel. She's lagged behind the rest of the party on a lot of issues that I think important, only belatedly coming to the table (for example, gay marriage). Let's just say, I'm not her biggest fan.
But she comes across very well in her emails. It's interesting to get to read things from her not intended for public consumption, aka, without a filter. She comes across as extremely wonkish, very well informed, thinking about every last angle of every issue. To pick an example at random: one of the emails was leaked by Wikileaks to show that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were suspected of giving covert support to Daesh. Indeed, that's a very brief line in the email, that it's suspected and diplomatic pressure should be put on them to stop it. But most of the content in the email was a strategy analysis for how to deal with the conflicts in the region. If we do X, then Y will be upset with us, but we can compensate with Z, and if we don't do it then A will perceive B and think that they can then get away with C..... on and on across numerous axes. How can you change perceptions without actually taking action, for example? She brings up Benghazi - every Republican's favorite buzzword. But it's in the context of two US fighter jets who overflew during the attacks, and about how even though the jets had no authorization to attack, simple fear that they would provide close air support diminished the level of attacks for several hours.
Check out any of the leaked emails with any relevant amount of content from her. Not just some brief "here's the twitter-length shocker" summary written by someone else - read them yourselves. Yes, the "shockers" are there. But so are very detailed lines of thinking about policy. No rage or emotional reactions. Actually, if you want to stick any of the "negative Hillary stereotypes" to her private writings, the one that probably fits best is the "cold and calculating" one. Analytic would probably be a better summary. Things like, what are all of the angles on this? What do we know, and what don't we know? What's the long game?
Just my take. Form your own. Take in more than just soundbytes.
The examples in that page generally involve cases where the first word is a generalizer or contradiction to the second - a "weak X", "meta X", etc. A nonassociative algebra is not a geometry because algebras are usually by definition associative; it's "broadening" the category by including a contradiction to the term. There is nothing inherently contradictory or broadening about "dwarf". A dwarf fan palm is a fan palm. A dwarf salamander is a salamander. A dwarf azalea is an azalea. On and on - here's a list of hundreds. A concept that, as mentioned, the IAU itself appears to recognize, given that they consider "dwarf stars" (of multiple varieties) to be stars and dwarf galaxies to be galaxies.
Lastly, that there exist cases where things have been poorly named does not change whether things should be deliberately poorly named (see #1). Because killer whales were called "blackfish" does that mean that we should continue naming cetaceans as "fish"?
He's somewhat of a new meme. He was one of the "undecided voters" at the second US presidential debate and asked the final question. The combination of his name, his peculiar look, and his "Can't we all just get along?" question quickly turned him into internet fodder.
Yes, the eth has degenerated (for the most part) in the mainland Nordic languages but is retained in Icelandic and Faroese. Denmark contributed a lot to this - what is spoken today in Norway is more similar to Old Danish than it is to Old Norwegian. Now, I say "for the most part" concerning the mainland languages because, for example, Elfdalian still has the eth.
Overall the mainland languages have taken on a much greater degree of continental influence than Icelandic and Faroese. Take a look at, for example, a Danish paper and click on the sections dropdown. You can probably read the majority of the section categories there, right? Now compare to an Icelandic paper.
Except that they don't have drone "swarms", they have isolated drones with very limited payload capacity. Daesh opens up battles with VBIEDs, where they can deliver tonnes of explosives into enemy troop formations, not a kilogram or two. Trucks are a lot more abundant in Syria than drones as well.
That said, I think it's easy to underestimate people because they're "jihadis". On the western side, JaF (islamist coalition, both anti-Assad and anti-Daesh) members not only use drones but have also been experimenting with remote controlled robotic gun platforms. For example, here's the Sham R3. Despite the consumer-hardware aspects (note the playstation controller to operate it), it seems surprisingly well made - multiaxis, very smooth action, good rotation rate but still accurate positioning, able to popup and retract for cover, etc. It's unlikely that things like that will somehow turn the war for them, but they are legitimate weapons development programs.
When activities are carried on in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, by an international organization, responsibility for compliance with this Treaty shall be borne both by the international organization and by the States Parties to the Treaty participating in such an organization
So even if they weren't recognized as a state and just as an "international organization", responsibility for compliance would be borne only by the organization itself and "State Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization" (aka, none). States have no obligation to force non-member states or international organizations to comply, unless they're members of that organization.
Concerning E.11 (the part banning the claiming of space resources), states only bear responsibility for themselves and "... non-governmental entities under their jurisdiction". Again, no bearing responsibility for third parties. There's a section for international intergovernmental organizations (E.16), which states that they have to declare acceptance of the treaty for it to apply to them. There is no section on international non-governmental organizations.
Lastly:
Any State Party to the Agreement may give notice of its withdrawal from the Agreement one year afte rits entry into force by written notification to the Depositary Governments. Such withdrawal shall take effect one year from the date of receipt of this notification
Aka, even those who've signed can leave at any point, without penalty (except losing access to the benefits of treaty membership, and encouraging others to follow suit)
It's not "Asgard", it's "Ásgarðr" (if you want to modernize the spelling, at least do so as "Ásgarður" - or if you want only English letters, at least get the pronunciation right with something like "Ausgarther"). That's an eth, not a d; an á, not an a; and it's not nominative if you drop the ending. And it's already a place name, it doesn't need a suffix to make it one - let alone a suffix taken from an entirely different linguistic branch. That's like naming a place "Beijing-ia" or "Tamil Nadu-ia"
Don't tell people who disagree with a bad decision that they need to "Give it up!". Reposting my issues with the definition from earlier:
First, the IAU definition:
The IAU...resolves that planets and other bodies in the Solar System be defined into three distinct categories in the following way:
(1) A planet [1] is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.
(2) A "dwarf planet" is a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape [2], (c) has not cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit, and (d) is not a satellite.
(3) All other objects [3] orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as "Small Solar System Bodies".
[1] The eight planets are: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.
[2] An IAU process will be established to assign borderline objects into either dwarf planet and other categories.
[3] These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), comets, and other small bodies.
1. Nomenclature: An "adjective-noun" should always be a subset of "noun". A "dwarf planet" should be no less seen as a type of planet than a "dwarf star" is seen as a type of star by the IAU.
2. Erroneous foundation: Current research agrees that most planets did not clear their own neighborhoods, and even that their neighborhoods may not always have been where they are. Jupiter, and Saturn to a lesser extent, have cleared most neighborhoods. Mars has 1/300th the Stern-Levison parameter as Neptune, and Neptune has multiple bodies a couple percent of Mars's mass (possibly even larger, we've only detected an estimated 1% of large KBOs) in its "neighborhood". Mars's neighborhood would in no way would be clear if Jupiter did not exist - even Earth's might not be. Should we demote the terrestrial planets as well?
Note that the Stern-Levison parameter does not go against this, as it's built around the ability of a planet to scatter a mass distribution similar to our current asteroid belt, not large protoplanets.
3. Comparative inconsistency: Earth is far more like Ceres and Pluto than it is like Jupiter, yet these very dissimilar groups - gas giants and terrestrial planets - are lumped together as "planets" while dwarfs are excluded.
4. Poor choice of dividing line: While defining objects inherently requires drawing lines between groups, the chosen line has been poorly selected. Achieving a rough hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line - it means differentiation, mineralization processes, alteration of primordial materials, and so forth. It's also often associated with internal heat and, increasingly as we're realizing, a common association with subsurface fluids. In short, a body in a category of "not having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body which one would study to learn about the origins of our solar system, while a body in a category of "having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body one would study, for example, to learn more about tectonics, geochemistry, (potentially) biology, etc. By contrast, a dividing line of "clearing its neighborhood" - which doesn't even meet standard #2 - says little about the body itself.
5. Mutability: What an object is declared at can be altered without any of the properties of the object changing simply by its "neighborhood" changing in any of countless ways.
6. Situational inconsistency: An exact copy of Earth (what the vast majority of people
The name "Asgardia" is so distorted that I hardly even recognized it. It's Ásgarðr. That's pronounced "OWSE GAR-thur". Where did "AS GARD-ee-ah" come from?
It's not a question of energy; it's a question of hardware. Distillation plants tend to be very large indeed.
That said, there is a good option for offworld use. Namely, unless your power source is nuclear, you need nighttime energy storage. Fuel cells tend to be a rather compact way to do this in comparison to batteries. In particular, since you're providing both oxidizer and fuel rather than using atmospheric oxygen, you can avoid the use of oxygen (and its high overpotential) and use, for example, a reversible HCl fuel cell. Regardless of what type of fuel cell you're using, during the daytime you're performing electrolysis, which has an extremely high enrichment factor (you can also likely get a good enrichment factor operating in galvanic mode, but this isn't as well studied). Hence, if your fuel cell layers are plumbed in a cascade (since every fuel cell stack needs numerous layers to reach distribution voltage regardless, so it's not hard to break them down into groupings of varying size), you can get enrichment for "free".
I do put "free" in quotes for two reasons. One, you still do have some mass penalty - extra hydrogen and HCl tankage (but not Cl2), extra plumbing, extra compressors/pumps, etc. The exact amount depends on the details of your setup. And two, the enrichment factor varies depending on your overpotential (ideally in terms of generation/storage the hydrogen side operates at almost no overpotential). If you operate at a low overpotential, you get better efficiency but reduced enrichment, while if you operate at high overpotential, it's reversed. But that said, it remains a viable option, and certainly is more realistic than, say, bringing a whole GS plant;) And the "waste" (enriched) stream is certainly valuable. On Earth D2 goes for nearly $1k/kg. And locally it has applications in industry (esp. plastics), medicine, etc.
I checked the last three papers under "magnetic shielding papers" on that page. None of them say anything to suggest that active shielding is an effective means to shield from GCR. They're also all quite old, there's much more recent research on the topic.
They do mention what I wrote - that active shielding is probably mass effective against SCRs (but needs more research). But it's very doubtful that it could be mass effective against GCR. The gyroradius of a particle is proportional to its energy and inversely proportional to the magnetic field strength. GCR is very high energy (commonly hundreds of MeV, up into the tens of GeV range in relevant amounts, with virtually no limit on the extremes), so you have to scale up the size of your magnet proportionally. To oversimplify, if you wanted to take a magnetic shield for the solar wind (commonly a few keV, up to a few dozen) and scale that up to shielding from solar storms protons (hundreds of keV to a few MeV), you'd have to increase it's scale 100fold; and to go from there to GCR would be another hundred-fold increase.
That is of course an oversimplification (even on Earth you can't just scale magnet masses like that, and it's more complex in space because you're actually making a mini-magnetosphere), but you get the gist. It's really hard to shield from GCR-energy particles.
Indeed, most plans call for varying materials - and not just with respect to the inside/outside, but also with where they are on the spacecraft. Even the passengers' own bodies act as shielding for other other passengers and needs to be taken into account. Modeling radiation and health risks on interplanetary missions is not a simple task!
If anyone wants to get more of a sense of how cross sections of different elements / isotopes can vary with different types and energies of radiation, I strongly recommend the Sigma server. Start off with neutrons (although you can change that in the dropdown on the top right), pick an isotope, then look at the options on the right. You'll see lots of entries of the form (n, X). The first part in the parentheses is what the incoming particle is; the second part is what the heaviest outgoing particles are. (n,gamma) for example means that there are no nucleons that result from the collision, only gamma; this is a simple neutron-capture transmutation. (n, total) means the total of all cross sections; (n, elastic) is elastic scattering (the dominant method of moderation at low energies; follows the same sort of energy/angular momentum distribution as elastic collisions between objects on macroscopic scales); (n, inelastic) is inelastic scattering (an additional loss mechanism at high energies where the particle is absorbed and then re-emitted, with a more complex energy distribution), etc. Click on "plot" for any category and it'll show you the result.
For example, here's the (n,alpha) for 10B, a well known neutron absorber. And indeed, these are very high cross sections compared to, say, the odds of elemental carbon doing anything to get rid of the neutron. But note how vastly higher the cross sections are in the thermal (meV) spectrum than they are in the fast (MeV) spectrum. Even with boron, you're unlikely to capture fast neutrons (MeV range or higher) except with a great thickness of absorber. But if you moderate them down - moderation having a high cross section - then they become easy to capture. Remember when looking at these charts that 1H is also 1/10th the molar mass of 10B.
On the other hand, low-Z (light) materials aren't that great at blocking certain types of radiation - if you want to block EM radiation spectrum, for example, you want high-Z materials (that's why there's the standard "lead apron" for getting an x-ray). But the balance of effects in space turns out to favor the need for low-Z materials.
If the terms above like "cross sections" are unfamiliar... picture a particle of any type of radiation like a baseball pitched randomly toward an area where someone has hung a bunch of spheres. What's the odds that the baseball is going to hit one of them? Well, it depends on the cross section that they present to the ball. While a naive expectation might be that it would just simply be proportional to the size of the atoms, in practice different isotopes vary widely in their different effective cross sections to different particles and different reactions. Still, cross sections are measured in "barns", which is a unit scaled to be roughly the size of typical atomic physical cross sections for comparison purposes. Anyway, you can just read nuclear cross sections as "how likely a reaction is per unit traveled through the target".
Oh, and I forgot to mention one other thing: when picking shielding materials, neutron capture or other transmutation reactions alter the isotope that they hit. Often what they produce will be unstable and will decay - sometimes multiple times - releasing more radiation. So it's also important to look
The estimated exposure for a 400 day round trip transit and 560 days on the surface with 5g/cm2 aluminum shielding is 1070mSv with a 4.2% increase in death rate for men / 5.1% for women, and for 20g/cm2 aluminum it's 960mSv with an increase of 3.4% for men and 4.1% for women. But there's caveats that make this effectively higher, see below. Additionally, both of these are for solar minimum with no solar storms. The big problems however come when you have major charged particle events. If you don't budget for the mass for it, then you're playing dice with your crews' lives, so you pretty much have to. Events that give enough dose to significantly increase the mortality rate (ex. the August 1972 event) are not rare. And while rare, some events are powerful enough to cause acute radiation poisoning and even death in short (30 day) timeframes (4x the August 1972 event). The probability of the former is estimated at 0.2% per week, while the latter is estimated at 0.01% per week.
Re: the comic: XKCD vastly oversimplifies the situation. Radiation risks are not limited to "100mSv: lowest one-year dose clearly proven to increase cancer risk" levels. Radiation is also tied to a wide range of other diseases beyond cancer (cataracts, cognitive decline, lung damage, heart disease, etc), and the level "clearly linked" to cancer does not mean "there is no cancer beyond this point". Specifically concerning cancer: The NCRP-98 / NCRP-132 recommended limits for blood-forming organs are 250mSv/mo, 500/yr, 400-2900/life (depends on age and sex; young and female = less, old and male = more). These limits are based around a calculated excess 3% risk of developing fatal cancer. However, they are misleading because the error bars are large, and the upper end of the error bars is much more likely to kill you than the lower end - so if you want a 95% confidence interval, the risks from such figures are about 3 times higher than the mean suggests. Additionally, wherein the odds of dying from cancer are 3%, the odds of contracting cancer are inherently higher, since - especially in the presence of modern medicine - not all cancer is fatal.
Furthermore, studies with astronauts and animal models keep suggesting more problems from radiation in space than had previously been assumed, and we know little of the effects of the radiation environment beyond LEO. Simplistic radiation models that treat all types of radiation damage from a certain category "grouping" as equivalent appear thusfar to be inaccurate.
You will not find any researchers working in the field of studying the radiation health risks to astronauts who feel that the case is overblown. It is very much considered a significant problem that remains to be solved. Unless you're fine with willingly compromising travelers health and risking their outright survival in the case of a severe solar event, wherein, there's no problem, you can go ahead and launch;)
Absorbing, not moderating. You have to moderate neutrons down from the MeV range to the thermal range in order to raise the absorption cross sections to reasonable levels - even with high cross section absorbers like boron.
Not exactly. Ideal shielding is relatively thin metal followed by lots of hydrogen-rich material, plus a small amount of neutron absorbers (boron, etc). The hydrogen-rich material should make up the majority of the mass. This can be hydrogen-rich plastics (such as polyethylene), liquid hydrogen propellant (great ISP, although storage is difficult), methane propellant (what SpaceX plans to use, albeit they don't call for much during coast), ammonia (coolant, easy hydrogen store), water (need it anyway, even easier to store), hydrazine (commonly used for RCS thrusters), etc. NASA has been looking at trying to make structural composite materials out of hydrogenated boron nitride nanotubes, which would be killing two birds with one stone (since they're strong as well).
The reason you need lots of hydrogen is that a lot of your high energy impacts will often kick off neutrons, and these are much harder to block than ionized particles (this is particularly of concern with GCR and high-energy solar flare protons). The best way to eliminate neutrons is to moderate them down to the thermal spectrum so that they can be readily absorbed by high cross section absorbers. Hydrogen is by far the best neutron moderator per unit mass; nothing else really even comes close. It has a fairly high scattering cross section to begin with, and scatters far more per event than other compounds due to its low mass (more energy transfers from the neutron to the hydrogen), and presents far more nuclei to scatter from per unit mass than other elements. Liquid hydrogen is even better because you're thermalizing to a very cold temperature, which dramatically increases absorption cross sections (whether from hydrogen itself, or elements specifically used as absorbers such as boron). But again, liquid hydrogen is more difficult to store than other forms....
No, you use a direct bank transfer. They're free and take less time than writing a check. It goes through instantly. Everyone's on the same system. You can do it on your cell phone, which essentially everyone has here. All of your bills show up in your bank's "inbox" - even trivial things. You pay them all with a single click and entering your pin.
I don't know what you're talking about. While I'm personally no fan, Iceland was Assange's base of operations for quite some time. And our next government is fairly likely to grant Snowden citizenship, something I'm cautiously supportive of.
And again, why don't you have that infrastructure? We have a tenth your population density and we still do it. We have sensors transmitting data out in the middle of freaking Vatnajökull (largest glacier in Europe), and all across the highlands (arguably the largest wilderness in Europe, depending on how unspoiled one requires an area to be to count as "wilderness"). What makes it so hard for you? You produce the hardware, for crying out loud. You have land access to all but one of your states (and heavy traffic to that one regardless). You're not a giant cluster of unstable volcanoes in the middle of the North Atlantic. You have economies of scale. Why can't you get your act together?
I'm not talking about "providing something useful visually", I'm talking about simply having the data.
It's even worse because there's potential compounding factors on Mars that could make psychological issues even worse. For example, here's one that's little studied: deuterium. Mars's deuterium levels are 5-7 times higher than Earth's (nothing like Venus's 150-240x, but still..). Animals and plants certainly can survive rather high deuterium levels, up to 50% (and bacteria can survive 98% deuterated water); in terms of survival, it poses no threat. However, in terms of effects on long-term health effects, it's much less clear. For example, one study found a 1,8% increase in incidence of depression for every 10ppm increase in deuterium in water (Earth mean = ~155ppm). So when you're talking an ~800ppm increase... the issue of long-term deuterium health effects really warrants more study. Furthermore, microbial food sources that may be used on Mars (either for direct consumption or producing feed for, e.g. aquaponics) can concentrate deuterium even further.
Unlike most isotopes, hydrogen isotopes have rather different properties. Deuterated drugs are a new field of interest, for example, as they can have lifetimes in the body an order of magnitude higher than their non-deuterated equivalents. Deuterated plastics are often dramatically more transparent (and significantly more radiation resistant) than non-deuterated plastics. However, mixtures of deuterated and non-deuterated versions of the same plastic, melted together, often yield an opaque result because the two versions have different melting points and densities, yielding an inhomogenous result.
Magnetic shielding (on practical scales) is not effective against GCR, only solar. The article talks about GCR.
IMHO, SpaceX probably has the right solution to radiation: go fast. If you have to bring up extra mass anyway, you might as well make that mass be fuel to shorten the trip rather than inert shielding for a long coast (although there clearly is *some* balancing point; paper-thin walls won't do, even on a short-trip). Also, their solution of "go big" is probably right, as surface area to shield rises propotional to the radius squared but internal volume (and mass / payload capacity of boosters) rises proportional to the radius cubed (assuming proportions are kept roughly the same on all three axes). The bigger your crew transport vehicle, the lower the percentage of its mass that needs to be dedicated to shielding to achieve the same result.
But there's no question that radiation is one of those issues that we really don't have a good "magic bullet" for.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me, how many of the hacked emails have you actually read?
How many of the hacked emails do you think almost anyone bringing them up has actually read?
I, unlike (almost assuredly) you, and the vast majority of people citing them, have actually read several. Now, keep in mind that these were carefully selected by Wikileaks, out of the vast number of emails that a campaign chair goes through, to be the most harmful things that they can find. In most of them, Clinton isn't even part of the conversation - not even quoted several replies back. However, in some of them, things she's written there. And my reaction to reading the actual words of Hillary Clinton?
Honestly, I was impressed.
Lest you think I'm a Clinton supporter, I was an Obama delegate in 2008 in the primaries when I lived in the US, aka fought hard against Clinton and her dirty campaign then. And I was a Bernie backer this time around and was harshly attacked by Clinton fans on progressive sites. Her politics don't align well with mine. She's a hawk. She's very pro-Israel. She's lagged behind the rest of the party on a lot of issues that I think important, only belatedly coming to the table (for example, gay marriage). Let's just say, I'm not her biggest fan.
But she comes across very well in her emails. It's interesting to get to read things from her not intended for public consumption, aka, without a filter. She comes across as extremely wonkish, very well informed, thinking about every last angle of every issue. To pick an example at random: one of the emails was leaked by Wikileaks to show that Saudi Arabia and Qatar were suspected of giving covert support to Daesh. Indeed, that's a very brief line in the email, that it's suspected and diplomatic pressure should be put on them to stop it. But most of the content in the email was a strategy analysis for how to deal with the conflicts in the region. If we do X, then Y will be upset with us, but we can compensate with Z, and if we don't do it then A will perceive B and think that they can then get away with C..... on and on across numerous axes. How can you change perceptions without actually taking action, for example? She brings up Benghazi - every Republican's favorite buzzword. But it's in the context of two US fighter jets who overflew during the attacks, and about how even though the jets had no authorization to attack, simple fear that they would provide close air support diminished the level of attacks for several hours.
Check out any of the leaked emails with any relevant amount of content from her. Not just some brief "here's the twitter-length shocker" summary written by someone else - read them yourselves. Yes, the "shockers" are there. But so are very detailed lines of thinking about policy. No rage or emotional reactions. Actually, if you want to stick any of the "negative Hillary stereotypes" to her private writings, the one that probably fits best is the "cold and calculating" one. Analytic would probably be a better summary. Things like, what are all of the angles on this? What do we know, and what don't we know? What's the long game?
Just my take. Form your own. Take in more than just soundbytes.
The examples in that page generally involve cases where the first word is a generalizer or contradiction to the second - a "weak X", "meta X", etc. A nonassociative algebra is not a geometry because algebras are usually by definition associative; it's "broadening" the category by including a contradiction to the term. There is nothing inherently contradictory or broadening about "dwarf". A dwarf fan palm is a fan palm. A dwarf salamander is a salamander. A dwarf azalea is an azalea. On and on - here's a list of hundreds. A concept that, as mentioned, the IAU itself appears to recognize, given that they consider "dwarf stars" (of multiple varieties) to be stars and dwarf galaxies to be galaxies.
Lastly, that there exist cases where things have been poorly named does not change whether things should be deliberately poorly named (see #1). Because killer whales were called "blackfish" does that mean that we should continue naming cetaceans as "fish"?
1) I linked that tweet myself elsewhere in the comments, as part of a series of funny tweets about Ken Bone.
2) Wow, stop the presses, someone on the internet repeated something that they found funny!
He's somewhat of a new meme. He was one of the "undecided voters" at the second US presidential debate and asked the final question. The combination of his name, his peculiar look, and his "Can't we all just get along?" question quickly turned him into internet fodder.
Poor Ken Bone. I guess now he'll have to go back to his old job as a card in Guess Who.
If you wanted, you could take it full circle and name it "Rassvörðr" ;)
Yes, the eth has degenerated (for the most part) in the mainland Nordic languages but is retained in Icelandic and Faroese. Denmark contributed a lot to this - what is spoken today in Norway is more similar to Old Danish than it is to Old Norwegian. Now, I say "for the most part" concerning the mainland languages because, for example, Elfdalian still has the eth.
Overall the mainland languages have taken on a much greater degree of continental influence than Icelandic and Faroese. Take a look at, for example, a Danish paper and click on the sections dropdown. You can probably read the majority of the section categories there, right? Now compare to an Icelandic paper.
Except that they don't have drone "swarms", they have isolated drones with very limited payload capacity. Daesh opens up battles with VBIEDs, where they can deliver tonnes of explosives into enemy troop formations, not a kilogram or two. Trucks are a lot more abundant in Syria than drones as well.
That said, I think it's easy to underestimate people because they're "jihadis". On the western side, JaF (islamist coalition, both anti-Assad and anti-Daesh) members not only use drones but have also been experimenting with remote controlled robotic gun platforms. For example, here's the Sham R3. Despite the consumer-hardware aspects (note the playstation controller to operate it), it seems surprisingly well made - multiaxis, very smooth action, good rotation rate but still accurate positioning, able to popup and retract for cover, etc. It's unlikely that things like that will somehow turn the war for them, but they are legitimate weapons development programs.
It says no such thing. Furthermore, it says:
So even if they weren't recognized as a state and just as an "international organization", responsibility for compliance would be borne only by the organization itself and "State Parties to the Treaty participating in such organization" (aka, none). States have no obligation to force non-member states or international organizations to comply, unless they're members of that organization.
Concerning E.11 (the part banning the claiming of space resources), states only bear responsibility for themselves and "... non-governmental entities under their jurisdiction". Again, no bearing responsibility for third parties. There's a section for international intergovernmental organizations (E.16), which states that they have to declare acceptance of the treaty for it to apply to them. There is no section on international non-governmental organizations.
Lastly:
Aka, even those who've signed can leave at any point, without penalty (except losing access to the benefits of treaty membership, and encouraging others to follow suit)
(And yes, I'm fully aware that I've picked a strange little hill to die on here...)
It's not "Asgard", it's "Ásgarðr" (if you want to modernize the spelling, at least do so as "Ásgarður" - or if you want only English letters, at least get the pronunciation right with something like "Ausgarther"). That's an eth, not a d; an á, not an a; and it's not nominative if you drop the ending. And it's already a place name, it doesn't need a suffix to make it one - let alone a suffix taken from an entirely different linguistic branch. That's like naming a place "Beijing-ia" or "Tamil Nadu-ia"
Don't tell people who disagree with a bad decision that they need to "Give it up!". Reposting my issues with the definition from earlier:
First, the IAU definition:
1. Nomenclature: An "adjective-noun" should always be a subset of "noun". A "dwarf planet" should be no less seen as a type of planet than a "dwarf star" is seen as a type of star by the IAU.
2. Erroneous foundation: Current research agrees that most planets did not clear their own neighborhoods, and even that their neighborhoods may not always have been where they are. Jupiter, and Saturn to a lesser extent, have cleared most neighborhoods. Mars has 1/300th the Stern-Levison parameter as Neptune, and Neptune has multiple bodies a couple percent of Mars's mass (possibly even larger, we've only detected an estimated 1% of large KBOs) in its "neighborhood". Mars's neighborhood would in no way would be clear if Jupiter did not exist - even Earth's might not be. Should we demote the terrestrial planets as well?
Note that the Stern-Levison parameter does not go against this, as it's built around the ability of a planet to scatter a mass distribution similar to our current asteroid belt, not large protoplanets.
3. Comparative inconsistency: Earth is far more like Ceres and Pluto than it is like Jupiter, yet these very dissimilar groups - gas giants and terrestrial planets - are lumped together as "planets" while dwarfs are excluded.
4. Poor choice of dividing line: While defining objects inherently requires drawing lines between groups, the chosen line has been poorly selected. Achieving a rough hydrostatic equilibrium is a very meaningful dividing line - it means differentiation, mineralization processes, alteration of primordial materials, and so forth. It's also often associated with internal heat and, increasingly as we're realizing, a common association with subsurface fluids. In short, a body in a category of "not having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body which one would study to learn about the origins of our solar system, while a body in a category of "having achieved hydrostatic equilibrium" describes a body one would study, for example, to learn more about tectonics, geochemistry, (potentially) biology, etc. By contrast, a dividing line of "clearing its neighborhood" - which doesn't even meet standard #2 - says little about the body itself.
5. Mutability: What an object is declared at can be altered without any of the properties of the object changing simply by its "neighborhood" changing in any of countless ways.
6. Situational inconsistency: An exact copy of Earth (what the vast majority of people
The name "Asgardia" is so distorted that I hardly even recognized it. It's Ásgarðr. That's pronounced "OWSE GAR-thur". Where did "AS GARD-ee-ah" come from?
Ás = a god (plural "æsir")
Garðr = garden
It's not a question of energy; it's a question of hardware. Distillation plants tend to be very large indeed.
That said, there is a good option for offworld use. Namely, unless your power source is nuclear, you need nighttime energy storage. Fuel cells tend to be a rather compact way to do this in comparison to batteries. In particular, since you're providing both oxidizer and fuel rather than using atmospheric oxygen, you can avoid the use of oxygen (and its high overpotential) and use, for example, a reversible HCl fuel cell. Regardless of what type of fuel cell you're using, during the daytime you're performing electrolysis, which has an extremely high enrichment factor (you can also likely get a good enrichment factor operating in galvanic mode, but this isn't as well studied). Hence, if your fuel cell layers are plumbed in a cascade (since every fuel cell stack needs numerous layers to reach distribution voltage regardless, so it's not hard to break them down into groupings of varying size), you can get enrichment for "free".
I do put "free" in quotes for two reasons. One, you still do have some mass penalty - extra hydrogen and HCl tankage (but not Cl2), extra plumbing, extra compressors/pumps, etc. The exact amount depends on the details of your setup. And two, the enrichment factor varies depending on your overpotential (ideally in terms of generation/storage the hydrogen side operates at almost no overpotential). If you operate at a low overpotential, you get better efficiency but reduced enrichment, while if you operate at high overpotential, it's reversed. But that said, it remains a viable option, and certainly is more realistic than, say, bringing a whole GS plant ;) And the "waste" (enriched) stream is certainly valuable. On Earth D2 goes for nearly $1k/kg. And locally it has applications in industry (esp. plastics), medicine, etc.
Just take a 9V battery and turn it upside down.
I checked the last three papers under "magnetic shielding papers" on that page. None of them say anything to suggest that active shielding is an effective means to shield from GCR. They're also all quite old, there's much more recent research on the topic.
They do mention what I wrote - that active shielding is probably mass effective against SCRs (but needs more research). But it's very doubtful that it could be mass effective against GCR. The gyroradius of a particle is proportional to its energy and inversely proportional to the magnetic field strength. GCR is very high energy (commonly hundreds of MeV, up into the tens of GeV range in relevant amounts, with virtually no limit on the extremes), so you have to scale up the size of your magnet proportionally. To oversimplify, if you wanted to take a magnetic shield for the solar wind (commonly a few keV, up to a few dozen) and scale that up to shielding from solar storms protons (hundreds of keV to a few MeV), you'd have to increase it's scale 100fold; and to go from there to GCR would be another hundred-fold increase.
That is of course an oversimplification (even on Earth you can't just scale magnet masses like that, and it's more complex in space because you're actually making a mini-magnetosphere), but you get the gist. It's really hard to shield from GCR-energy particles.
Indeed, most plans call for varying materials - and not just with respect to the inside/outside, but also with where they are on the spacecraft. Even the passengers' own bodies act as shielding for other other passengers and needs to be taken into account. Modeling radiation and health risks on interplanetary missions is not a simple task!
If anyone wants to get more of a sense of how cross sections of different elements / isotopes can vary with different types and energies of radiation, I strongly recommend the Sigma server. Start off with neutrons (although you can change that in the dropdown on the top right), pick an isotope, then look at the options on the right. You'll see lots of entries of the form (n, X). The first part in the parentheses is what the incoming particle is; the second part is what the heaviest outgoing particles are. (n,gamma) for example means that there are no nucleons that result from the collision, only gamma; this is a simple neutron-capture transmutation. (n, total) means the total of all cross sections; (n, elastic) is elastic scattering (the dominant method of moderation at low energies; follows the same sort of energy/angular momentum distribution as elastic collisions between objects on macroscopic scales); (n, inelastic) is inelastic scattering (an additional loss mechanism at high energies where the particle is absorbed and then re-emitted, with a more complex energy distribution), etc. Click on "plot" for any category and it'll show you the result.
For example, here's the (n,alpha) for 10B, a well known neutron absorber. And indeed, these are very high cross sections compared to, say, the odds of elemental carbon doing anything to get rid of the neutron. But note how vastly higher the cross sections are in the thermal (meV) spectrum than they are in the fast (MeV) spectrum. Even with boron, you're unlikely to capture fast neutrons (MeV range or higher) except with a great thickness of absorber. But if you moderate them down - moderation having a high cross section - then they become easy to capture. Remember when looking at these charts that 1H is also 1/10th the molar mass of 10B.
On the other hand, low-Z (light) materials aren't that great at blocking certain types of radiation - if you want to block EM radiation spectrum, for example, you want high-Z materials (that's why there's the standard "lead apron" for getting an x-ray). But the balance of effects in space turns out to favor the need for low-Z materials.
If the terms above like "cross sections" are unfamiliar... picture a particle of any type of radiation like a baseball pitched randomly toward an area where someone has hung a bunch of spheres. What's the odds that the baseball is going to hit one of them? Well, it depends on the cross section that they present to the ball. While a naive expectation might be that it would just simply be proportional to the size of the atoms, in practice different isotopes vary widely in their different effective cross sections to different particles and different reactions. Still, cross sections are measured in "barns", which is a unit scaled to be roughly the size of typical atomic physical cross sections for comparison purposes. Anyway, you can just read nuclear cross sections as "how likely a reaction is per unit traveled through the target".
Oh, and I forgot to mention one other thing: when picking shielding materials, neutron capture or other transmutation reactions alter the isotope that they hit. Often what they produce will be unstable and will decay - sometimes multiple times - releasing more radiation. So it's also important to look
The estimated exposure for a 400 day round trip transit and 560 days on the surface with 5g/cm2 aluminum shielding is 1070mSv with a 4.2% increase in death rate for men / 5.1% for women, and for 20g/cm2 aluminum it's 960mSv with an increase of 3.4% for men and 4.1% for women. But there's caveats that make this effectively higher, see below. Additionally, both of these are for solar minimum with no solar storms. The big problems however come when you have major charged particle events. If you don't budget for the mass for it, then you're playing dice with your crews' lives, so you pretty much have to. Events that give enough dose to significantly increase the mortality rate (ex. the August 1972 event) are not rare. And while rare, some events are powerful enough to cause acute radiation poisoning and even death in short (30 day) timeframes (4x the August 1972 event). The probability of the former is estimated at 0.2% per week, while the latter is estimated at 0.01% per week.
Re: the comic: XKCD vastly oversimplifies the situation. Radiation risks are not limited to "100mSv: lowest one-year dose clearly proven to increase cancer risk" levels. Radiation is also tied to a wide range of other diseases beyond cancer (cataracts, cognitive decline, lung damage, heart disease, etc), and the level "clearly linked" to cancer does not mean "there is no cancer beyond this point". Specifically concerning cancer: The NCRP-98 / NCRP-132 recommended limits for blood-forming organs are 250mSv/mo, 500/yr, 400-2900/life (depends on age and sex; young and female = less, old and male = more). These limits are based around a calculated excess 3% risk of developing fatal cancer. However, they are misleading because the error bars are large, and the upper end of the error bars is much more likely to kill you than the lower end - so if you want a 95% confidence interval, the risks from such figures are about 3 times higher than the mean suggests. Additionally, wherein the odds of dying from cancer are 3%, the odds of contracting cancer are inherently higher, since - especially in the presence of modern medicine - not all cancer is fatal.
Furthermore, studies with astronauts and animal models keep suggesting more problems from radiation in space than had previously been assumed, and we know little of the effects of the radiation environment beyond LEO. Simplistic radiation models that treat all types of radiation damage from a certain category "grouping" as equivalent appear thusfar to be inaccurate.
You will not find any researchers working in the field of studying the radiation health risks to astronauts who feel that the case is overblown. It is very much considered a significant problem that remains to be solved. Unless you're fine with willingly compromising travelers health and risking their outright survival in the case of a severe solar event, wherein, there's no problem, you can go ahead and launch ;)
Absorbing, not moderating. You have to moderate neutrons down from the MeV range to the thermal range in order to raise the absorption cross sections to reasonable levels - even with high cross section absorbers like boron.
Not exactly. Ideal shielding is relatively thin metal followed by lots of hydrogen-rich material, plus a small amount of neutron absorbers (boron, etc). The hydrogen-rich material should make up the majority of the mass. This can be hydrogen-rich plastics (such as polyethylene), liquid hydrogen propellant (great ISP, although storage is difficult), methane propellant (what SpaceX plans to use, albeit they don't call for much during coast), ammonia (coolant, easy hydrogen store), water (need it anyway, even easier to store), hydrazine (commonly used for RCS thrusters), etc. NASA has been looking at trying to make structural composite materials out of hydrogenated boron nitride nanotubes, which would be killing two birds with one stone (since they're strong as well).
The reason you need lots of hydrogen is that a lot of your high energy impacts will often kick off neutrons, and these are much harder to block than ionized particles (this is particularly of concern with GCR and high-energy solar flare protons). The best way to eliminate neutrons is to moderate them down to the thermal spectrum so that they can be readily absorbed by high cross section absorbers. Hydrogen is by far the best neutron moderator per unit mass; nothing else really even comes close. It has a fairly high scattering cross section to begin with, and scatters far more per event than other compounds due to its low mass (more energy transfers from the neutron to the hydrogen), and presents far more nuclei to scatter from per unit mass than other elements. Liquid hydrogen is even better because you're thermalizing to a very cold temperature, which dramatically increases absorption cross sections (whether from hydrogen itself, or elements specifically used as absorbers such as boron). But again, liquid hydrogen is more difficult to store than other forms....
No, you use a direct bank transfer. They're free and take less time than writing a check. It goes through instantly. Everyone's on the same system. You can do it on your cell phone, which essentially everyone has here. All of your bills show up in your bank's "inbox" - even trivial things. You pay them all with a single click and entering your pin.
I don't know what you're talking about. While I'm personally no fan, Iceland was Assange's base of operations for quite some time. And our next government is fairly likely to grant Snowden citizenship, something I'm cautiously supportive of.
And again, why don't you have that infrastructure? We have a tenth your population density and we still do it. We have sensors transmitting data out in the middle of freaking Vatnajökull (largest glacier in Europe), and all across the highlands (arguably the largest wilderness in Europe, depending on how unspoiled one requires an area to be to count as "wilderness"). What makes it so hard for you? You produce the hardware, for crying out loud. You have land access to all but one of your states (and heavy traffic to that one regardless). You're not a giant cluster of unstable volcanoes in the middle of the North Atlantic. You have economies of scale. Why can't you get your act together?
I'm not talking about "providing something useful visually", I'm talking about simply having the data.
It's even worse because there's potential compounding factors on Mars that could make psychological issues even worse. For example, here's one that's little studied: deuterium. Mars's deuterium levels are 5-7 times higher than Earth's (nothing like Venus's 150-240x, but still..). Animals and plants certainly can survive rather high deuterium levels, up to 50% (and bacteria can survive 98% deuterated water); in terms of survival, it poses no threat. However, in terms of effects on long-term health effects, it's much less clear. For example, one study found a 1,8% increase in incidence of depression for every 10ppm increase in deuterium in water (Earth mean = ~155ppm). So when you're talking an ~800ppm increase... the issue of long-term deuterium health effects really warrants more study. Furthermore, microbial food sources that may be used on Mars (either for direct consumption or producing feed for, e.g. aquaponics) can concentrate deuterium even further.
Unlike most isotopes, hydrogen isotopes have rather different properties. Deuterated drugs are a new field of interest, for example, as they can have lifetimes in the body an order of magnitude higher than their non-deuterated equivalents. Deuterated plastics are often dramatically more transparent (and significantly more radiation resistant) than non-deuterated plastics. However, mixtures of deuterated and non-deuterated versions of the same plastic, melted together, often yield an opaque result because the two versions have different melting points and densities, yielding an inhomogenous result.
Magnetic shielding (on practical scales) is not effective against GCR, only solar. The article talks about GCR.
IMHO, SpaceX probably has the right solution to radiation: go fast. If you have to bring up extra mass anyway, you might as well make that mass be fuel to shorten the trip rather than inert shielding for a long coast (although there clearly is *some* balancing point; paper-thin walls won't do, even on a short-trip). Also, their solution of "go big" is probably right, as surface area to shield rises propotional to the radius squared but internal volume (and mass / payload capacity of boosters) rises proportional to the radius cubed (assuming proportions are kept roughly the same on all three axes). The bigger your crew transport vehicle, the lower the percentage of its mass that needs to be dedicated to shielding to achieve the same result.
But there's no question that radiation is one of those issues that we really don't have a good "magic bullet" for.